“Was this the man?”
“No, sir,” answered Tom.
Pleadwell leaned back in his chair, and turned to the jury with a smile of triumph on his face. The people in the court-room nodded to each other, and whispered, “That clears Jack.”
Every one, but Jack Rennie himself, seemed to feel the force of Tom’s testimony. The prisoner still sat clutching the table, looking blankly at the wall, pale, almost trembling, with some suppressed emotion.
But through Tom’s mind kept echoing the solemn words of his oath: “The whole truth; the whole truth.” And he had not told it; his testimony was no better than a lie. An awful sense of guilt came pressing in upon him from above, from below, from every side. Hateful voices seemed sounding in his brain: “Perjurer in spirit! Receiver of bribes!”
The torture of his self-abhorrence, in that one moment of silence, was terrible beyond belief.
Then a sudden impulse seized him; a bright, brave, desperate impulse.
He stepped down from the witness-stand, passed swiftly between chairs and tables, tearing the money from his breast-pocket by the way, and flinging the hated hundred dollars down before the astonished Pleadwell, he returned as quickly as he came, stepped into his place with swelling breast and flaming cheeks and flashing eyes, and exclaimed, falling, in his excitement, into the broad accent of his mother tongue,—
“Noo I’m free! Do what ye wull wi’ me! Prison me, kill me, but I’ll no’ hold back the truth longer for ony mon, nor a’ the money that ony mon can gi’ me!”