The time came when the prosecution closed its case, and Peter was summoned to the office of Andrews, to be coached in his part as a witness. He would be wanted in two or three days, the lawyers told him.
Now Peter had never intended to appear as a witness; he had been fooling the defense all this time—“stringing them along,” as he phrased it, so as to keep in favor with them to the end. Meantime he had been figuring out how to justify his final refusal. Peter was eating his lunch when this plan occurred to him, and he was so much excited that he swallowed a piece of pie the wrong way, and had to jump up and run out of the lunch-room. It was his first stroke of genius; hitherto it was McGivney who had thought these things out, but now Peter was on the way to becoming his own boss! Why should he go on taking orders, when he had such brains of his own? He took the plan to McGivney, and McGivney called it a “peach,” and Peter was so proud he asked for a raise, and got it.
This plan had the double advantage that not merely would it save Peter’s prestige and reputation, among the Reds, it would ruin McCormick, who was one of the hardest workers for the defense, and one of the most dangerous Reds in American City, as well as being a personal enemy of Peter’s. McGivney pulled some of his secret wires, and the American City “Times,” in the course of its accounts of the case, mentioned a rumor that the defense proposed to put on the stand a man who claimed to have been tortured in the city jail, in an effort to make him give false testimony against Goober; the prosecution had investigated this man’s record and discovered that only recently he had seduced a young girl, and she had killed herself because of his refusal to marry her. Peter took this copy of the American City “Times” to the office of David Andrews, and insisted upon seeing the lawyer before he went to court; he laid the item on the desk, and declared that there was his finish as a witness in the Goober case. “It’s a cowardly, dirty lie!” he declared. “And the man responsible for circulating it is Pat McCormick.”
Such are the burdens that fall upon the shoulders of lawyers in hard-fought criminal trials! Poor Andrews did his best to patch things up; he pleaded with Peter—if the story was false, Peter ought to be glad of a chance to answer his slanderers. The defense would put witnesses on the stand to deny it. They would produce Sadie Todd to deny it.
“But Sadie told me she suspected me!”
“Yes,” said Andrews, “but she told me recently she wasn’t sure.”
“Much good that’ll do me!” retorted Peter. “They’ll ask me if anybody ever accused me, and who, and I’ll have to say McCormick, and if they put him on the stand, will he deny that he accused me?”
Peter flew into a rage against McCormick; a fine sort of radical he was, pretending to be devoted to the cause, and having no better sense than to repeat a cruel slander against a comrade! Here Peter had been working on this case for nearly six months, working for barely enough to keep body and soul together, and now they expected him to go on the and have a story like that brought out in the papers, and have the prosecution hiring witnesses to prove him a villain. “No, sir!” said Peter. “I’m thru with this case right now. You put McCormick on the witness stand and let him save Goober’s life. You can’t use me, I’m out!” And shutting his ears to office of the Goober Defense Committee, where he repeated the same scene.
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