t all. So the attorney had made no
attempt to school him beforehand, and he was determined now to allow
him to give only direct answers to the questions put to him.

Two or three times the old man attempted to explain, at the end of an
answer, just why he had gone up into the high hills the night before
the twentieth of August--that he had heard that Rogers and a band of
men had gone into the woods to start fires. But he was ordered to
stop, and these parts of his answers were kept out of the record.
Finally he was rebuked savagely by the Judge and ordered to confine
himself to answering the lawyer's questions, on pain of being arrested
for contempt. It was a high-handed proceeding that showed the temper
and the intention of the Judge and a stir of protest ran around the
courtroom. But old Erskine Beasley was quelled. He gave only the
answers that the prosecutor forced from him.

"Did you hear a shot fired?" he was asked.

"Yes."

"Did you hear two shots fired?"

"No."

"Did you see Jeffrey Whiting's gun?"

"Yes."

"Did you examine it?"

"Yes."

"Had it been fired off?"

"Yes."

"Excused," snapped the prosecutor. And the old man, almost in tears,
came down from the stand. He knew that his simple yes and no answers
had made the most damaging sort of evidence.

Then the prosecutor went back in the story to establish a motive. He
called several witnesses who had been agents of the railroad and
associated in one way or another with the murdered man in his efforts
to get options on the farm lands in the hills. Even these witnesses,
though they were ready to give details and opinions which might have
been favorable to his side of the case, he held down strictly to
answering with a word his own carefully thought out questions.

With these answers the prosecutor built up a solid continuity of cause
and effect from the day when Rogers had first come into the hills to
offer Jeffrey Whiting a part in the work with himself right up to the
moment when the two had faced each other that morning on Bald
Mountain.

He showed that Jeffrey Whiting had begun to undermine and oppose
Rogers' work from the first. He showed why. Jeffrey Whiting came of a
family well known and trusted in the hills. The young man had been
quick to grasp the situation and to believe that he could keep the
people from dealing at all with Rogers. Rogers' work would then be a
failure. Jeffrey Whiting would then be pointed to as the only man who