"But you knew it was in the safe?"
"I supposed so."
"One moment," said the district attorney, interrupting. "Once more, why did you reopen the study on this particular day?"
"Because I had been informed that Mr. Hodgkins was coming to remove the will."
"By whom were you so informed?"
"Mrs. Arnold drove up about 3 o'clock and mentioned the fact. Indeed, she had expected to find him at the house. He was an old acquaintance of hers, as well as of my uncle—her legal adviser, in fact."
A stylish woman, still fair in spite of her 50 years, was sitting in front of Robert as he testified. She was the widow of Benjamin Arnold's brother, Henry, and her son, Henry, or Harry, had just offered a reward of $5,000 for the incendiary—a sum which McCausland might well have hopes of securing. The inspector was still hovering about the threshold of his ante-room, and now that Floyd's examination was concluded he called the district attorney to one side, apparently urging him to reserve the remainder of his evidence, which would naturally consist of rebuttal of Floyd and corroboration of Bertha. At any rate, Mr. Badger arose, and, announcing that the case was closed, offered a summary of the evidence, rapid, methodical, but unimpressive, like himself. Then the prisoner was asked if he desired to speak in his own behalf.
"Your honor," he said, "this monstrous charge of having set on foot a fire in the most populous section of our noble city overwhelms me so that I am impotent to express the indignation I feel. I leave it to your own sense of justice, your own discrimination, whether I am to be dishonored with the suspicion of an infamous crime, on evidence so flimsy that the bare denial of a veracious man should be sufficient to upset it. I read in many faces around me the hunger for blood; the unthinking call for a victim. Heed that, and my good name is taken from me. I am irreparably wronged. Resist it, and you will prove yourself worthy of the honorable title which you bear."
Not a few were swayed toward the youth by his manifest emotion. But the judge waited fully a minute before he arose and his eyeglasses were trembling in his hand.
"You have elected, against good counsel," he began, "to be your own advocate. I cannot and do not adjudge you unsuccessful, in the sense of having demonstrated your guilt rather than your innocence. But that you have failed to break the government's chain of evidence in its most damaging links—sole opportunity, motive and suspicious conduct, especially after the act—is plain to me, and would be plain to any mind accustomed to weighing such evidence calmly.