"Well ... but ..."
"You didn't want her to live, in spite of your alleged change of heart! Isn't that it?" yelled Mason. "Isn't that the black, sad truth? She was drowning, as you wanted her to drown, and you just let her drown! Isn't that so?"
He was fairly trembling as he shouted this, and Clyde, the actual boat before him and Roberta's eyes and cries as she sank coming back to him with all their pathetic and horrible force, now shrank and cowered in his seat—the closeness of Mason's interpretation of what had really happened terrifying him. For never, even to Jephson and Belknap, had he admitted that when Roberta was in the water he had not wished to save her. Changelessly and secretively he had insisted he had wanted to but that it had all happened so quickly, and he was so dazed and frightened by her cries and movements, that he had not been able to do anything before she was gone.
"I ... I wanted to save her," he mumbled, his face quite gray, "but ... but ... as I said, I was dazed ... and ... and ..."
"Don't you know that you're lying!" shouted Mason, leaning still closer, his stout arms aloft, his disfigured face glowering and scowling like some avenging nemesis or fury of gargoyle design—"that you deliberately and with cold-hearted cunning allowed that poor, tortured girl to die there when you might have rescued her as easily as you could have swum fifty of those five hundred feet you did swim in order to save yourself?" For by now he was convinced that he knew just how Clyde had actually slain Roberta, something in his manner and mood convincing him, and he was determined to drag it out of him if he could. And although Belknap was instantly on his feet with a protest that his client was being unfairly prejudiced in the eyes of the jury and that he was really entitled to—and now demanded—a mistrial—which complaint Justice Oberwaltzer eventually overruled—still Clyde had time to reply, but most meekly and feebly: "No! No! I didn't. I wanted to save her if I could." Yet his whole manner, as each and every juror noted, was that of one who was not really telling the truth, who was really all of the mental and moral coward that Belknap had insisted he was—but worse yet, really guilty of Roberta's death. For after all, asked each juror of himself as he listened, why couldn't he have saved her if he was strong enough to swim to shore afterwards—or at least have swum to and secured the boat and helped her to take hold of it?
"She only weighed a hundred pounds, didn't she?" went on Mason feverishly.
"Yes, I think so."
"And you—what did you weigh at the time?"
"About a hundred and forty," replied Clyde.
"And a hundred and forty pound man," sneered Mason, turning to the jury, "is afraid to go near a weak, sick, hundred-pound little girl who is drowning, for fear she will cling to him and drag him under! And a perfectly good boat, strong enough to hold three or four up, within fifteen or twenty feet! How's that?"