e all know, that this acknowledgment of yours was
made in a talk with Miss Geddis. We are all willing to spare her the
humiliation of being brought into court. But it is your perfect right
to have her called if you wish it."

Knowing well enough by this time what I was in for, I was still foolish
enough, or besotted enough, to shake my head. "I don't wish it," I
said; and since this was practically telling Whitredge not to do so, he
did not cross-examine the two witnesses.

When the prosecution rested, Whitredge took up his line of defense. He
tried to show, rather lamely, I thought, that I had always lived within
my means, hadn't been dissipated, and had never been known to bet,
either on horse races or on the stock market; that whatever I had done
had been done without criminal intent. In this part of the trial I had
a heart-warming surprise. The afternoon train from Glendale brought a
big bunch of young people, and a good sprinkling of older ones, all
eager to testify to my former good character. I saw then how unfair I
had been in the bitterness of that first day. The shock of my arrest
had simply dammed up the sympathy stream like a sudden frost; but now
the reaction had come and I was not without friends. That little
demonstration went with me though many a long and weary day afterward.

Naturally, the greater part of this "character evidence" was thrown out
as irrelevant. The trial wasn't held for the purpose of ascertaining
what sort of a young man I had been in the past. It was supposed to be
an attempt to get at the facts in a particular case; and according to
the testimony of two uncontradicted witnesses, I had admitted these
facts.

Chandler said nothing about my attempt to escape until he came to
address the jury. But then he drove the nail in good and hard. The
deputy sheriff, Simmons, bruised and beaten, was shown to the jurors,
and the prosecuting attorney made much of the fact that I had not
stopped at a possible murder in shutting Simmons up in the bank vault.
There was nothing said about the bribe to the other deputy who had
figured as the hack driver; from which I inferred that the Irishman had
pocketed my money and held his peace.

Whitredge's summing-up was as lame in effect as it was rantingly
emotional. He liked to hear himself talk, and his stock in trade as a
criminal lawyer consisted mainly of perfervid appeals to the sympathies
of his juries. Here, he pleaded, with the tre