Poor men! It was for this that they succumbed to the attacks of the oil trustees upon their business, sold them for $200,000 three-quarters of a concern which produced $300,000 in dividends in one year for the lucky conquerors, became vassals instead of masters in their own refinery. It was for $10,000 a year, divided into $6500 for one and $3500 for the other, that they undertook to fetch and carry for their suzerains, even to the gates of the penitentiary; and when discovery and conviction came, to bear in silence upon their own shoulders the guilt and shame from which others got only "more." The trial of the two remaining defendants proceeded. Neither of them took the stand. In a deposition the elder said it was Albert who had spoken about misplacing the pipes; but when asked what he said in reply to a suggestion, which no one better than he knew the significance of, he replied: "I made no reply to it, but I thought it would be a very scandalous proceeding."[496] Albert had told how, in conversation in California, his employer had described his plans with regard to Matthews. "We would have just got them fellows in a boat, right in the middle of the stream, and we would have tipped them two over, and drowned them, and you would have been all right."[497] "If I ever made such a remark," this defendant deposed, "it was in a playful humor. I am in the habit of making playful remarks." Witness after witness had to confess, under cross-examination, that his testimony had been written and rewritten by himself or the lawyer for the defence, and carefully conned before coming on the stand. The District Attorney asked one of these tutored witnesses why he had read over the written preparation of his testimony in the rotunda of the court-house just before going on the stand. "I read it over," he replied, lucidly, "for the simple reason of reading it over." "Just to practise in reading?" "Well, perhaps we might call it practice in reading."[498] "This preparation of the testimony," said the District Attorney to the jury, "which I stigmatize as infamous, this going to a witness and writing him down, and having him fix it, and write it over again, and keeping it in his mind, and reading it over, and so going on the stand, is not the way to try a lawsuit, in my mind. I write nothing down. I coach no witnesses. I want a witness to tell me his story. I put him on the stand and he tells me his story; but no writing down, no reading over. It is not right, and it is very liable to be very wrong."