nner of man you are
considering. You are considering whether he was the aggressor, he or the
people he shot at.

"Counsel says that Louis Skaroff lied. Now I am very frank to confess
that when we produced that story on the witness stand I feared you would
not believe it, not because I doubted the truthfulness of his statement
but because the story itself is so brutal and inhuman that I questioned
whether there could be found anywhere in the county twelve persons who
would think such things could possibly happen just thirty miles away.
But when one of their own witnesses went on the stand here, in rebuttal,
and told you that Louis Skaroff came out of that room with his arms
above his head, crying, with the blood running from his finger tips, I
knew that you knew that Louis Skaroff had told the truth.

"The state has been very reluctant in this case to admit that there were
rifles on the dock, because if the deputies went there with rifles there
was a reason for it. You could not find a rifle on that dock until we
proved--what? That rifle shells were around the dock in great numbers;
we proved it by innocent, clean little boys who picked up the shells;
until we proved by witnesses that the rifles were there and were being
shot; until we proved by a rifle bullet with human blood and a man's
hair on it that the use made of the rifles was a deadly one.

"Who was the aggressor? Even now the State doesn't like to admit,
because the State knows it is fatal to their case to admit, and
notwithstanding hopeless to deny, that there were helpless men in the
water being shot at. They do not like to admit that a man was so
impressed with the inhumanity of the thing that he ran from the depot to
the boat house hoping to effect a rescue of the men and was stopped by
the armed deputies. The State does not like to admit the evidence of
their own deputy witness, Groger,--whose actions I want the counsel for
the state to explain and justify if he can--who repeatedly fired at a
man who was trying to untie the boat so the unarmed men could escape.

"Counsel said that if there was any intention to start trouble men would
not have lined up as they were on the dock in an exposed position. And I
ask you, if there was not an intention to start trouble why were they
kept in the warehouse until the boat had almost tied up? If that was not
an ambuscade, what on earth was it? If they did not intend to start
trouble why was it McRae waited until the