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 prove to the last inch of necessity its right to take a human life.