n who was setting the fire. He looked
vacantly at the Judge while the latter ordered that part of his words
stricken out which told what the man was doing. He showed no
resentment, no feeling of any kind. He related how the man had run
away from him, trailing the torch through the brush, and again he did
not seem to notice the Judge's anger in cautioning him not to mention
the fire again.

At his counsel's direction, he went through a lifeless pantomime of
falling upon one knee and pointing his rifle at the fleeing man. Now
the man turned and faced him. Then he heard the shot which killed
Rogers come from the woods. He dropped his own rifle and went forward
to look at the dying man. He picked up the torch and threw it away.

Then he turned to fight the fire. (This time the Judge did not rule
out the word.) Then his rifle had exploded in his hands, the bullet
going just past his ear. The charge had scorched his neck. It was a
simple story. The thing _might_ have happened. It was entirely
credible. There were no contradictions in it. But the manner of
Jeffrey Whiting, telling it, gave no feeling of reality. It was not
the manner of a man telling one of the most stirring things of his
life. He was not telling what he saw and remembered and felt and was
now living through. Rather, he seemed to be going over a wearying,
many-times-told tale that he had rehearsed to tedium. A sleeping man
might have told it so. The jury was left entirely unconvinced, though
puzzled by the manner of the recital.

Even Lemuel Squires' harping cross questions did not rouse Jeffrey to
any attention to the story that he had told. At each question he went
back to the point indicated and repeated his recital dully and evenly
without any thought of what the District Attorney was trying to make
him say. He was not thinking of the District Attorney nor of the
story. He was still gazing mentally in stupid wonder at the horrible
fact that Ruth Lansing had lied his life away at the word of her
church.

When he had gotten back to the little railed enclosure where he was
again the prisoner, he sat down heavily to wait for the end of this
wholly irrelevant business of the trial. Another witness was called.
He did not know that there was another. He had expected that Squires
would begin his speech at once.

He noticed that this witness was a girl from French Village whom he
had seen several times. Now he remembered that she was Rafe Gadbeau's
girl. Wha