“If,” he cried, “there is the slightest approach to a repetition of that unseemly noise, I will instantly clear the court?”
The doctor who had examined the body was examined.
“Might not the farmer have committed suicide?” he was asked.
“Everything is against that theory,” the doctor replied, “for the knife belonged to Grahame; besides, the deed was done on the road, and from the appearance of the deceased’s coat, he had evidently been hauled through the gateway on his back, bleeding all the while, and so hidden under the darkling spruce pine.”
“So that felo de se is quite out of the question?”
“Utterly so, my lord.”
“Stand down, doctor.”
I am giving the evidence only in the briefest epitome, for it occupied hours. The advocate for the prosecution made a telling speech, to which the prisoner’s solicitor replied in one quite as good. He spoke almost ironically, and laughed as he did so, especially when he came to the evidence of the knife. His client at the time of the murder was lying sound asleep at a hedge-foot. What could hinder a tramp, one of the many who swarm on the Deeside road, to have stolen the knife, followed Craig Nicol, stabbed him, robbed and hidden the body, and left the knife there to turn suspicion on the sleeping man? “Is it likely,” he added, “that Reginald—had he indeed murdered his quondam friend—would have been so great a fool as to have left the knife there?” He ended by saying that there was not a jot of trustworthy evidence on which the jury could bring in a verdict of guilty.
But, alas! for Reginald. The judge in his summing up—and a long and eloquent speech it was—destroyed all the good effects of the solicitor’s speech. “He could not help,” he said, “pointing out to the jury that guilt or suspicion could rest on no one else save Grahame. As testified by a witness, he had quarrelled with Nicol, and had made use of the remarkable expression that ‘the quarrel would end in blood.’ The night of the murder Grahame was not sober, but lying where he was, in the shade of the hedge, Nicol must have passed him without seeing him, and then no doubt Grahame had followed and done that awful deed which in cool blood he might not even have thought about Again, Grahame was poor, and was engaged to be married. The gold and notes would be an incentive undoubtedly to the crime, and when he sailed away in the Wolverine he was undoubtedly a fugitive from justice, and in his opinion the jury had but one course. They might now retire.”
They were about to rise, and his lordship was about to withdraw, when a loud voice exclaimed: