"And did you say anything to your cousin about your husband's threats?"
"No."
"Can you tell me why you didn't?"
"Because"--unconsciously, the woman scored yet another point--"because I didn't want Bob to see I was frightened."
"And now"--Ronnie craned forward in his mounting excitement--"and now, Mrs. Towers, I want you to describe to his lordship and the jury, in your own words, exactly what happened in Robert Fielding's room on the afternoon of July 5."
"I made Bob his tea, and I was helping him eat it when Bill came in," began the woman.
No sounds save the scratch of reporters' pencils, the occasional tap of a boot-sole on the bare floor-boards, and the suppressed breathing of her tense audience interrupted the story Lucy Towers told her counsel and the court--a story so utterly resembling, yet so utterly differing from the toneless confession which the "hanging prosecutor" had read out the day before, a story so redolent of life and truth and certainty that, listening to it, it seemed as if one could actually see the dead man standing at the doorway of that bare tenement room, see the lifted stick in his hand, and hear his harsh, grim voice.
"Bill said, 'I'll do you in. I'll do you both in, damn you.' He had his stick in Ms hand. He lifted his stick. I was frightened. I thought he meant to kill Bob. I thought he meant to kill both of us. I remembered the pistol. I ran to the cupboard. I pulled out the pistol. I pointed it at him. Bob said, 'Look out, Bill. The gun's loaded.' Bill said, 'You can't frighten me.' I thought he was going to kill Bob, so I fired.
"So I fired." The little story ended to the indescribable, unbearable silence of men and women whose emotions are near to breaking-point. Through that unbearable silence, Ronnie's next question cut like a razor through taut string.
"You say that your husband carried a stick. Can you describe that stick?"