So all the morning there had been fine sport in the court-room, and the good-humor had risen higher with every fresh incident in the entertainment until Albert's wife took her place in the witness-box. She, too, raised a laugh, but it was not she who laughed. Serious enough she was when taking her place on the witness-stand. She had to face these gentlemen, before whose hundreds of millions her husband's little venture had withered, but, as she herself afterwards said: "I wasn't afraid of them, but I was nervous. But as soon as I got talking I didn't care anything for them, although they all sat there in front, in a row, looking straight at me."
The wife's story to the jury showed how such an adventure appeared when looked at and experienced from the woman's stand-point--the home-maker's and the home-keeper's--which the smiling row before her were as little able to grasp as the participants in a pigeon-shooting match to look upon that vision of flames, demons, and death-dealing thunder from the point of view of the hapless birds. A bright-faced, brown-eyed, pleasant-looking woman, as she took the stand she looked what she was--an artisan's honest wife. "My husband," she said, "had been employed in the Vacuum oil works at Rochester thirteen or fourteen years, and we had accumulated some property--mortgages and money and real estate. We moved to Buffalo, April 5, 1881, where he was superintending the building of the Buffalo works."[476] After Albert had yielded to the threats and the temptation, and had fixed the stills and the fires for an explosion, he fled without a word to his wife or his associates, hid, under an assumed name, in Boston, and then travelled over the continent for a year--from Buffalo to Boston, to Rochester, to San Francisco.
"When you left Buffalo did you leave any word with Matthews where you were going?"
While the wife was in Buffalo wondering what had become of her husband, he was in New York with his venerable ex-employer, getting lessons like the following in the secrets of building up a great commercial enterprise:
"The best thing you can do, Albert," said the latter, "is to go and write a telegram, and tell your wife to go back to Rochester."