Harter’s own manner was utterly against him, too. One could see the jury disliking him more and more.
His impassivity was absolute—after all, he was a solicitor himself—but it struck one very disagreeably, as the coroner dwelt on the frightful results of the smash, as he had not done with any of the other witnesses.
Asked whether he had been drinking during the evening, Harter replied in the affirmative, but denied that he had been anything but sober.
He gave a very unemphatic account of the accident and “supposed that the car had skidded.” It was not a very tenable theory and it broke down under the examination of the A. A. men.
Harter listened to it all with his unwholesome little face quite unmoved. He must have expected the verdict, for when at last it came he did not move a muscle.
He was formally committed for trial at the next assizes on a charge of manslaughter.
Chapter Fifteen
The thing, if it had been done on the stage, would have ended there. The climax had come. It was—it should have been—all over. But the drama of life, if it holds climax, inevitably leads straight on to anticlimax. Things go on ... one can’t pause, as at the end of a chapter, and take things up again after a decent interval.
The catastrophe was followed by a series of days and nights that had to be lived through.
Harter’s trial came on in a very short while and he was found guilty of manslaughter.