at the judge.

Never was a verdict more unexpected. If a poll had been taken of the
judgment of the population twenty-four hours before, a great majority
would have been found believing that there was no escape for the
prisoner, who was accused of murdering a wealthy timber merchant. The
minority would have based their belief that the prisoner had a chance of
escape, not on his possible innocence, not on insufficient evidence,
but on a curious faith in the prisoner's lawyer. This minority would not
have been composed of the friends of the lawyer alone, but of outside
spectators, who, because Charley Steele had never lost a criminal case,
attached to him a certain incapacity for bad luck; and of very young
men, who looked upon him as the perfect pattern of the person good to
see and hard to understand.

During the first two days of the trial the case had gone wholly against
the prisoner, who had given his name as Joseph Nadeau. Witnesses had
heard him quarrelling with the murdered man, and the next day the
body of the victim had been found by the roadside. The prisoner was a
stranger in the lumber-camp where the deed was done, and while there
had been morose and lived apart; no one knew him; and he refused to
tell even his lawyer whence he came, or what his origin, or to bring
witnesses from his home to speak for his character.

One by one the points had been made against him--with no perceptible
effect upon Charley Steele, who seemed the one cool, undisturbed person
in the courtroom.

Indifferent as he seemed, seldom speaking to the prisoner, often
looking out of the windows to the cool green trees far over on the hill,
absorbed and unbusinesslike, yet judge and jury came to see, before the
second day was done, that he had let no essential thing pass, that the
questions he asked had either a pregnant aptness, opened up new avenues
of deliberation, or were touched with mystery--seemed to have a longer
reach than the moment or the hour.

Before the end of this second day, however, more attention was upon him
than upon the prisoner, and nine-tenths of the people in the court-room
could have told how many fine linen handkerchiefs he used during the
afternoon, how many times he adjusted his monocle to look at the judge
meditatively. Probably no man, for eight hours a day, ever exasperated
and tried a judge, jury, and public, as did this man of twenty-nine
years of age, who had been known at college as Beauty Steele, an