'And what did you do on hearing it?' asked the Lawyer, who, as I say, was conducting the prosecution.
'I stood still and listened for it again,' answered the witness.
'And did you hear it?' asked the Lawyer.
'No, not again,' replied the witness.
'And then?'
'I continued my walk towards the township.'
'You did not consider it sufficiently peculiar as to warrant your making inquiries?'
'It was so sharp and sudden that I did not know what it was.'
The Prosecuting Lawyer resumed his seat, and Mr Perkins thereupon jumped up and began to cross-examine the witness after his own fashion. When he had finished and had sat down again, he had elicited from the man—first that he could not even swear it was a human scream he heard; secondly, that it was so sudden and so short that he would hardly like to swear solemnly that he heard anything at all. It might have been, so the cross-examination elicited, the wind in the grass, a mopoke in a tree, perhaps, or a curlew down by the river side. The man could not state anything definitely, and Mr Perkins asked the Bench to severely censure the police for bringing such paltry and unreliable evidence before the Court. This was decidedly a point in my favour.