“Really, I didn’t know, Mr. Pickett, without inquiring.”
The witness was losing his temper, the lawyer was getting sarcastic, and the spectators were anticipating a still greater treat in store from the continuance of the examination.
In his seat at the rear of the court room Dannie sat, dazed, motionless, listening and hearing as one in a dream; in his breast still the imperious demand of his conscience urging him to confess; in his palsied limbs no power to move. Then Marshall took up a new line of examination. He handed a paper to the witness directing his attention to the name at the bottom of it.
“Is that your signature, Mr. Pickett?” he asked.
The old man looked at the paper carefully.
“Yes,” he replied, “it is. I wrote it myself.”
“This paper is an agreement to sell to the Delaware Valley and Eastern Railroad Company a right of way fifty feet in width, through your property, on the line located by their engineers on September twenty-seventh last. You signed that paper voluntarily, without any coercion, naming your own price for the property?”
“Let me tell you about that paper, young man.”
“No; answer my question, yes or no.”