antipathy had gone; there was a strange eager intimacy between the
jurymen and himself. People no longer looked with distant dislike at the
prisoner, but began to see innocence in his grim silence, disdain only in
his surly defiance.

But Charley Steele had preserved his great stroke for the psychological
moment. He suddenly launched upon them the fact, brought out in
evidence, that the dead man had struck a woman in the face a year ago;
also that he had kept a factory girl in affluence for two years. Here
was motive for murder--if motive were to govern them--far greater than
might be suggested by excited conversation which listeners who could not
hear a word construed into a quarrel--listeners who bore the prisoner at
the bar ill-will because he shunned them while in the lumber-camp. If
the prisoner was to be hanged for motive untraceable, why should not
these two women be hanged for motive traceable!

Here was his chance. He appeared to impeach subtly every intelligence in
the room for having had any preconviction about the prisoner's guilt. He
compelled the jury to feel that they, with him, had made the discovery of
the unsound character of the evidence. The man might be guilty, but
their personal guilt, the guilt of the law, would be far greater if they
condemned the man on violable evidence. With a last simple appeal, his
hands resting on the railing before the seat where the jury sat, his
voice low and conversational again, his eyes running down the line of
faces of the men who had his client's life in their hands, he said:

"It is not a life only that is at stake, it is not revenge for a life
snatched from the busy world by a brutal hand that we should heed to-day,
but the awful responsibility of that thing we call the State, which,
having the power of life and death without gainsay or hindrance, should