THE ART OF CROSS-EXAMINATION
lawyer, but he attained also to the grander thoughts and the logical powers of the really great advocate. Butler's success depended upon zeal, combined with shrewdness and not overconscientious trickery.
In his autobiography, Butler gives several examples of what he was pleased to call his legerdemain, and to believe were illustrations of his skill as a cross-examiner. They are quoted from "Butler's Book," but are not reprinted as illustrations of the subtler forms of cross-examination, but rather as indicative of the tricks to which Butler owed much of his success before country juries.
"When I was quite a young man I was called upon to defend a man for homicide. He and his associate had been engaged in a quarrel which proceeded to blows and at last to stones. My client, with a sharp stone, struck the deceased in the head on that part usually called the temple. The man went and sat down on the curbstone, the blood streaming from his face, and shortly afterward fell over dead.
"The theory of the government was that he died from the wound in the temporal artery. My theory was that the man died of apoplexy, and that if he had bled more from the temporal artery, he might have been saved—a wide enough difference in the theories of the cause of death.
"Of course to be enabled to carry out my proposition I must know all about the temporal artery,—its location,
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