“Your—your Honour,” she stammered, “I move a postponement in order to allow the defence more time to prepare its case.”
Judge Kellog fingered his patriarchal beard. Katherine stood hardly breathing while she waited his momentous words. But his answer was as Old Hosie had predicted.
“In view of the fact that the defence has already had four months in which to prepare its case,” said he, “I shall have to deny the motion and order the trial to proceed.”
Katherine sat down. The hope of deferment was gone. There remained only to fight.
A jury was quickly chosen; Katherine felt that her case would stand as good a chance with any one selection of twelve men as with any other. Kennedy then stepped forward. With an air that was a blend of his pretentious—if rather raw-boned—dignity as a coming statesman, of extreme deference toward Katherine’s sex, and of the sense of his personal belittlement in being pitted against such a legal weakling, he outlined to the jury what he expected to prove. After which, he called Mr. Marcy to the stand.
The agent of the filter company gave his evidence with that degree of shame-facedness proper to the man, turned state’s witness, who has been an accomplice in the dishonourable proceedings he is relating. It all sounded and looked so true—so very, very true!
When Katherine came to cross-examine him, she gazed at him steadily a moment. She knew that he was lying, and she knew that he knew that she knew he was lying. But he met her gaze with precisely the abashed, guilty air appropriate to his rôle.
What she considered her greatest chance was now before her. Calling up all her wits, she put to Mr. Marcy questions that held distant, hidden traps. But when she led him along the devious, unsuspicious path that conducted to the trap and then suddenly shot at him the question that should have plunged him into it, he very quietly and nimbly walked around the pitfall. Again and again she tried to involve him, but ever with the same result. He was abashed, ready to answer—and always elusive. At the end she had gained nothing from him, and for a minute stood looking silently at him in baffled exasperation.
“Have you any further questions to ask the witness?” old Judge Kellog prompted her, with a gentle impatience.