Ollie took the witness-chair with an air of extreme nervousness. As she settled down in her cloud of black skirt, black veil, and shadow of black sailor hat, she cast about the room a look of timid appeal. She seemed to be sounding the depths of the listening crowd’s sympathy, and to find it shallow and in shoals.
Hammer was kind, with an unctuous, patronizing gentleness. 265 He seemed to approach her with the feeling that she might say a great deal that would be damaging to the defendant if she had a mind to do it, but with gentle adroitness she could be managed to his advantage. Led by a question here, a helping reminder there, Ollie went over her story, in all particulars the same as she had related at the inquest.
Hammer brought out, with many confidential glances at the jury, the distance between Ollie’s room and the kitchen; the fact that she had her door closed, that she had gone to bed heavy with weariness, and was asleep long before midnight; that she had been startled by a sound, a strange and mysterious sound for that quiet house, and had sat up in her bed listening. Sol Greening had called her next, in a little while, even before she could master her fright and confusion and muster courage to run down the hall and call Joe.
Hammer did well with the witness; that was the general opinion, drawing from her a great deal about Joe’s habit of life in Isom’s house, a great deal about Isom’s temper, hard ways, and readiness to give a blow.
She seemed reluctant to discuss Isom’s faults, anxious, rather, to ease them over after the manner of one whose judgment has grown less severe with the lapse of time.
Had he ever laid hands on her in temper? Hammer wanted to know.
“Yes.” Her reply was a little more than a whisper, with head bent, with tears in her sad eyes. Under Hammer’s pressure she told about the purchase of the ribbon, of Isom’s iron hand upon her throat.
The women all over the room made little sounds of pitying deprecation of old Isom’s penury, and when Hammer drew from her, with evident reluctance on her part to yield it up, the story of her hard-driven, starved, and stingy life under Isom’s roof, they put their handkerchiefs to their eyes. 266
All the time Ollie was following Hammer’s kind leading, the prosecuting attorney was sitting with his hands clasped behind his head, balancing his weight on the hinder legs of his chair, his foot thrown over his knee. Apparently he was bored, even worried, by Hammer’s pounding attempts to make Isom out a man who deserved something slower and less merciful than a bullet, years before he came to his violent end.
Through it all Joe sat looking at Ollie, great pity for her forlorn condition and broken spirit in his honest eyes. She did not meet his glance, not for one wavering second. When she went to the stand she passed him with bent head; in the chair she looked in every direction but his, mainly at her hands, clasped in her lap.