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 the
lawyer’s pleading, he stormed out of the office, and over to the
office of the Goober Defense Committee, where he repeated the same
scene.