United States or Micronesia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Barrett and the Colorado lawyers evidently had their hands too full to think of me; and, in any event, I could not see what possible chance they might have of reopening my case and proving my innocence. At the end of it I was reaching for the pen in Whitredge's hand, but at the touch of the thing with which I was to sign away my fighting rights for all time a little flicker of strength came.
If I had been wholly well and out of prison perhaps the cheap bombast in all this would have been apparent at once. But I was neither well nor free. And Polly's heart was breaking; I didn't need Whitredge's word for this I knew it by all the torments of inward conviction.
"You can't deny you don't deny that you knew these mining sharps, Hempstead and Lesherton, pretty intimately, that you saw them frequently and talked with them in the way of business, and that you knew all about the capitalization scheme they were trying to put over," was Whitredge's summing up of the situation. "You'll have to loosen up, Weyburn, if you expect to get any help.
"You are certainly an ornament to an honorable profession." Then, stepping into the cell and standing aside: "You may go. We'll know where to find you when you're needed." Whitredge's vanishing was like a trick of legerdemain; one moment he stood before us, and at the next he was gone. At his going, Cummings and the turnkey also disappeared and I was left alone with Benedict.
There was a possibility that Geddis might be staying late in the bank; and if he were not, there was the other possibility that he might have changed the combination on the vault lock since my arrest. The more I thought about it, the more fiercely the escape notion gripped me. Whitredge's talk had made it perfectly plain that the best I could hope for in a court trial would be a light sentence.
I know now, of course, that I was boyishly hot-hearted and unfair; that I was too young and inexperienced to make allowances for that deathless trait in human nature in all animate nature which prompts the well to recoil instinctively from the pest-stricken. Later on but I needn't anticipate. It was along in the latter part of the afternoon, and before Whitredge's return, that Agatha came.
Having lived in Glendale practically all my life, I had a good right to expect that at least a few of my friends would rally to my support in the time of trouble. They came, possibly a half-dozen of them in all, between Whitredge's visit and old John Runnels's bringing of my dinner at one o'clock.
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 tremolo stop pulled all the way out, was a young man whose entire future would be blasted and all that sort of thing.
Word Of The Day