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298 ¥. AMERICAN STATE TRIALS.

Conley proof. None of these niggers ever came up and aaid
Conley was there and that they were with him. Starnes—
and Starnes could find a needle in a haystack, but the Lord
only knows what he’d do in an acre—he could not find any of
these niggers. ‘

‘Then there was that old negro drayman, old McCrary, the
old peg-leg negro drayman, and thank God he was an old-
timer, ‘‘fo’’ de war nigger. You know Conley, wishing to add
a few finishing trimmings to his lines, said that old McCrary
sent him down in the basement that Saturday morning and
when the old darkey was put on the stand he said simply,
“*No, bossa, I never sont him down thar.” Everywhere you
go you find that Conley lied. He says he watched there one
Saturday last year between 2 and 8 o'clock, Well, Schiff
says he didn’t and so does Darley and Holloway, the latter
guaranteed by the state, and the little office boys, nice look-
ing little chaps from nice families, they all say he didn’t.
Cut out Conley and you strip the case to nothing.

Did you hear the way Conley told his story? Have you
ever heard an actor, who knew his Shakespearean plays, his
“Merchant of Venice’’ or his ‘Hamlet’? He ean wake up
at any time of the night and say those lines, but he can’t say
any lines of a play he has never learned. So it was with Con-
ley. He could tell the story of the disposition of the girl’s
‘body, and he knew it so well he could reel it off backward or
forward, any old way, but when you got to asking him about
other things, he always had one phrase, ‘‘Boss, ah can’t
*member dat.’*

They say Conley could not have made up that story. Well,
I don’t know about that. There is something queer in the
whole thing, you know. I conldn’t climb that post over there,
gentlemen. I mean I couldn't go very far up it, but if I had
Professor Starnes, and Professor Black, and Professor Camp-
bell, and Professor Rosser, and then Dean Lanford to help
me, I'd go quite a way up. Well, they teok a notion Mrs.
‘White had seen the negro, and they carried Mra, White there

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