Under Vanderveer's cross-examination this witness was made to place the model of the Verona with its stern at the same angle as it had been at the time of the shooting. The witness was then asked to assume the same position he had been in at the time he said he had seen Tracy. The impossibility of having seen the face of a man firing from any of the cabin windows was thus demonstrated to the jury.
Then to clinch the idea that the identification was simply so much perjury, Vanderveer introduced into evidence the stenographic report of the coroner's inquest held over Jefferson Beard in which the witness, Bridge, had sworn that the first shot came from an open space just beneath the pilot house and had further testified that he could not recognize the person who was doing the firing.
Walter H. Smith, a scab shingle weaver, and deputy on the dock, followed with a claim to have recognized Tracy as one of the men who was shooting from the Verona. He also stated that he could identify another man who was shooting from the forward deck. He was handed a number of photographs and failed to find the man he was looking for. Instead he indicated one of the photographs and said that it was Tracy. Vanderveer immediately seized the picture and offered it in evidence.
"I made a mistake there," remarked Smith.
"I know you did," responded Vanderveer, "and I want the jury to know it."
The witness had picked out a photograph of John Downs and identified it as the defendant.
The prosecution then called S. A. Mann, who had been police judge in Spokane, Wash., from 1908 into 1911, and questioned him in regard to the Spokane Free Speech fight and the death of Chief of Police John Sullivan. Here attorney Fred Moore was on familiar ground, having acted for the I. W. W. during the time of that trouble. Moore developed the fact that there had been several thousand arrests with not a single instance of resistance or violence on the part of the I. W. W., not a weapon found on any of their persons, and no incendiary fires during the entire fight. He further confounded the prosecution by having Judge Mann admit that in the Spokane fight a prisoner arrested on a city charge was always lodged in the city jail and one arrested on a county charge was always placed in the county jail—a condition not at all observed in Everett.
Moore also brought out the facts of the death of Chief Sullivan so far as they are known. The witness admitted that Sullivan was charged with abuse of an adopted daughter of Mr. Elliott, a G. A. R. veteran; that desk officer N. V. Pitts charged Sullivan with having forced him to turn over certain Chinese bond money and the Chief resigned his position while under these charges; that the Spokane Press bitterly attacked Sullivan and was sued as a consequence, the Scripps-McRae paper being represented by the law firm of Robertson, Miller and Rosenhaupt, of which Judge Frank C. Robertson was the head; that the Chronicle and Spokesman-Review joined in the attack upon the Chief; and that when Sullivan was dying from a shot in the back the following conversation occurred between himself and the dying man: "I said to him 'John, who do you suppose did this?' He says, 'Judge F. C. Robertson and the Press are responsible for this.' I said, 'John, you don't mean that, you can't mean it?' He says, 'That is the way I feel.'"
Judge Ronald prevented the attorneys from going very deeply into the Spokane affair, saying:
"I am not going to wash Spokane linen here; we have some of our own to wash!"