een the first to surrender
up his own son to justice.

"That will do, Mr Matterson," said Pyle hurriedly, seeing signs of an
utter breakdown. And he beckoned him from the box.

Then he began a fervid appeal to the Bench. If all the testimony they
had just listened to was worth a jot, he said, it was clear as clear
could be that the case was not one of culpable homicide or of
manslaughter, but of accidental death. The evidence of the native
witnesses, fair and straightforward as, to their great credit, it had
been, made this way, even more if possible than that of the relatives
and friends of the accused. The only eyewitnesses of the tragedy,
besides the accused, had frankly admitted when it was put fairly to
them, that the lamentable and deplorable affair must have been an
accident.

Then he went on to enlarge upon the terrible mental punishment this
boy--this mere child--had already undergone, a consciousness which would
last far into his after and maturer life, of what one act of
carelessness had involved; and having expatiated thus and at some
length, concluded by pathetically urging his worship to discharge the
accused, and not to add further to his own sufferings and to those of
his sorrowing relatives.

There was dead silence as the attorney ended this appeal. We, and
indeed all in the room, took for granted that it would bear fruit, and
that George's discharge would follow. But we reckoned without Shattuck.

"As Mr Pyle has observed," began the magistrate, "this is a painful and
deplorable case. Even an accident may have its culpable features,
rendering its perpetrator amenable to the law. Here two lives have been
sacrificed owing to a most culpable piece of thoughtless bravado on the
part of the accused, and I should not be doing my duty in summarily
discharging him. It is a case for a judge and jury to decide, and the
accused stands committed to the next Circuit Court here."

Then the formality of asking him if he wished to make a statement being
gone through, and having been duly cautioned, George, instructed by the
attorney, repeated, "It was an accident," and in a scrawling, shaky,
schoolboy hand signed his statement.

Then Pyle applied that bail should be granted. There was plenty of
substantial security available, he added. And at his words at least a
dozen men stood up. But the next words that fell from the Bench were
even a greater thunderbolt to us than the decision to commit.

"I