The witness let the fifteen-pound bronze drop over the railing of the witness box, then raised it again with the lariat, and placed it once more on top of the railing.
Counsel for the defense smiled, approvingly.
“Not bad for an amateur detective, Ed. That thing dropped twenty feet would cave a man’s head in, all right. What, may I ask, suggested this ingenious method to you?”
Counsel’s tone was pleasantly interrogative. There was no hint of ridicule in his voice. Nevertheless, the witness shot him a quick, suspicious glance.
“When I examined his room, I found this lariat coiled on the bust,” he explained, gaining confidence. “As there wasn’t any window or door on the ground floor at that end of the houses from which he could have struck the blow that killed his uncle, nor any foot-tracks in the snow except the old man’s, I figured that this was the way he must have done it.”
“Very clever, Ed,” the prisoner’s attorney drawled. “Very!”
He stuck his thumbs into the armholes of his vest and surveyed the officer, head cocked to one side.
“Let me see, Ed — you’ve been constable of Cardinal for nearly a year now, haven’t you?” he asked.
The witness nodded.
“A year on the twenty-fifth of this month,” he replied.
“You’d like to be sheriff of Cardinal County, wouldn’t you, Ed?”
The witness looked about with a vague smile.
“Well, yes, Colonel,” he said. “Who wouldn’t?”
The attorney smiled back.
“Your chances are pretty good — now, Ed, ain’t they?” he asked ungrammatically, but with the merest shade of emphasis upon the word “now.”
“I suppose so! Everybody knows me. I was born and raised here,” the witness replied, with due modesty.
The attorney nodded acquiescence.
“I know, Ed. Your chances are particularly bright now — since you have so ably assisted the State in this prosecution, I mean.”
He was still smiling but a sort of grating edge had crept into his drawl.
A barely audible titter ran through the crowded court-room. The prosecuting attorney was known to have political ambitions. A successful conviction of murder — the first murder in the county in twenty years — would count greatly for him in the coming election. This star witness who had aided him so ably was sure not to be forgotten by him.
The witness moved uneasily.
“I don’t know about that, Colonel,” he snapped with a sudden show of resentment. “I did my duty, that’s all.”
The prosecutor was on his feet, his hard eyes flashing.
“I object to the discrediting of the witness by personal and irrelevant observations,” he stormed. “The officer is known to us as a reputable citizen.”
“There you go again, Warren,” the defendant’s counsel drawled, querulously. “Losing your temper over nothing.”
The judge frowned. He glanced from one to the other and sighed. Both men, prosecutor and defender, were his friends — outside the court-room. The three of them had seen Cardinal grow from a collection of miners’ tents to a city of some importance. He had proper respect for his profession, but he was not going to permit mere court routine to shatter a friendship of thirty years’ standing, so he said in a tone of diplomatic deprecation to the defendant’s counseclass="underline"
“I’ll have to sustain the objection, Colonel. Please proceed.”
Before the attorney for the State sat down, he said in a withering tone to his opponent:
“If you don’t lose your temper a dozen times before you’re through, I’ll miss my guess, Melvin Edgerly.”
“Gentlemen! You’re in the court!” the judge reminded them, with some show of severity.
The prisoner’s counsel did not reply to the observation of his opponent. He glanced back at the dark-haired girl on the bench beside the prisoner, then turned to the witness again.
“I was just trying to bring out, Ed, how sure you are that you’re going to be our next Sheriff.” He jerked one stubby thumb over his shoulder at the girl. “If you had been half as sure of getting Laura, there, there’d be wedding bells along with your inauguration, I guess.”
A wave of suppressed amusement passed through the crowd. The young constable’s unsuccessful wooing of Laura Hamilton was common knowledge. Someone in one of the rear seats emitted a loud guffaw.
The judge pounded his gavel.
“Another such disturbance and I’ll order the court-room cleared!” he thundered.
The face of the witness burned a dull red. The girl on the bench beside the boy dropped her eyes. Her long, dark eyelashes lay like two crescents of jet against the clear pallor of her skin. The prisoner’s hand stole out in protecting reassurance. His eyes were fastened upon the broad, untidy back of his attorney as if he were trying to read, there, the motives responsible for the man’s ill-timed digression.
The counsel consulted his notes.
“Were you alone in your office, Ed, on the morning of the fourteenth when the accused called up on the telephone and informed you that his uncle had been killed?” he asked, after a pause.
“I was,” the witness snapped.
“It was eight o’clock when the telephone rang, I believe you stated before?”
“Yes.”
“You are sure about the time?”
“Yes, sure."
“Looked at your watch, I suppose?”
“No, but I get down to the office at a quarter to eight every morning. I had been in only a short time when the telephone rang.”
“I see. You went directly to the place?”
“Yes. I closed my desk and left at once.”
“I don’t suppose you can tell us exactly to the minute when you arrived at the scene of — the tragedy?”
“I can. It was ten minutes to nine,” the officer asserted with snappy positiveness. “I looked at my watch as I walked across the field to the house.”
The attorney glanced at the ceiling. He seemed to be thinking.
“The distance from your office in the city hall to the house is about one mile,” he said. “Am I right?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“It took you from eight o’clock to ten minutes to nine — fifty minutes, to cover the distance of one mile?”
“The road was in a bad condition,” the witness explained, tersely. “It had been thawing heavily all night. I had to stop every little while to stamp the snow off my boots.”
“I see. If it hadn’t been thawing so unusually hard all night, you could have made the distance in much less time — in say twenty-five minutes?”
“Twenty minutes, easy,” the witness corrected. “I’m a fast walker.”
The colonel pursed his lips. Pie glanced at the judge, then transferred his gaze to the jury. When he spoke again, he seemed to be addressing no one in particular.
“The weather records show that it started thawing at ten-thirty the night before. I guess the canyon road must have been in pretty bad shape, all right. It was the heaviest thaw on record for this time of the year, since 1912.”
He paused and leaned back in his chair and regarded the witness, musingly.
“After you had taken charge of the body,” he resumed, “you looked around the house and found to your surprise that with the exception of your own foot tracks, there were no tracks leading to or from the house in any direction. That was what first directed your suspicion against my client, wasn’t it?”
“It was. It stopped snowing at five o’clock the night before. He, — ” here the constable pointed a heavy finger at the prisoner — “told me that the last time he saw his uncle alive was at ten o’clock the night before, when the old man was walking up and down outside the house, smoking. It did not snow after that,” he added, triumphantly.