north to
look after their endangered business.

There were others who would have been glad to support him, but he would
not call on them. Indeed what he most dreaded were the occasional
testimonials of sympathy which reached him. Friendliness unmanned him.

The other way in which his ordeal made itself felt was in his great
longing to have it over with. He looked forward to the cell which he
believed awaited him as to relief. There at least he would be safe
from the hard, inquisitive eyes which empaled him.

Meanwhile, as they argued back and forth and his fate hung in the
balance, he found himself staring at the patch of pale winter sky which
showed in the tall window. The air was clean up there. The sky was a
noble, empty place unpolluted by foul breath and villainy and lies!

When Denholm arose to speak for the prisoner, the jury regarded him
with curiosity tempered by pity. They liked Denholm, liked his
resourcefulness, his unassailable good-humor, his gallant struggle on
behalf of a bad cause. Plainly they were wondering what he could say
for his client now.

If Denholm felt that his case was hopeless, he gave no sign of it. He
was frank, unassuming, friendly with the jury. His style of delivery
was conversational.

"I will be brief," he said. "I do not mean to take you over the
evidence again. Every detail must be more than familiar to you.

"What my learned friend has just said to you, what I say to you now,
and what his lordship will presently say to you from the bench all
amounts to the same thing--choose for yourselves what you are to
believe. Somewhere in this jungle of contradictions lurks the truth.
It is for you to track it down.

"The prisoner's case stands or falls by his own testimony. We have an
instinct that warns us to disregard what a man says in his own defense.
In this case we cannot disregard it. I ask you not to consider it as
evidence against the prisoner that he has no witnesses.

"If we go over the story in our minds, we will see that under the
conditions of these happenings he could not have witnesses. Therefore,
if we wish to do justice, we must weigh his own story.

"Never mind the details now, but consider his attitude in telling it.
For an entire session of the court he sat in the witness chair telling
us with the most painstaking detail everything that happened from the
time of his first arrival at Fort Enterprise up to his arrest.

"During the whole of the