Mid Watch by Ellsberg Edward

Author:Ellsberg, Edward [Ellsberg, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2017-01-01T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

THE recess ended, the Court reconvened.

Together the Judge Advocate and Judge Rice, an extremely incongruous-looking pair, stood before the long table behind which the President was seated reading the agreed-upon stipulation presented by them for his inspection. From the witness chair, Commander George Bruce, with beads of sweat standing out all over his forehead, watched Admiral Pearson through anxious eyes. If everything in that stipulation was satisfactory, he could go back to work on his boilers, relieved of a most unpleasant task, of which the cross-examination by that menacing old scarecrow of a defence lawyer was not the least of his worries.

Admiral Pearson came near to the end of the stipulation. His eyebrows rose questioningly. Bruce’s spirits sank correspondingly. That stipulation was not sailing through unchallenged. Perhaps, after all, he might have to continue his testimony.

“See, here, gentlemen,” announced the President, “this stipulation goes far beyond anything we were discussing with this witness. It goes into the matter of the deaths, on which he is not at all competent to pass.”

“Yes, Admiral; I guess that’s so,” agreed Judge Rice, “and I’ll just have to take the blame for it. Ye see,” and he leaned informally over on the table as man to man, “we only had this Commander here to testify on the boilers, and I was suggesting to you we cut that all short. But after him comes the question of who’s dead and whether he’s dead because he just got tired o’ living and quit, or whether maybe this explosion killed him — you can’t convict my client or anybody else of killing a man till you’ve proved first the corpus delicti, and second how it came he got that way.

“So my friend here in building up his case is all set next to put on the stand the Manhattan’s medical officer, Passed Assistant Surgeon Oxley, to prove all that for every one o’ the fifty-three men named as dead in this indictment. He can prove they’re deceased, all right; he’s got the fifty-three death certificates all in order for that. But to make out a good case, the Captain here has got to prove beyond a reasonable doubt how each and every man died and what killed him — burns from the fires, scalds from the steam, suffocation, concussion, shock, pneumonia, God knows what else, down even to what chopped one poor devil up in that engine and then that he didn’t topple into the engine crank pit maybe just because he fainted from the heat in the engine-room.

“Now by the time Surgeon Oxley gets through performing all those fifty-three autopsies on the witness-stand so I can’t challenge any one of ’em and punch holes in this indictment, it sort o’ comes to my mind he can move right on off the witness-stand to this table to start performing autopsies on the Court to see what killed all the Members — the heat maybe, or just cruel and inhuman punishment having to listen to all that mortuary evidence.

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