IX

delivered but hurled, headlong, with the force and rush of a cavalry charge. Before it Orr’s points sank overwhelmed. To replace them with others of his own Peacock made new ones, evolving them with a fire and lucidity that was pyrotechnic. They were like bombs exploding before the jury’s eyes. He arraigned the defendant, arraigned the defense, stampeded their tactics, denounced Annandale’s manner, which he declared to be that of a hardened criminal, and pictured him as a jealous husband who, in accordance with a plot long premeditated, had first lured his victim to his house, then following him thence had murdered him in the darkness, but who now swore that he was drunk and remembered nothing. “Assuming that he was drunk,” Peacock shouted, “his intoxication was a feigned disguise, assumed for the purpose and legally an aggravation of his dastard crime.”

Beneath, in the unlovely street, an organ was tossing a jig. The jolts of it mounted to the court, fusing with Peacock’s voice, adding their vulgarity to his own, and it was to the wretchedness of them that he said at last: “My duty is done.”

He had scored points by the dozen. In as many seconds Orr had their heads off by half.

“Harris, gentlemen, is the rock of the People’s case. His hand fashioned it. Without him it crumbles. Let me array for you Harris against Harris.”

Leisurely Orr began, showing the man’s hand for what it was, not dirty and disreputable merely, but discredited.

“Apart from that hand where is the promised evidence? Where is it? Where is that evidence? Gentlemen, not a bit of evidence have you had, not a molecule, not a minim, not a mite. At best or at worst any evidence producible against this defendant would be circumstantial. In telling you the value of such testimony the District Attorney has been good enough to leave it to me to explain that testimony of this character must, to be