He called Reverend Hollis first. Hollis testified to the public whipping: the date, the location, what he witnessed, and his failure to intervene, which he stated plainly without being prompted. Then he testified to the pattern he had observed over five years of Mercer systematically restricting the financial and social access of anyone who questioned his business practices. Aldridge objected to the pattern evidence as irrelevant to the specific debt claim. Alderton overruled him.
"The pattern," Alderton said, "is the point."
Clara Briggs testified about the false charges on her husband's account. Ed Loomis testified about being told explicitly that doing business with the Lawson ranch would affect his mill's credit with Mercer's store. Pete McAllister testified in his loud, definitive voice about watching Roy Cutter cut Margaret's fence in the dark, and he did it with the total absence of self-consciousness that made the most credible kind of witness.
Then Hart called Agnes Carver.
She walked to the witness chair with her hands still and her back straight. And she did not look at Caleb Mercer as she passed his table, which Margaret thought was a better choice than looking at him, because looking at him would have suggested she was tracking him. And Agnes Carver was done tracking Caleb Mercer. She was done being afraid of him.
She testified in a clear, quiet voice that did not waver. She described the evening in February, the late return for the forgotten shawl, the open account books on the counter, Mercer bent over the page with a pen in a different ink, the sheet of practice handwriting—Henry Lawson's numbers written over and over in a stranger's attempt to capture them. She described backing out of the doorway. She described three days of silence, followed by the end of her employment and the instruction to relocate somewhere quieter.
The room was very still. Aldridge cross-examined her. He was methodical and not cruel; he was too experienced to be cruel with an elderly woman in front of a judge who was already paying close attention. But he pressed her on visibility, on lighting conditions, on whether she could be certain of what she'd seen from a doorway at night.
Agnes Carver said, in the same clear, quiet voice: "I worked those account books for six years, Mr. Aldridge. I know Henry Lawson's handwriting, and I know Caleb Mercer's handwriting, and I know the difference between them. And what I saw that evening was a man writing in a hand that wasn't his."
Aldridge sat down.
Then Hart called Margaret. She walked to the witness chair and she sat down, and she looked at Judge Alderton, who looked back at her with those accurate eyes, and she began.
Hart walked her through the ledgers methodically, entry by entry: the nine discrepancies, the $174 of payments Henry had made and Mercer had declined to record. He had her explain the accounting system in her own words, in the plain, direct language of a woman who had maintained the books for four years and understood them entirely. He had her describe the pattern, the timing of the adjustments, their concentration in the period after Henry fell ill, the specific entries where the ink color changed if you looked closely under lamplight.