Here we have her sitting in her parlor at about twenty-five minutes after ten o'clock waiting anxiously to hear some news. There was as yet no excitement on the street to awaken curiosity. These two soldiers believed they were the first persons to pass that house after the assassination; the street was entirely quiet; as they passed along they met two policemen shortly after passing the house 541, where Mrs. Surratt lived, who had not yet heard the news; yet here was a woman expecting to hear some news; who hailed the first passers-by after the fatal, and evidently appointed, hour to inquire what was wrong down town. It was also proven by a servant of good character, Susan Ann Jackson, that she had on that night served supper in the dining-room, after the family and boarders had left, to a man whom Mrs. Surratt called her son, and whom this witness identified as the prisoner at the bar.[24] We can now see why she was anxiously awaiting the news. On the trial of Surratt a good deal of the testimony introduced to show the existence of a conspiracy to assassinate the President, and that the prisoner was a member of this conspiracy, implicated his mother in it equally with himself. Most of the witnesses that had been brought before the Commission to prove the existence of such a conspiracy, and that Mary E. Surratt was an active member of it, were again produced on this trial. As the witnesses Lloyd and Wiechmann were the most important of these, their testimony being completely conclusive of the guilt both of the the prisoner and his mother, great efforts were made to discredit, especially, the testimony of Wiechmann; but this could not be done by any of the methods known to the law. He stood the test of every effort and came out unscathed from a bitter and most hostile cross-examination that occupied a day and a half. Every effort was made to make him contradict himself as to his present testimony in chief, as also to his testimony given two years before at the military trial, but without avail. No false witness could possibly have come out of such a fiery ordeal unscathed. Truth is always consistent with itself, and one truth is always consistent with every other correlated truth, and for this reason a witness that keeps the truth can never be entrapped.