'Timid,' the lawyer was labeling his witness. 'Sensitive. Over-scrupulous. He’d scruple his testimony out of existence.'
Aloud he spoke with grave reassurance. 'Your merely seeing Mr. Whiting can do him no harm. Indeed, you may not be needed at all. The preliminary examination having been waived—' He paused for a moment before the Nelson gate, his thin-featured old face remote and serious. 'In any case, remember this, my boy. Nothing is ever required of you on the witness stand except to tell your story exactly as you have told it off the stand. In the end the truth will come out and no innocent man be harmed.'
He congratulated himself as he went on up the street that he had reassured the lad, put before him his irresponsibility in its true light. Had he looked back, he might have seen the reassured witness staring after him in a kind of horror of amazement. To Robbins it was as if, astoundingly, an outsider had voiced the thought of his own heart. That truth must prevail, that false witnesses would be brought to confusion—it was a belief ingrained into the fibre of his being. He was sick with a premonition of disgrace.
'Only, they can’t know,' he tried to hearten himself. 'I can stick to it I did.' He stood still a moment, the line of his sensitive chin grown suddenly hard. 'And I’ve got to stick to it,' he warned himself. 'I’ve got to stick it out as long as I live.'
It did not need the county attorney’s advice to keep him away from the court-room during the opening days of the trial. With all the youthful masculinity of Sutro crowding the courthouse steps, Robbins sat at home in the hot, darkened parlor, reading from books pulled down at random, seeing always, no matter what he read, a room set thick with eyes—eyes scornful, eyes reproachful, eyes speculative.
When at last the ordeal came, it was so much less dreadful than his anticipation of it that he was conscious of an immediate relief. There was, indeed, a minute of blind confusion as he made his way toward the stand—voices singing in his ears, a blue mist before his eyes. Then, somehow, he was sworn and seated, and all round him were the friendly faces of neighbors. He could see the judge nod encouragement to him over his desk; he could see the bracing kindness of the county attorney’s glance. Whiting he could not see, the bowed shoulders of a reporter intervening.
He was scarcely nervous after the first moments. His story flowed from him without effort, almost without volition. 'I was walking along the track—I’d been fishing—' It seemed to him that he had said the words a million times.
There were interruptions now and then; objections; questions from a round-faced, deep-voiced youngster, who, Robbins divined presently, was Whiting’s lawyer; but all of it—the narrative, the pauses, the replies—came with the regular, effortless movement of well-oiled machinery. He could have laughed at the puerile efforts of the defense to break down his story.—'Was he sure that he knew James Whiting?' Was there a resident of Sutro who did not know him? 'Could he swear,—taking thought that he was under oath,—could he swear that the man on the side of the car was James Whiting and not some other man resembling him? If, on a moving train, another man resembling James Whiting, of about James Whiting’s size—'
'He knows he can’t touch me,' Robbins was thinking triumphantly. 'He knows it!'
The question of truth or falsehood was quite removed from him now. He came down from the stand finely elated, and in the afternoon went back of his own accord to the court-room. Emerson, the truck-gardener, was under examination and faring badly. One by one, the damaging facts of his past came out against him—an arrest for theft, a jail sentence for vagrancy, a quarrel with the prisoner, proved threats. The victim emerged limp from the ordeal, and slunk away from the room, wholly discredited.