sufferings from the scoffers.

The trial occupied two days. The prisoner was defended by a clever young
lawyer from Melbourne, who fought every point pertinaciously and strove
with all his energy and knowledge and cunning to represent Joe Rogers as
the victim of circumstances and Ephraim Shine--especially Ephraim
Shine--who was a monster of blackened iniquity, capable of a diabolical
astuteness in the pursuit of his criminal intentions. The story of the
boy Haddon was absolutely false in representing Rogers as having assisted
in the theft of the gold produced. The boy was a creature of Shine's;
that was obvious on the face of his evidence and the evidence of Miss
Shine and Detective Downy. Shine had had the lad in his toils, otherwise
why had he taken such precautions to shield the man, and why had he given
him warning of the approach of the troopers? Rogers' story was entirely
credible, he said. It was to the effect that Shine had confessed to him
that he had robbed the mine of a quantity of gold and had been robbed in
turn by the boy Haddon, who was his real accomplice. He solicited the aid
of the unfortunate prisoner to recover the treasure, and offered him half
the gold as a reward. The prisoner was tempted and he fell. His action
towards the boy at the Piper Mine was taken merely to induce him to
disclose the whereabouts of the lost booty, and the shooting at Trooper
Casey was an accident. Rogers had acted on blind and unreasoning impulse
in snatching up the gun on the approach of the police, believing his
complicity with Shine in the effort to recover the hidden loot had come
to light, and the discharge of the weapon was purely involuntary.

To give an air of plausibility to this plea it was necessary to represent
Ephraim Shine in the worst possible light, and that conscientious and
hard-working young lawyer spared no pains on his own part or the part of
the dead man's daughter to make every point that would tell for his
client; but Chris was not more moved than at the preliminary
investigation. She told the truth simply, and no effort on the part of
the barrister could shake her evidence or break through the unnatural
calm in which she appeared to have enveloped herself. Harry saw her
several times during the course of the trial, and found a desolate
anguish in her white immobile face, that stirred up in his heart again a
fury against fate, the law, and every force and condition that added the
smallest pang to he