“Then Mr. Rocke came around to the dock, and sat down and talked with his client, and encouraged him until his fainting self-esteem was in some degree restored.
“After recess the court reassembled, and the defence was opened in a most eloquent speech, by Mr. Rocke.
“He told the whole story of ‘John Weston’s’ purely accidental connection with the party of young roughs who had stopped the stage coach, not either with any intention of mail robbery, murder or any other great violence, but merely to get possession of a certain document held by the deceased lawyer.
“He dwelt upon the young prisoner’s total ignorance of their plans and incomplicity with their offence.
“He described the purely accidental shooting of the lawyer by the pistol held in the deceased’s own hand, leveled at one of the assailants, and knocked up by the assailant in self-defence, so that it went off, sending a bullet under the chin, and upward and backward through the brain. He bade them see how easy, natural and inevitable such an accident must be.
“He described the humane impulse of the boy spectator, now the unhappy young prisoner at the bar. He told how he had seen the catastrophe; how he had run to the rescue, had bent over the fallen man, but finding him dead, had picked up the pistol, and without an idea of escaping, as the guilty ones had done, stood there gazing at the dead in a sort of panic, no doubt, until he was taken into custody by the constable.
“Was this, he asked, the conduct of a guilty man? The guilty had fled—had finally escaped—had never been recaptured. But had this young man ever even attempted to fly?
“He would bring witnesses to prove the unblemished good character of his client, and to prove that on the fatal night of the robbery and the murder he, the accused, so far from having any share in the conspiracy to stop the mail coach, had returned to his home to spend the evening with his newly married wife, and had gone again only at the request of his landlady, and on a neighborly errand. It was after having executed this errand, and while he was on his way home, that he chanced most unhappily to fall in with the party of young ruffians who stopped the coach. He had no hand in their offence, and was taken while trying to render assistance to the victim.
“Then Counsellor Rocke called Joseph Wyvil, of Stockton.
“Joseph Wyvil, who had just come into court, being sworn, testified that he knew the prisoner at the bar, and had known him since he, the prisoner, was four years of age—that is, for fourteen years—and that most intimately at home and at school, and had never known him to be untruthful, dishonest or cruel in all that time, and could not possibly believe him to be capable of the crime for which he was there arraigned.