Wealth against commonwealth

by Henry Demarest Lloyd

"Yes—" That was as far as Cleber got.

"I object!" screamed one of the lawyers.

"I propose to show that the captain made a request of this witness in regard to what he should do to Albert, and what he should come and swear to about Albert, there being no truth in the matter he wanted Cleber to swear to," the State's Attorney urged to the Court. The judge took the matter home for consideration over-night, and announced in the morning that he would not admit the evidence. It was acknowledged by one of the lawyers for the members of the trust on trial that he had employed the captain to get evidence for them; but the judge, instead of admitting Cleber's testimony, and leaving the question of its value to be settled by the jury, excluded it.

In his closing speech District Attorney Quinby said: "Why, in Heaven's name, my friends, didn't you place the captain on this witness-stand? He would have been a feast for you and a feast for me. His ways have been curious and sinuous, his methods have been peculiar and corrupting, and they did not dare to put him on the stand because if they did he would have left it to go to prison. That is the reason. They know it."

The brave and steadfast woman told her part of this story on the witness-stand. Her home had been broken up again and again. As she herself said afterwards: "I had to live with my carpets packed, and moved around like a gypsy." Her husband had been tempted to commit a crime which compelled him to lead the life of a fugitive. He had been spirited away and secreted; she had not been allowed to know where he was, and could communicate with him only through a third person; they had moved around, in her expressive phrase, until they had moved into two rooms; the savings of fifteen years' hard work were all gone, and the independent business, in which her husband had just got his footing, swept away. He and she faced the world with no other assets than their child and the palms of their hard-working hands.

"Well, it's taken all we had," she says; "we've lost it all, but I'd rather it would be so than to have the money they have, and go about hiding and sneaking. I'd like money, but not so well as that. When I said to 'Charley,' 'I shall have to sell all my furniture'—'Oh, that's nothing.' And when I told him it had cost us $100 to pay the expenses of selling real estate—'That isn't much.' It wasn't much to them, but it was to us, who had made every dollar by hard work. Well, we'll have to do without the money, and just live along by honest work. We can live that way. We have had all this trouble and lost our money, and haven't made money enough to buy a calico dress."

All the good that had come of this loss of savings and home and honor had gone to those at the bar of justice and their associates sitting in the tickled row before her. On the cross-examination, which was to crush the witness and her damaging testimony, the distinguished counsel, not content with all the suffering and loss already inflicted on this wife, tried to humiliate her still further, but the woman's wit of truth was too much for the lawyer's wit of wile.

"Don't you recollect," the lawyer asked, "that you went to the house of the manager of the Vacuum, and that you saw him in the parlor, and that you asked him to take your husband back?"

"I never asked him to take my husband back."