Page:Train - Tutt and Mr Tutt (Scribner, 1922).djvu/105

 had been called. The trial had sunk into a dull, unbroken monotony, as Mr. Tutt said, of the "vain repetitions of the heathen." Yet the police and the district attorney had done all that could reasonably have been expected of them. They were simply confronted by the very obvious fact—a condition and not a theory—that the legal processes of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence are of slight avail in dealing with people of another race.

Now it is possible that even had Mr. Tutt put in no defense whatever the jury might have refused to convict, for there was a curious air of unreality surrounding the whole affair. It all seemed somehow as if—assuming that it had ever taken place at all—it had occurred in some other world and in some other age. Perhaps under what might have been practically a direction of the court a verdict of conviction might have been returned—but it is doubtful. The more witnesses testified to exactly the same thing in precisely the same words the less likely it appeared to be.

But Mr. Tutt was taking no chances and, upon the forty-third day of the trial, at a nod from the bench, he opened his case. Never had he been more serious; never more persuasive. Abandoning every suggestion of frivolity, he weighed the testimony of each white witness and pointed out its obvious lack of probative value. Not one, he said,