conveniently behind it. Fronting it was a long bench, designed for the
prisoner and escort. In the immediate rear were arranged a few rows of
chairs, to accommodate the witnesses and spectators.

The sergeant's order, prompted by the entrance of the two Justices of the
Peace, was the occasion of all present rising to attention, in customary
deference to police-court rules. One of the newcomers, dressed in the
neat blue-serge uniform of an inspector of the Force, was familiar to
Redmond as Inspector Kilbride, who had been recently transferred to L
Division from a northern district. He had close-cropped gray hair and a
clipped, grizzled moustache. Though apparently nearing middle-age he
still possessed the slim, wiry, active figure of a man long inured to the
saddle.

The appearance of his judicial confrere fairly startled George. He was a
huge fellow, fully as tall and as heavy a man as Slavin, though not so
compactly-built or erect as the latter. Still, his wide, loosely-hung,
slightly bowed shoulders suggested vast strength, and his leisurely
though active movements indicated absolute muscular control. But it was
the strangely sombre, mask-like face which excited Redmond's interest
most. Beneath the broad, prominent brow of a thinker a pair of deep-set,
shadowy dark eyes peered forth, with the lifeless, unwinking stare of an
owl. Between them jutted a large, bony beak of a nose, with finely-cut
nostrils. The pitiless set of the powerful jaw was only partially
concealed by an enormous drooping moustache, the latter reddish in colour
and streaked with gray, like his thinning, carefully brushed hair. His
age was hard to determine. Somewhere around forty-five, George decided,
as he regarded with covert interest Ruthven Gully, Esq.,
gentleman-rancher and Justice of the Peace for the district.