He testified, and his alibi corps testified as one man, that he had been at Hazard, forty miles away, when Mortimer fell. The defense closed in sanguine trustfulness. Then, in rebuttal, the prosecution sprung a surprise--a sensation--a bomb. The surprise was Henry Falkins, and when he took the stand, the hand-made alibi collapsed. Even then Newt Spooner had not been able to realize that the convincing story of one witness could destroy his carefully fabricated tissue of lies. But sundry unexpected things were happening in this dingy court-room. A new spirit reigned there. Vaguely the sullen lad, crouching back in the prisoner's chair, was aware of a hardening and petrifying resolve on the rugged faces in the jury-box. Heretofore the average venireman had thought there was no health in incurring the wrath of a family of terrorists like the Spooners. Heretofore Spooners had always "come cl'ar." Heretofore prosecutors had made only perfunctory attempts to convict them. Not so with the Honorable Cale Floyd. From opening statement to closing argument he leaped savagely at the throat of the defense. His cross-examination was a merciless hail of verbal rifle-fire. As he defied all the vicious animosities of the Spooner tribe, the court-room held its breath, and young Newt waited vainly for his kinsmen to rise _en masse_ and silence his anathemas with a volley. Each night in his cell, young Newt Spooner wondered why he did not hear a sound outside the brick "jail-house," and see the doors go down before the wrath of his rescuers. It was incredible that the clan should stand by and permit him to be "penitentiaried." Yet it finally dawned upon him that precisely this thing was happening. The realization had dazed and embittered him. He knew that even among his own he was not accounted as of great importance, but he bore the name of Spooner, and in the old days that would have been enough. He was the first sacrifice to the changing order. He felt no resentment against the prosecutor in spite of his philippics. The prosecutor was paid to do it. He even rather admired the courage which gave strength to the attack, when every precedent told the lawyer that he was inviting death for his pains. But for the man who had volunteered to testify; who belonged to the family which his family had hated and fought; who had come back to the mountains with "fotched-on" ideas and attacked him with the despised weapon of the law; for that man he felt such hatred as can only come of festering and venomous brooding, which lasts while life lasts.