The prosecutor was eager. He leaned forward, both hands on the table, and looked at her almost hungrily. The jurymen shuffled their feet and sat up in their chairs with renewed interest. A hush fell over the room. Here was the motive at the prosecutor’s hand.
“That’s what he said,” Ollie affirmed, her gaze bent downward.
She told how Isom had come down after that, followed by Joe. And the prosecutor asked her to repeat what she had 272 heard Joe say once more for the benefit of the jury. He spoke with the air of a man who already has the game in the bag.
When the prosecutor was through with his profitable cross-examination, Hammer tried to lessen the effect of Ollie’s damaging disclosure, but failed. He was a depressed and crestfallen man when he gave it up.
Ollie stepped down from the place of inquisition with the color of life coming again into her drained lips and cheeks, the breath freer in her throat. Her secret had not been torn from her fearful heart; she had deepened the cloud that hung over Joe Newbolt’s head. “Let him blab now,” said she in her inner satisfaction. A man might say anything against a woman to save his neck; she was wise enough and deep enough, for all her shallowness, to know that people were quick to understand a thing like that.
In passing back to her place beside her mother she had not looked at Joe. So she did not see the perplexity, anxiety, even reproach, which had grown in Joe’s eyes when she testified against him.
“She had no need to do that,” thought Joe, sitting there in the glow of the prosecutor’s triumphant face. He had trusted Ollie to remain his friend, and, although she had told nothing but the truth concerning his rash threat against Isom, it seemed to him that she had done so with a studied intent of working him harm.
His resentment rose against Ollie, urging him to betray her guilty relations with Morgan and strip her of the protecting mantle which he had wrapped about her at the first. He wondered whether Morgan had not come and entered into a conspiracy with her to shield themselves. In such case what would his unfolding of the whole truth amount to, discredited as he already was in the minds of the jurors by that foolish threat which he had uttered against Isom in the thin dawn of that distant day? 273
Perhaps Alice had gone away, also, after hearing Ollie’s testimony, in the belief that he was altogether unworthy, and already branded with the responsibility for that old man’s death. He longed to look behind him and search the throng for her, but he dared not.
Joe bowed his head, as one overwhelmed by a sense of guilt and shame, yet never doubting that he had acted for the best when he assumed the risk on that sad night to shield his master’s wife. It was a thing that a man must do, that a man would do again.