They’re not healthy here, but I can’t afford to send them away.”
When I started to leave, he dropped back into his whine.
“I hadn’t the ghost of a chance. Colonel Ingram and Judge Caldwell are pretty friendly. I’m not saying that if I’d got the right kind of testimony out of their witnesses on cross-examination, that friendship would have decided the case. And yet I must say that Judge Caldwell did a whole lot to prevent my getting that very testimony. Why, Judge Caldwell and Colonel Ingram belong to the same lodge and the same club. They live in the same neighborhood—one I can’t afford. And their wives are always in and out of each other’s houses. They’re always having whist parties and such things back and forth.”
“And yet you think Jackson had the right of it?” I asked, pausing for the moment on the threshold.
“I don’t think; I know it,” was his answer. “And at first I thought he had some show, too. But I didn’t tell my wife. I didn’t want to disappoint her. She had her heart set on a trip to the country hard enough as it was.”
“Why did you not call attention to the fact that Jackson was trying to save the machinery from being injured?” I asked Peter Donnelly, one of the foremen who had testified at the trial.
He pondered a long time before replying. Then he cast an anxious look about him and said:
“Because I’ve a good wife an’ three of the sweetest children ye ever laid eyes on, that’s why.”
“I do not understand,” I said.
“In other words, because it wouldn’t a-ben healthy,” he answered.
“You mean—” I began.