On page 2589 Mr. Rerdell swears positively that he did not know that he was to be used as a witness for the Government until he was called in court to take the stand. Let us look at the evidence of Mr. Bliss on page 2590. I will read you what he said:
Mr. Bliss. Your Honor, we propose to show, in substance, that this witness, for reasons with which we have nothing to do, connected with his own views of his own safety, from an early period was desirous of being accepted by the Government as a witness; that the counsel in the case refused to communicate with him or to have anything to do with him until, in the presence of his own counsel, he was brought to Mr. Merrick's office, and there the whole thing was explained; and that then for the first time the Government accepted his willingness to be a witness; and they did it under circumstances which held out to him no inducement and which involved no training or anything of the kind by anybody representing the prosecution.
Now, let us go to the next step. I want to be perfectly fair. On page 2591 Mr. Merrick asked Mr. Rerdell this question:
Q. When did you first learn that you would be put upon the stand after pleading guilty?—A. It was the day before my plea was made in court.
Yet when he rose to withdraw the plea he expressed his willingness to go upon the stand for the Government, leaving you to infer that no arrangement had been made, and he afterwards finally swore that he did not know that he was to be called until he was called.
These things, gentlemen, you must remember.
On page 2515 Rerdell swears that on the Sunday after he got out of jail he proposed to Mr. Lilley to have Lilley act for him, and authorized Lilley to say to the Government that if the Government would accept him he would go on the stand and rebut Vaile. He told him that he had in his possession a letter or two of Mr. Vaile's. Rerdell tells you that he made this proposition on the 16th or 17th of September, 1882, which was after he made the affidavit of June, 1881. On the same page he said it was just after Vaile went off the stand. That is my recollection. In the last trial Vaile testified on the 4th of August, 1882. So about that time Rerdell, according to his testimony, went to Lilley and made a proposition to sell out then. When he made the affidavit of July 13, 1882, the trial was then in progress. The very next month, August, while the trial was still going on, that same man, having made the affidavit of July 13, 1882, went to his attorney, Mr. Lilley, and authorized him to say to the Government that Mr. Rerdell would take the stand to swear against Mr. Vaile. Remember another thing, gentlemen. The only thing he offered to do then to insure his own safety was to swear against Vaile. He did not offer to swear against Dorsey. He did not authorize Mr. Lilley to tell the Government about the pencil memorandum and the tabular statement and his letter to Bosler and Doisey's letter to Bosler and the Chico letter. Not a word. He simply went and wanted to sell some letters he had that had been written by Vaile. Why did he make that offer? Because that was all he had.
On page 2517 he says that nothing was said about pardon, but he says that Lilley told him that he thought he could get him off. What does that mean? That means pardon. On page 2518 he swears that he saw Woodward in November in Hartford, and Woodward and he wrote out the statement, covering, I believe, about seventy pages of legal cap. Then Mr. Rerdell, on page 2519, swears that he never made an affidavit after that. Then he admits, on the same page, that the day before he came into court he met Mr. Woodward and made another affidavit. That was supplementary to the first. In the meantime he found some new papers. So we find, according to his testimony, these affidavits:
On page 2521 we find that he made an affidavit in June, 1881. Remember, gentlemen, that he swore to that affidavit three or four times.
He made another affidavit in July, 1882, and another in September and November of the same year, and another in February, 1883. And yet he swears that he was not to have immunity.