Eli | Page 4

'll find they 've bit off more 'n they can chew when they try to figure out John Wood done that. I only hope I 'll have the luck to be on that case--all hands on the jury whisper together a minute, and then clear him, right on the spot, and then shake hands with him all 'round!"
"But something is worrying you," she said. "What is it? You have looked it since noon."
"Oh, nothin'," he replied--"only George Cahoon came up to-noon to say that he was goin' West next week, and that he would have to have that money he let me have awhile ago. And where to get it--I don't know."

III.
The court-room was packed. John Wood's trial was drawing to its close. Eli was on the jury. Some one had advised the prosecuting attorney, in a whisper, to challenge him, but he had shaken his head and said,--
"Oh, I could n't afford to challenge him for that; it would only leak out, and set the jury against me. I 'll risk his standing out against this evidence."
The trial had been short. It had been shown how the little building of the bank had been entered. Skilled locksmiths from the city had testified that the safe was opened with a key, and that the lock was broken afterward, from the inside, plainly to raise the theory of a forcible entry by strangers.
It had been proved that the only key in existence, not counting that kept by the president, was in the possession of Wood, who was filling, for a few days, the place of the cashier--the president's brother--in his absence. It had been shown that Wood was met, at one o'clock of the night in question, crossing the fields toward his home, from the direction of the bank, with a large wicker basket slung over his shoulders, returning, as he had said, from eel-spearing in Harlow's Creek; and there was other circumstantial evidence.
Mr. Clark, the president of the bank, had won the sympathy of every one by the modest way in which, with his eye-glasses in his hand, he had testified to the particulars of the loss which had left him penniless, and had ruined others whose little all was in his hands. And then in reply to the formal question, he had testified, amid roars of laughter from the court-room, that it was not he who robbed the safe. At this, even the judge and Wood's lawyer had not restrained a smile.
This had left the guilt with Wood. His lawyer, an inexperienced young attorney,--who had done more or less business for the bank and would hardly have ventured to defend this case but that the president had kindly expressed his entire willingness that he should do so,--had, of course, not thought it worth while to cross-examine Mr. Clark, and had directed his whole argument against the theory that the safe had been opened with a key, and not by strangers. But he had felt all through that, as a man politely remarked to him when he finished, he was only butting his "head ag'in a stone wall."
And while he was arguing, a jolly-looking old lawyer had written, in the fly-leaf of a law-book on his knee, and had passed with a wink to a young man near him who had that very morning been admitted to the bar, these lines:--
"When callow Blackstones soar too high, Quit common-sense, and reckless fly, Soon, Icarus-like, they headlong fall, And down come client, case, and all."
The district-attorney had not thought it worth while to expend much strength upon his closing argument; but being a jovial stump-speaker, of a wide reputation within narrow limits, he had not been able to refrain from making merry over Wood's statement that the basket which he had been seen bearing home, on the eventful night, was a basket of eels.
"Fine eels those, gentlemen! We have seen gold-fish and silver-fish, but golden eels are first discovered by this defendant The apostle, in Holy Writ, caught a fish with a coin in its mouth; but this man leaves the apostle in the dim distance when he finds eels that are all money. No storied fisherman of Bagdad, catching enchanted princes disguised as fishes in the sea, ever hooked such a treasure as this defendant hooked when he hooked that basket of eels! [Rustling appreciation of the jest among the jury.] If a squirming, twisting, winding, wriggling eel, gentlemen, can be said at any given moment to have a back, we may distinguish this new-found species as the greenback eel. It is a common saying that no man can hold an eel and remain a Christian. I should like to have viewed the pious equanimity of this good man when he laid his hands on that whole bed of eels. In