The poised figure of the lawyer, drawn statuesquely upright, winced as painfully as though a trusted hand had smitten him, and in his abrupt change of expression was betrayal of dismay and chagrin. "You say--you can't--identify him!" he echoed incredulously. Stubbornly the man who was testifying shook his head. "May I explain in my own way?" he inquired, and as the lawyer barked raspingly back at him, the Court intervened: "This is your own witness--You must understand the impropriety of attempting to force him." "While I was looking at the defendant there, just now," went on the man in the chair, "I was seeing only his side face, and I was positive that he was the person I was describing. Feature for feature and line for line ... the likeness seemed exact. I was willing to swear to it.... But when he turned and faced me ... I saw something else ... and now I don't think he _is_ the man." The words came in a puzzled and dumfounded confession, and the witness paused, then went resolutely on again: "This man has a fine pair of clear and well-matched eyes, when one sees them both at once.... That one at the door had something ... I can't say just what it was ... that marred one eye. I shouldn't call it a cast exactly ... but they didn't match." Abruptly the State dismissed that witness, and about the defence tables went quiet but triumphant smiles--which the jury did not miss, as the pencils of the press writers raced. But over Boone Wellver's face passed a shadow, and Asa, catching his eye across the heads of the crowd, read the motion of the boy's moving lips, as, without sound, they shaped the words, "Keep cool now, Asa! Keep cool." CHAPTER XIII The prosecution had other trumps yet to play. It called a name, which brought into the courtroom, with shambling and uncertain step, a man whose face was pasty with prison pallour. His thin body was garbed in the zebra-stripes of the penitentiary's livery, and the hand that he raised to take oath trembled. His voice, too, carried a quaver of weakness in its first syllable. Here at length was the promised sensation. The stenographer who had accepted his life-term had become star witness for the State. Now, enlisted from the ranks of the accused, he had undertaken to tell what purported to be the inside story of the plot. To hear his words, one had to bend attentively, yet, when he had talked for an hour, the scratching of pencils at the press table sounded, through his pauses, almost clamorous, and there was no other sound. Boone sat, tight of muscle, with his eyes steadfastly fixed on Asa. He thought that just now he was needed, but at the pit of his stomach gnawed a sickness of dread, and it seemed to him that already he could see the gallows rising from its ugly platform. The bearded lawyer who had once battered down this man's own defence now stood before him, shepherding his words on toward their climax. Faint response followed sharp interrogation with a deadly effectiveness.