"I am no more than that, I am no less—a thing from Heaven, stained and shamed with dirt in this world, and yet reflecting God, who burns my body to call my spirit up, cleansed, freed, eternal."

The prisoner's face was changed. He seemed remote from our world, withdrawn to a great distance, looking down, his smile a benediction.

"Poor little laws!" he said, ever so gently. "Men in earnest, groping through the dark in search of right and truth, children playing at 'Let's pretend to be God.' Play on at your game, your tiresome game, in your stuffy, dirty court room, with your old worn-out rules. But let me go, for I am weary of this mock trial, in a sham court, where little children play at make-believe. I go to take my trial at the Court of God, whose law is truth. You have nothing but death to give. He gives life."

Then there was silence, broken presently by an emotional juror, who sobbed, and tried to make believe he had a cough.

The counsel for the Crown had prepared a very fine speech which he must needs deliver. It was all about a most murderous and ferocious redskin desperado, committing a series of despicable and cowardly outrages, at wanton random of the homicidal maniac, guided only by the low cunning of a savage. Then we found that this very bad man was the prisoner, and ripples of merriment broke into open laughter.

I will not quote my speech for the defense, but merely cite the points which made it hopeless.

There was, for example, a strong contention within my reach that by the most ancient and fundamental principles of justice a prisoner has the right of trial before a jury of his peers. Yet my client was arraigned for felony before a panel to all intents of his enemies, against whom he had levied war, men biased by race prejudice before they entered court. My junior warned me, however, that it is not tactful to impugn the jury; and British practise, unlike the American, does not allow the defense to challenge any juror who has read the public press.

My defense was limited then to arguments which the judge derided afterward as those of a sentimentalist attempting to interpret murder as virtuous conduct. As long as I defended the slayer of Red Saunders I had the jurors with me; even the shooting of the Indian agent might be condoned as an act of natural wrath provoked to the degree of actual madness; but when I came to the killing of Sarde, the whole court turned against me with a disdain which chilled me, silenced me. Myself one of the sworn constabulary, Sarde's brother officer and a justice of the peace, how could I defend what seemed, by all the evidence produced, his ruthless murder, deliberate, unprovoked? The real facts of the Sarde-la Mancha duel, begun in former years and now completed, I was barred from telling, and in default of that excuse the crime seemed monstrous.

My plea was therefore based on the apparent confusion which brought a stone age savage before a civilized court, to be judged, not as he should be, by the sanctions and usages of savagery, but by the customs of a strange, a mysterious, an invading and hostile people. What chance would one of us have, tried by the unknown customs of the heavenly host before a court of angels? The jurors laughed at me.

So, with a stinging self-contempt I sat down, a total failure, knowing that the uttermost endeavors of my friendship had brought my friend just one step nearer to a shameful death.