Also Crozier's evidence was expected to be sensational, and to prove the swivel on which the fate of the accused man would hang.

Among those on the inside it was also known that the clever but dissipated Augustus Burlingame, the counsel for the prisoner, had a grudge against Crozier,--no one quite knew why except Kitty Tynan and her mother, and that cross-examination would be pressed mercilessly when Crozier entered the witness-box.

As Burlingame came into the court-room he said to the Young Doctor--he was always spoken of as the Young Doctor in Askatoon, though he had been there a good many years and he was no longer as young as he looked--who was also called as a witness, "We'll know more about Mr.J.G.Kerry when this trial is over than will suit his book." It did not occur to Augustus Burlingame that in Crozier, who knew why he had fled the house of the showy but virtuous Mrs.Tynan, he might find a witness of a mental and moral calibre with baffling qualities and some gift of riposte.
Crozier entered the witness-box at a stage when excitement was at fever height; for the M'Mahon Gang had given evidence which every one believed to be perjured; and the widow of the slain man was weeping bitterly in her seat because of noxious falsehoods sworn against her honest husband.
There was certainly something credible and prepossessing in the look of Crozier.

He might be this or that, but he carried no evil or vice of character in his face.

He was in his grave mood this summer afternoon.
There he stood with his long face and the very heavy eyebrows, clean-shaven, hard-bitten, as though by wind and weather, composed and forceful, the mole on his chin a kind of challenge to the vertical dimple in his cheek, his high forehead more benevolent than intellectual, his brown hair faintly sprinkled with grey and a bit unmanageable, his fathomless eyes shining.