Never was a verdict more unexpected. If a poll had been taken of the
judgment of the population twenty-four hours before, a great majority
would have been found believing that there was no escape for the
prisoner, who was accused of murdering a wealthy timber merchant. The
minority would have based their belief that the prisoner had a chance of
escape, not on his possible innocence, not on insufficient evidence, but
on a curious faith in the prisoner's lawyer. This minority would not
have been composed of the friends of the lawyer alone, but of outside
spectators, who, because Charley Steele had never lost a criminal case,
attached to him a certain incapacity for bad luck; and of very young men,
who looked upon him as the perfect pattern of the person good to see and
hard to understand.

During the first two days of the trial the case had gone wholly against
the prisoner, who had given his name as Joseph Nadeau. Witnesses had
heard him quarrelling with the murdered man, and the next day the body of
the victim had been found by the roadside. The prisoner was a stranger
in the lumber-camp where the deed was done, and while there had been
morose and lived apart; no one knew him; and he refused to tell even his
lawyer whence he came, or what his origin, or to bring witnesses from his
home to speak for his character.

One by one the points had been made against him--with no perceptible
effect upon Charley Steele, who seemed the one cool, undisturbed person
in the courtroom.

Indifferent as he seemed, seldom speaking to the prisoner, often looking
out of the windows to the cool green trees far over on the hill, absorbed
and unbusinesslike, yet judge and jury came to see, before the second day
was done, that he had let no essential thing pass, that the questions