Indeed, so badly did things go that on the day following Godfrey Lowell at last put Jim himself on the stand.
Jim had asked to testify and so he did, although how he thought it would help him nobody can say.
Chapter Twenty-six
I HAVE BEFORE ME now that statement of Jim’s.
Given much of it in question and answer, and broken by cross-examination and objections here and there, it takes many pages of the stenographic report.
As I have also, however, that document which Jim himself prepared later as the basis of an appeal, I shall use that instead.
I give it word for word.
“I had nothing whatever to do with the death of Sarah Gittings, or of Florence Gunther.
I am willing to swear that before God.
If I had kept back part of what little I know, it has been partly because I saw that things looked pretty hopeless for me, and partly because of my sister, who has been and is in deep trouble.
“I did not see Sarah Gittings on the night of the eighteenth of April.
I had expected to see her.
She had made two previous attempts to get in touch with me, both of which had failed.
But on that day, a Monday, I received a telephone message from her, in which she mentioned a letter she had sent me.
She seemed disturbed when I said that I had not received such a letter.
“I examined my desk, but there was no such letter.
Then she asked me to meet her that night on a matter of vital importance.
“I agreed to do this, and I started rather early, intending to walk to the address she had given, which was at 1737 Halkett Street.
I was to ask for a Miss Gunther.
I wrote down the address, but on the way I found that I had left it in my other clothing, so I stopped at a drugstore and telephoned to the Bell house, hoping to catch Sarah before she started.
“She had gone, but I remembered that the address was in the seventeen hundred block, and rather than go back I decided to make inquiries in that block.
“I walked across the park and out.
I walk rather slowly, and it was fully eight when I reached the block, and possibly eight-fifteen when I had located the house.
Miss Gunther was waiting on the steps, and she took me into the house.
I had never seen her before.
She seemed very nervous, and had very little to say.
When I asked her why I had been sent for, she said that Miss Gittings would tell me.
“We sat there until perhaps twenty minutes to ten.
I asked her repeatedly to give me an idea of what it was all about, but she would not.
It was not her affair, she said. But she asked me to keep my visit a secret.
She made me promise it, as a matter of fact.
She said she ‘didn’t want to be mixed up’ in anything.
And I did so promise.
“She seemed unduly uneasy about Sarah Gittings.
I could not understand it, and as time went on she was more and more uneasy.
She said she was sure something terrible had happened, and at last she began to cry.
I tried to reassure her, but she said I didn’t understand, and at nine-forty her condition was such that I advised her to go to bed, and myself started for home.
“In my statement to the District Attorney I said that I had reached the path to the Larimer lot at nine-thirty.
This was not true.
I saw that I was under suspicion, and so I changed the time.
I was on the path, or beside it, at or about ten o’clock.
“I took the same route on my return, but when about halfway up the hill toward the Larimer lot I sat down to rest.
I left the path and moved some feet to the right; that is, in the direction of the Bell house.
I lighted a cigar there and rested.
I may have been there five minutes, when I heard some one moving on the hillside to my left, and some distance away.
“At first I thought it was a dog.
I had heard dogs barking a few minutes before.
I had thrown away my cigar, and I believe that against the hillside where I sat I was practically invisible to any one at that distance.
But I was not certain that it was a dog, and as that part of the park has been the scene of several hold-ups, I pressed the spring which released the knife in the cane, and then waited.
“There were two people in the park below.