ous thing has happened today
while I was in court. A little boy left a letter for me at my office
here; it is an ill-written scrawl, as you see, but certainly important."

Ned took the paper, on which was written in a scrawling hand:

"Sir, Maister Sankey be innocent of the murder of Foxey. I doan't want
to put my neck in a noose, but if so be as they finds him guilty in
coort and be a-going to hang him, I shall come forward and say as how I
did it. I bean't agoing to let him be hung for this job. A loife for a
loife, saes oi; so tell him to keep up his heart."

There was no signature to the paper.

Ned looked up with delight in his face.

"But won't the letter clear me, Mr. Wakefield? It shows that it was not
me, but some one else who did it."

"No, Sankey, pray do not cherish any false hopes on that ground. The
letter is valueless in a legal way. To you and to your friends it may be
a satisfaction; but it can have no effect on the court. There is nothing
to prove that it is genuine. It may have been written by any friend of
yours with a view of obtaining your acquittal. Of course we shall put it
in at the trial, but it cannot be accepted as legal evidence in any way.
Still a thing of that sort may have an effect upon some of the jury."

Ned looked again at the letter, and a shade came over his face now that
he looked at it carefully. He recognized in a moment Bill's handwriting.
He had himself instructed him by setting him copies at the time he was
laid up with the broken leg, and Bill had stuck to it so far that he was
able to read and write in a rough way.

Ned's first impulse was to tell Mr. Wakefield who had written the note,
but he thought that it might get Bill into a scrape. It was evidently
written by his friend, solely to create an impression in his favor, and
he wondered that such an idea should have entered Bill's head, which was
by no means an imaginative one. As to the young fellow having killed Mr.
Mulready it did not even occur to Ned for a moment.

As, seated by the side of the chief constable, he drove along that
afternoon, Ned turned it over anxiously in his mind whether it would be
honest to allow this letter to be produced in court, knowing that it
was only the device of a friend, Finally he decided to let matters take
their course.

"I am innocent," he said to himself, "and what I have got to live for is
to clear myself from this charge. Mr. Wakefield said this letter would
not be of va