"Did Joe Newbolt ever make love to you?" he asked.
Joe's face flushed with resentful fire; but Ollie's white calm, forced and strained that it was, remained unchanged.
"No, I tell you, he didn't!" Ollie answered, with a little show of spirit.
Hammer rose with loud and voluble objections, which had, for the first time during the proceedings, Joe's hearty indorsement. But the judge waved him down, and the prosecutor pressed his new line of inquisition.
"You and Joe Newbolt were thrown together a good deal, weren't you, Mrs. Chase--you were left there alone in the house while your husband was away in the field, and other places, frequently?"
"No, not very much," said Ollie, shaking her head.
"But you had various opportunities for talking together alone, hadn't you?"
"I never had a chance for anything but work," said Ollie wearily.
Unawed by the sheriff's warning, the assembly laughed again. The sound ran over the room like a scudding cloud across a meadow, and when the sheriff stood again to set his censorious eye upon someone responsible, the last ripple was on the farther rows. Nobody can catch a laugh in a crowd; it is as evasive as a pickpocket. Nobody can turn with watchful eye upon it and tell in what face the ribald gleam first breaks. It is as impossible as the identification of the first stalk shaken when a breeze assails a field of grain.
The sheriff, not being deeper than another man, saw the fatuity of his labor. He turned to the court with a clownish gesture of the hands, expressive of his utter inability to stop this thing.
"Proceed with the case," said the judge, understanding the situation better than the sheriff knew.
The prosecuting attorney labored away with Ollie, full of the feeling that something masked lay behind her pale reticence, some guilty conspiracy between her and the bound boy, which would show the lacking motive for the crime. He asked her again about Morgan, how long she had known him, where he came from, and where he went--a question to which Ollie would have been glad enough to have had the answer herself.
He hung on to the subject of Morgan so persistently that Joe began to feel his throat drying out with a closing sensation which he could not swallow. He trembled for Ollie, fearing that she would be forced into telling it all. That was not a woman's story, thought he, with a heart full of resentment for the prosecutor. Let him wait till Morgan came, and then----