as still, dabbing
his lips again; then he moved uneasily; once more his features were
twisted by pain, and in a few snarling, almost incoherent words he
dismissed the jury to consider the verdict.

Peter Blood had listened to the intemperate, the blasphemous, and almost
obscene invective of that tirade with a detachment that afterwards, in
retrospect, surprised him. He was so amazed by the man, by the reactions
taking place in him between mind and body, and by his methods of
bullying and coercing the jury into bloodshed, that he almost forgot
that his own life was at stake.

The absence of that dazed jury was a brief one. The verdict found the
three prisoners guilty. Peter Blood looked round the scarlet-hung court.
For an instant that foam of white faces seemed to heave before him. Then
he was himself again, and a voice was asking him what he had to say
for himself, why sentence of death should not be passed upon him, being
convicted of high treason.

He laughed, and his laugh jarred uncannily upon the deathly stillness
of the court. It was all so grotesque, such a mockery of justice
administered by that wistful-eyed jack-pudding in scarlet, who was
himself a mockery--the venal instrument of a brutally spiteful and
vindictive king. His laughter shocked the austerity of that same
jack-pudding.

"Do you laugh, sirrah, with the rope about your neck, upon the very
threshold of that eternity you are so suddenly to enter into?"

And then Blood took his revenge.

"Faith, it's in better case I am for mirth than your lordship. For I
have this to say before you deliver judgment. Your lordship sees me--an
innocent man whose only offence is that I practised charity--with a
halter round my neck. Your lordship, being the justiciar, speaks with
knowledge of what is to come to me. I, being a physician, may speak with
knowledge of what is to come to your lordship. And I tell you that I
would not now change places with you--that I would not exchange this
halter that you fling about my neck for the stone that you carry in
your body. The death to which you may doom me is a light pleasantry by
contrast with the death to which your lordship has been doomed by that
Great Judge with whose name your lordship makes so free."

The Lord Chief Justice sat stiffly upright, his face ashen, his lips
twitching, and whilst you might have counted ten there was no sound in
that paralyzed court after Peter Blood had finished speaking. All those
wh