en brought into court? Men with quick tempers
might quarrel over trivial things, but exasperation did not always
end in bodily injury and the taking of life; imprecations were not so
uncommon that they could be taken as evidence of wilful murder. The
prisoner refused to say what that troubled conversation was about,
but who could question his right to take the risk of his silence being
misunderstood?

The judge was alternately taking notes and looking fixedly at the
prisoner; the jury were in various attitudes of strained attention; the
public sat open mouthed; and up in the gallery a woman with white face
and clinched hands listened moveless and staring. Charley Steele was
holding captive the emotions and the judgments of his hearers. All
antipathy had gone; there was a strange eager intimacy between the
jurymen and himself. People no longer looked with distant dislike at the
prisoner, but began to see innocence in his grim silence, disdain only
in his surly defiance.

But Charley Steele had preserved his great stroke for the psychological
moment. He suddenly launched upon them the fact, brought out in
evidence, that the dead man had struck a woman in the face a year ago;
also that he had kept a factory girl in affluence for two years. Here
was motive for murder--if motive were to govern them--far greater than
might be suggested by excited conversation which listeners who could not
hear a word construed into a quarrel--listeners who bore the prisoner
at the bar ill-will because he shunned them while in the lumber-camp.
If the prisoner was to be hanged for motive untraceable, why should not
these two women be hanged for motive traceable!

Here was his chance. He appeared to impeach subtly every intelligence in
the room for having had any preconviction about the prisoner's guilt. He
compelled the jury to feel that they, with him, had made the discovery
of the unsound character of the evidence. The man might be guilty, but
their personal guilt, the guilt of the law, would be far greater if they
condemned the man on violable evidence. With a last simple appeal, his
hands resting on the railing before the seat where the jury sat, his
voice low and conversational again, his eyes running down the line of
faces of the men who had his client's life in their hands, he said:

"It is not a life only that is at stake, it is not revenge for a life
snatched from the busy world by a brutal hand that we should heed
to-day, but the