"Yes, he said, 'I shot him,'" he testified with evident reluctance under Banning's sharp questioning and a little tense rustle ran through the audience.
Then Banning called two witnesses whom Dudley and Carmelita had not noted before and whom Dudley, for one, recognized after some difficulty, though their names meant nothing to him. They were the two gossiping women who had discussed the scandal about Carmelita and Rao-Singh in his presence the night of the fête while Carmelita was auctioning her kiss, the two women who had aroused in him the mad desire to throttle their slanderous tongues. Banning put these two women, obviously dressed elaborately for the occasion and most conscious of their importance, upon the stand one after the other, and both testified that they had heard Dudley cry as he leaped up and interrupted Carmelita and Rao-Singh about to dance, "If you don't let my wife alone—I'll kill you!"
At this point the trial was adjourned until ten o'clock the next morning.
Kendall and Dudley would have agreed with the slowly departing audience that the prosecution had scored at every turn and that David Banning was quite justified in the grin which he flung toward them as he started scooping up his papers into his briefcase. Dudley
