Lloyd was there, compelled, despite his superstitious reluctance to speak against a woman now she was dead, to rehearse the tale which his terrors had evolved out of his drunken imagination. This time, however, his sottish memory or failure of memory, his fright at the time of his arrest, his repeated denials of the visit of Booth and Herold, his temptations and bribes to accuse his landlady, were, under the keen cross-examination of the counsel for the prisoner, fully exposed.
Weichman "came also:" this time with his story carefully elaborated, touched and retouched here and there, and written down beforehand. He had been engaged for three or four months in aiding the prosecution, had prepared a carefully detailed statement for the use of the Assistant District Attorney, and now openly acknowledged that "his character was at stake" in this trial, and that he "intended to do all he could to help the prosecution." He had conned over and over again the report of his evidence on the Conspiracy Trial, had corrected it to meet objections subsequently made and to eliminate discrepancies and contradictions, and had thus brought its several disjointed parts into some logical sequence; he then had added to it the incidents and conversations disclosed for the first time in the affidavit sent to Colonel Burnett, which was appended to the published report of the trial, to which allusion has been made; and, now, in the final delivery of his deadly charge, coolly averring that his memory was much more distinct now than at the time of the former trial two years ago, he, with a superadded concentrated venom, flavored his narrative with a few damning incidents never heard of before--one, the most poisonous of all, that on the evening of the fatal 14th, while Booth was about his murderous work, Mrs. Surratt was pacing her parlor floor begging her pious boarder "to pray for her intentions." This time, however, the witness did not escape unscathed. When he emerged from the skillful hands of Mr. Bradley, his malicious and sordid _animus_ laid bare,--his self-contradictions, his studied revisions, his purposeful additions to his testimony, exposed--his intimacy with the conspirators, his terrified repentance, his abject self-surrender and his cowardly eagerness to shift his peril upon the head of his protectress,--and then his simulated remorse and his later recantation--all made clear--he was an object of loathing to gentlemen; a stumbling block to the philanthropist; to the indifferent, an enigma; and to the common man, a perpetual provocation to a breach of the peace.