Or was the city of Chicago on trial for permitting an unsophisticated girl to be made the victim of a criminal corporation with its headquarters in another state, as Miss Gingles has sworn?
No more remarkable case was ever tried in the criminal court of Cook county, wherein some of the most amazing cases of which the world has record have been heard and decided.
Ella Gingles was charged with larceny. Ella Gingles asserted that the charge against her was inspired by an intent on the part of her accusers to brand her a thief so that her story of the criminal machinations of a gang operating in the interest of a combination against law and order, with headquarters at an Indiana resort, might escape the penalty of acts committed by its agents.
The jury which heard Ella Gingles' story was not misled by any rhetorical bombast or alleged expert testimony covering the coined phrase, "mythomania."
Miss Gingles was supposed to have the hysterical tendency developed to the extent that she imagined things happened and then believed they had happened.
There are such people, but they are not of the physical or mental make-up of Ella Gingles. Dr. Krohn has had, no doubt, a vast experience of hysteria, basing the theory on his Kankakee connection, but he reckoned without the jury if he believed that the clear-eyed, self-poised young woman who told that horrible story to the court involving Agnes Barrett and Cecelia Kenyon with the "man in the velvet mask," was a victim of hysteria.
The testimony of Ella Gingles was of a sort that might be heard in a French court and understood. If it were heard in an English court, and believed, the plaintiffs would be certain of twenty years at hard labor without appeal.
In the criminal court of Chicago the prosecution was placed in a strange position. Ella Gingles, charged with a crime against the state, no matter by whom, it was the duty of the state's attorney's office to prosecute her with all the resources of that office.
Across the river they are used to meeting steel with steel. They fight with the weapons that the enemy uses. They perhaps become too inured to the idea that everybody is guilty until proved innocent. Therefore the cross-examination of Ella Gingles by Mr. Short, legitimate enough if the young woman were the double-dyed criminal he appears to believe her, fell short of its intended effect with the jury that leaned forward, every man listening with hand over ear for the lightest word of the softest-spoken witness the criminal court had seen in many a day.
Mr. Short was too clever an advocate to believe that the racking cross-examination covering hideous detail of the behavior of Miss Barrett and the dead Mrs. Kenyon, which brought tears to the eyes of the shrinking witness, could add anything to the state's contention in this case.