“It’s not a lie. It’s truth. Truth! Truth!” Annette screamed back in a wild burst of hysteria. Her eyes were blazing. She was beside herself. Her face was contorted with nervous twitchings. “It’s a lie, I tell you! I was lyin’ before! It was all lies, lies, lies! I didn’t see you shoot, because I shot him. Ernie lied to me! He lied like hell! An’ he laffed at me! He laffed in my face. He cursed me for a Breed—a dirty Breed! He cursed me, an’ sent me to hell with my kid! They can’t hang you, Wolf! You didn’t do it! I did! I stole your gun from your room. I done it! I left him there dead, an’ I’m glad! They can’t hang you, boy. You didn’t do it! I did! I did! I——”
In a flash the Wolf came back.
“Don’t take notice of her!” he cried in a sweat of awful dread. “She’s crazy mad! She don’t know a thing she’s sayin’. You’ve drove her crazy between you! She didn’t kill Sinclair. I did!”
He broke off and gazed about him. He looked yearningly at the bowed figure in the witness box. The sight seemed to spur him. The next moment Croisette became aware of movement at the back of the Court as someone stood up and moved towards the door. Then the Wolf was talking again, but coldly, quietly, convincingly.
“You’ve mazed her! You may as well get the truth right here, so you ken let that pore kid alone. I shot Sinclair. An’ I’d do it all again if he was livin’ now. He stole my woman,” he went on, pointing at the huddled figure of Annette. “She’s my woman. Do you get what that means—any of you? An’ he made her bear his kid. I said I’d kill him. All she said first was right—dead right. Ther’ wasn’t one lie to it. She’s only lyin’ now, cos you’ve got her rattled. I shot that boy to the hell he belongs, an’ now you ken hang me right away.”
Croisette scrawled a note and passed it to Stanley Fyles. But as the Wolf finished speaking Annette was galvanized into fierce rejection of his confession.
“I’m not mazed or crazy!” she cried at the Judge. “It’s that fool boy! He guesses to save me from hangin’. That’s been him always. He reckons me a crazy kid. I’m not. I’m a woman. I killed Ernie Sinclair ’cos he made me hate him. My kid. I killed him for my kid. I ken show you the way I did it. It wasn’t him. The Wolf didn’t shoot him. You can’t hang him! It’s me! You got to hang me!”
Croisette saw Fyles thrust his way out of the Court.
It was like the passing of a fantastic dream. Where before had pulsed a throng of eager life with every passion astir, now all was darkness, and the hush of desertion. The courthouse was closed, and locked up, and empty.