No Comebacks

'It may have been me,' he conceded, then a new thought came to him. He turned to the jury. 'But isn't that the whole skill of it? Isn't that just what the cardsharp does? He inveigles his victim into a game.'

He was obviously in love with the word 'inveigle' which the judge thought was new to his vocabulary. The jurymen nodded. Quite obviously they too would hate to be inveigled.

'One last point,' said O'Connor sadly, 'when we settled up, how much did you pay me?'

'Sixty-two pounds,' said Keane angrily. 'Hard-earned money.'

'No,' said O'Connor from the dock, 'how much did you lose to me, personally.'

The grocer from Tralee thought hard. His face dropped. 'Not to you,' he said. 'Nothing. It was the farmer who won.'

'And did I win from him?' asked O'Connor, by now looking on the edge of tears.

'No,' said the witness. 'You lost about eight pounds.'

'No further questions,' said O'Connor.

Mr Keane was about to step down when the judge's voice recalled him. 'One moment, Mr Keane. You say "the farmer won"? Who exactly was this farmer?'

'The other man in the compartment, my lord. He was a farmer from Wexford. Not a good player, but he had the devil's own luck.'

'Did you manage to get his name?' asked Judge Comyn.

Mr Keane looked perplexed. 'I did not,' he said. 'It was the accused who had the cards. He was trying to cheat me all right.'

The prosecution case ended and O'Connor took the stand on his own behalf. He was sworn in. His story was as simple as it was plaintive. He bought and sold horses for a living; there was no crime in that. He enjoyed a friendly game of cards, but was no dab hand at it. A week before the train journey of 13 May he had been having a quiet stout in a Dublin public house when he felt a hard lump on the wooden pew near his thigh.

It was a pack of cards, apparently abandoned by a previous occupant of the booth, and certainly not new. He thought of handing them in to the barman, but realized such a time-worn pack would have no value anyway. He had kept them, and amused himself with patience on his long journeys seeking a foal or mare to buy for clients.

If the cards were marked, he was totally ignorant of it. He knew nothing of this shading and trimming the detective had talked about. He would not even know what to look for on the backs of his pack of cards, found on a pub seat.

As for cheating, didn't cheats win? he asked the jury. He had lost £810s. on that journey, to a complete stranger. He was a fool to himself, for the farmer had had all the run of the good hands. If Mr Keane had wagered and lost more them he, that was perhaps because Mr Keane was a more rash man than he. But as to cheating, he would have no part of it, and certainly he would not have lost so much of his own hard-earned money.

In cross-examination prosecuting counsel sought to break his story. But the wispy little man stuck to it with apologetic and self-deprecating tenacity. Finally counsel had to sit down.

O'Connor returned to the dock and awaited the summing up. Judge Comyn gazed at him across the court. You're a poor specimen, O 'Connor, he thought. Either your story is true, in which case you are a truly unlucky card-player. Or it is not, in which case you must be the world's most incompetent card-sharp. Either way, you have twice lost, using your own cards, to strangers in railway trains.

On the matter of the summing-up, however, he could allow no such choice. He pointed out to the jury that the accused had claimed he had found the cards in a Dublin pub and was completely unaware that they were a marked deck. The jury might privately wish to believe that story or not; the fact was the prosecution had not disproved it, and in Irish law the burden of proof was upon them.

Secondly, the accused had claimed that it was not he but Mr Keane who had proposed both the poker and the wagering, and Mr Keane had conceded that this might be true.

But much more importantly, the prosecution case was that the accused had won money by false pretences from the witness Lurgan Keane. Whatever the pretences, true or false, witness Keane had conceded on oath that the accused had won no money from him. Both he, the witness, and the accused had lost money, albeit widely differing sums. On that issue the case must fail. It was his duty to di

rect the jury to acquit the defendant. Knowing his court, he also pointed out that it lacked fifteen minutes to the hour of luncheon.

It takes a case of weighty jurisprudence to keep a Kerry jury from its lunch, and the twelve good men were back in ten minutes with a verdict of not guilty. O'Connor was discharged and left the dock.

Judge Comyn disrobed behind the court in the robing room, hung his wig on a peg and left the building to seek his own lunch. Without robes, ruffle or wig, he passed through the throng on the pavement before the court house quite unrecognized.

He was about to cross the road to the town's principal hotel where, he knew, a fine Shannon salmon awaited his attention, when he saw coming out of the hotel yard a handsome and gleaming limousine of noted marque. At the wheel was O'Connor.

'Do you see your man?' asked a wondering voice by his side. He glanced to his right and found the Tralee grocer standing beside him.

'I do,' he said.

The limousine swept out of the hotel yard. Sitting beside O'Connor was a passenger dressed all in black.

'Do you see who's sitting beside him?' asked Keane in wonderment.