Page:Frank Packard - Greater Love Hath No Man.djvu/81

 holding it by one hand, dropped to his knees and placed one end of his stick at the indicated position. "The floor represents the side wall projecting at right angles, of course. What happens? Nothing. The bar is too long. There is absolutely no leverage, not enough even to take up the little slack in the crack of the door itself. The bar is too long—it must first be bent before it can be of any service. But wait! There must be no possibility of error here. You may say that while the door could only be opened from this side and that the bar had to be bent to do it, the bar might first have been inserted and levered the other way, or even upward or downward, where there is more space, and so bent. But that, waiving aside all consideration of the strength and thickness of the bar, which to begin with would make it improbable, is, with a moment's consideration, proved to be a fallacy. There was room only to insert the thin, flattened, spear-shaped ends of the bar, anywhere around the casing, between the door and the door casing, and these would have bent or broken long before the thicker part of the bar, the middle of the bar, yielded to the strain—and yet these ends are as straight to-day as the day they were forged." Randall rose to his feet, put aside the drawing, took up the fender bar again and walked directly to the jury box.

"Gentlemen, the man who bent that bar is the man who murdered Doctor Merton—but it was not the prisoner at the bar. I have told you before that if you convict him, you must convict him on his own story. Take that story from his lips. He stood there before the cupboard holding the straight bar, he had nothing to bend it