Or why his foolish story of
having left his stick behind him at the chestnut? But the sound of
my approaching steps higher up on the path had stopped him in mid-
career and sent him rushing up the slope ahead of me. When he came
back after a short circuit of the fields beyond, it was to find
his crime forestalled and by the very weapon he had thrown into
the Hollow as he went skurrying by. It was the shock of this
discovery, heightened by the use he made of it to secure the booty
thus thrown in his way without crime, which gave him the hang-dog
look we all noted. That there were other reasons--that the place
recalled another scene of brutality in which intention had been
followed by act, I did not then know. It was sufficient to me then
that my safety was secured by his own guilty consciousness and the
prevarications into which it led him. Instead of owning up to the
encounter he had so barely escaped, he confined himself to the
simple declaration of having heard voices somewhere near the
bridge, which to all who know the ravine appeared impossible under
the conditions named.
Yet, for all these incongruities and the failure of his counsel to
produce any definite impression by the prisoner's persistent
denial of having whittled the stick or even of having carried it
into Dark Hollow, I expected a verdict in his favour. Indeed, I
was so confident of it that I suffered less during the absence of
the jury than at any other time, and when they returned, with that
air of solemn decision which proclaims unanimity of mind and a
ready verdict, I was so prepared for his acquittal that for the
first time since the opening of the trial, I felt myself a being
of flesh and blood, with human sentiments and hopes.
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