Page:Frank Packard - Greater Love Hath No Man.djvu/78

 man is innocent! The court will tell you, the district attorney himself will tell you that there is not a shred of evidence on which to convict him aside from his own confession. Now a man who voluntarily and of his own free will gives himself up to the authorities and confesses to a crime has no reason to tell anything but a bona fide story; it would be absurd to imagine that he would do anything else—if, gentlemen, he really committed that crime. There is no evidence, I say against the prisoner except his own story. If you convict him, you must convict him on that—and yet I will prove to you beyond the shadow of a doubt that according to that story it is impossible for him to have committed this crime. What does it mean, gentlemen of the jury? You know the prisoner. Most of you have known him all your lives. You know him for his clean, upright life. You know him for a man who, through love and gratitude to his benefactors, has put self aside and stayed with them because they needed him—a sacrifice the greater because, ambitious, a man whose intellect would carry him to a high place in any sphere, he has curbed ambition, crushed it back while those two he loved and would not leave still lived. But during these years Varge has studied and neglected no single opportunity for self-improvement. He has studied medicine with Doctor Merton, and I have heard Doctor Merton say myself that if he could have afforded it he would have sent Varge to college—but Doctor Merton could not afford it, gentlemen—and no one knew that better than Varge himself. Look at him, gentlemen of the jury! He stands there for the man he is, a man as utterly incapable of this thing as you or