Calvin with a frankness which might have turned the incident to his advantage had not Elmen immediately clowned it, making reference to Mr. Clarke of Ha'va'd, slurring the r's in the exaggerated manner which always started a laugh and played on prejudices against the old eastern university.
The audience laughed, and the judge sternly commanded order, while the jury tittered and giggled; and before a set of men, relaxed and ever ready for another laugh, Calvin continued the cross-examination which the witness and Elmen kept as close to the comic as they dared. Comedy was on Elmen's program for his last effect. First he had offered sobs and mother love; next sex; and now, laughs for the concluding act of the entertainment.
Calvin possessed no great knack in dealing with laughs, which, to his mind, had no place in a court of law; also, he was handicapped in being obliged, in his effort to discredit James Morton Royle's testimony, to put queries which had lost their novelty by having been asked of his daughter.
The State dismissed the witness, and court adjourned; in the morning Calvin offered evidence in rebuttal for about an hour, and Elmen required a like period for his surrebuttal. In the afternoon Ellison opened argument by counsel with his carefully prepared, emotional appeal, in the name of the murdered wife and motherless child, for the death penalty for Frederic Ketlar. Before Ellison had been speaking twenty minutes he had several jurymen in tears.
When he sat down, Herman Elmen arose to an eloquent and even more impassioned plea in the name of the pathetic mother of the unjustly accused boy, and in the name of the boy himself, who had been born into the world with every handicap—except a loving mother—
