g further to offer," said Goodlaw.

Sharpman resumed his seat with an air of satisfaction, and sat for
full five minutes, with his face in his hand, in deep thought.

"I think," he said, finally, looking up, "that we shall present
nothing in rebuttal. The case, as it now stands, doesn't seem to call
for it." He had been considering whether it would be safe and wise for
him to go on the witness-stand and deny any portion of Ralph's story.
He had reached the conclusion that it would not. The risk was too
great.

"Very well," said the judge, taking up his pen, "then the evidence is
closed. Mr. Goodlaw, are you ready to go to the jury?"

Goodlaw, who had been, during this time, holding a whispered
conversation with Ralph, arose, bowed to the court, and turned to
face the jurors. He began his speech by saying that, until the recent
testimony given by the boy Ralph had been produced in court, he had
not expected to address the jury at all; but that that testimony had
so changed the whole tenor of the case as to make a brief argument for
the defence an apparent necessity.

Fortified by the knowledge of the story that Rhyming Joe had told, as
Ralph had just whispered it to him, Goodlaw was able to dissipate,
greatly, the force of the plaintiff's evidence, and to show how
Craft's whole story might easily be a cleverly concocted falsehood
built upon a foundation of truth. He opened up to the wondering minds
of the jurors the probable scheme which had been originated by these
two plotters, Craft and Sharpman, to raise up an heir to the estates
of Robert Burnham, an heir of whom Craft could be guardian, and a
guardian of whom Sharpman could be attorney. He explained how the
property and the funds that would thus come into their hands could be
so managed as to leave a fortune in the pocket of each of them before
they should have done with the estate.

"The scheme was a clever one," he said, "and worked well, and no
obstacle stood in the way of these conspirators until a person known
as Rhyming Joe came on the scene. This person knew the history of
Ralph's parentage and saw through Craft's duplicity; and, in an
unguarded moment, the attorney for the plaintiff closed this man's
mouth by means which we can only guess at, and sent him forth to hide
among the moral and the social wrecks that constitute the flotsam and
the jetsam of society. But his words, declaring Simon Craft's bold
scheme a fabric built upon a lie, had already s