"Probably! Oh, thunder," put in Patrick Durand, one of the cleverest criminal lawyers in the city, "that man Ilingsworth is dead already!"
Colonel Morehead placed the finger-tips of one hand against those of the other as he made answer:
"If he'd been merely one of a crowd of maddened depositors, acting in the heat of passion, it would have been second degree, without a doubt. And yet,"—and the Colonel darted sharp glances first at Durand and then toward his client,—"in my opinion, the star witness of the prosecution was your daughter Leslie. The jury believed every word that she said."
And indeed such had been the case at Ilingsworth's trial. Assistant District Attorney Leech had made no mistake in the order of summoning his witnesses. After her father, bluff, arrogant and eager—and over-willingness is a bad virtue in a witness—had finished his testimony, Leslie had taken the stand and had wholly removed the bad impression Wilkinson had made on the jury through his evident desire that Ilingsworth should be convicted. Moreover, Leech had trained the girl, as he did all his witnesses, to answer the essential facts, and nothing else. And to make his task all the easier, Ilingsworth's lawyer, a hanger-on of the criminal courts—for Ilingsworth had had no funds to employ first-class counsel, and a prisoner without money is a doomed man in New York—had wallowed through the trial without a glimmering of common sense. From the first, as might have been expected, he had played directly into the hands of the People. But his blundering had not been without its interesting side—interesting, at least, to a few of his hearers. For despite the Assistant District Attorney's strenuous objections, the Court had overruled his contention that the entire conversation between Giles Ilingsworth and Leslie that memorable afternoon was irrelevant and immaterial, and in consequence the good-for-nothing lawyer had led Leslie on to tell in detail all of Ilingsworth's grave charges against her father. And it was at that point, and barely before the girl had uttered two hundred words, that a reporter of the Morning Mail had succeeded in wriggling his way through the lawyers inside the rail, and had not crept back into his place and resumed the taking of copious notes until the court stenographer to whom he had whispered: "Say, old man, I want all this, word for word, by two o'clock, at any price," had nodded his willingness to accept the fifty-dollar bill that he was sure the Morning Mail must vouchsafe him for this hurry job.
And so it happened that an hour later the Morning Mail man was telling Mr. Ougheltree of the Twentieth Century Bank and head of the bankers clique that owned the Mail, that he had to stand by this man Ilingsworth from start to finish. And as a result of this interview the few spectators at the afternoon session of the court had heard the celebrated Worth Higgins inform the Court that he had been retained to conduct the case for the defence, as well as the Court's complimentary remarks in reply.
But Worth Higgins had been of little service to the defendant, though he had drawn from his witnesses, especially Ilingsworth, all that they knew or suspected about Wilkinson's management of the seventeen bankrupt trust companies—a feat which, as will readily be imagined, was all that the Morning Mail required of him. In truth, Higgins had done Ilingsworth more harm than good. The defendant had deliberately purchased a gun; had lain in wait; had shot a man down in cold blood. Not the man he had aimed at, it is true, but the principle was the same.
"Will the defendant deny that he did the shooting?" had been Higgins' query to Boggs.
"Of course he will," had been his fellow-counsel's answer. "He's as innocent as a new-born babe."
And with that Higgins had put the defendant on the stand and heard him deny it—a weak, wabbling denial it was, in reality merely a recital of his wrongs.
"That's all," Higgins said, when the testimony was over, and then he had added in an aside to his junior: "His goose is cooked."