Sam Lucas gave him no respite. Moment by moment he pressed the panting race harder, faster; moment by moment he grew more exacting, imperative and pressing in his demands for unhesitating replies. While he harassed and urged the sweating victim, the prosecutor’s eyes narrowed, his thin lips pressed hard against his teeth. The moment was approaching for the final assault, for the fierce delivery of the last, invincible dart.
The people felt it coming, and panted with the acute pleasures of expectation; Hammer saw its hovering shadow, and rose to his feet; Mrs. Newbolt suffered under the strain until she rocked from side to side, unconscious of all and everybody but herself and Joe, and groaned.
What were they going to do to Joe–what were they going to do?
Sam Lucas was hurling his questions into Joe’s face, faster and faster. His voice was shaded now with the inflection of accusation, now discredit; now it rose to the pitch of condemnation, now it sank to a hoarse whisper of horror as he dwelt upon the scene in Isom Chase’s kitchen, the body of old Isom stretched in its own blood upon the floor.
Joe seemed to stumble over his replies, to grope, to flounder. The agony of his soul was in his face. And then, in a moment of tortured desperation he rose from his seat, tall, gaunt, disordered, and clasped his hand to his forehead as if driven 288 to the utmost bound of his endurance and to the outer brink of his resources.
The prosecutor paused with leveled finger, while Joe, remembering himself, pushed his hair back from his brow like one waking from a hot and troubled sleep, and resumed his seat. Then suddenly, in full volume of voice, the prosecutor flung at him the lance for which he had been weakening Joe’s defenses through those long and torturing hours.
“Tell this jury what the ‘words’ were which you have testified passed between you and Isom Chase after he made the threat to kill you, and before he ran for the gun!”
Hammer bellowed forth an objection, which was quietly overruled. It served its purpose in a way, even though it failed in its larger intent, for the prosecutor’s headlong assault was checked by it, the force of his blow broken.
Joe sat up as if cold water had been dashed over him. Instead of crushing him entirely, and driving him to the last corner shrinking, beaten and spiritless, and no longer capable of resistance, it seemed to give him a new grip on himself, to set his courage and defiance again on the fighting line.
The prosecuting attorney resented Hammer’s interference at the moment of his victory–as he believed it–and turned to him with an ugly scowl. But Hammer was imperturbable. He saw the advantage that he had gained for Joe by his interposition, and that was more than he had expected. Only a moment ago Hammer had believed everything lost.