THE story I am about to tell is hardly a story at all. Perhaps I had better call it a report, and let it go at that, with a word of explanation as to how I came to report it.

In 1884 a new state survey and a new re-districting act between them cut off about one-quarter of a northern timber county close to the Canada border, and delivered over the severed portion to its neighbor on the southerly side, a thickly settled county with several large towns and with important manufacturing interests. This division left the backwoods county temporarily without a judiciary or a place of holding court. But the act provided for the transfer of all pending cases to the courts of the more fortunate county down below, and gave the backwoods District Attorney the privilege of trying in the said courts such cases as might arise in his own bailiwick during his term of office then current.

No such cases occurred, however, until the period stated by the act was nearly at an end, when the District Attorney of the mutilated county came down to Metropole, our County Seat, to try a murder case. As our backwoods neighbors were a somewhat untrammelled, uncouth and free-and-easy folk at their quietest, his coming naturally attracted some curious interest, especially after it became known that he had come into town sitting side by side with the prisoner in the smoking-car, and discussing politics with him. His name was Judge Cutwater, and he was generally spoken of as Cutwater of Seneca—perhaps because he had at some time been a Judge in Seneca, New York; perhaps because there was no comprehensible reason for so calling him, any more than there was comprehensible reason for various and sundry other things about him.

He was a man who might have been sixty or seventy or eighty. Indeed, he might have been a hundred, and he may be now, for all I know. But he was lean, wiry, agile, supple and full of eternal youth. He might have been good-looking if he had cared to be, for he had a fine old-fashioned eagle face, and a handsome, flowing gray moustache, the grace of which was spoiled by a straggling thin wisp of chin whiskers, and a patch of gray stubble on each cheek. And, of course, he chewed tobacco profusely and diffusely, and in his long, grease-stained, shiny broadcloth coat, his knee-bagged breeches, his big slouch hat, and his eye-glasses with heavy black horn rims, suspended from his neck by a combination of black ribbon and pink string, he looked what he was, as clearly as though he had been labelled—the representative of the Majesty of the Law among a backwoods people out of odds with fortune, desperate, disheartened, down on their luck, and lost to self-respect.

He said he was a good Democrat, and I think he was. He saw the prisoner locked up, bade him a kindly “Good night, Jim,” and ordered the jailer to let him have all the whiskey he wanted. Then Judge Cutwater called on his brother of the local bench, greeting him with a ceremonious and stately dignity that absolutely awed the excellent old gentleman, and dropping an enormous Latin quotation on him as he departed, just by way of utterly flattening him out. After that he strolled over to the hotel, grasped the landlord warmly by the hand, and in the space of half an hour told him a string of stories of such startling novelty, humor and unfitness for publication that, as the landlord enthusiastically declared, the recent Drummers’ Convention could not be said to be “in it” with the old man.

The next day the case of Jim Adsum for the murder of his mate in a logging camp was called in court; and District Attorney Cutwater’s trying of it was a circus that nearly drove old Judge Potter into an apoplectic fit, and kept the whole court room in what both those eminent jurists united—it was the only thing they did unite in—in characterizing as a disgraceful uproar.

And yet, somehow, by four o’clock he had evidence enough in to convict the prisoner; the defence had not a single exception worth the noting, and was rattled as to its state of mind; and that weird old prosecutor, who repeatedly spoke of the prisoner at the bar as “Jim,” and made no secret of the fact that they had been bosom friends and companions in the forest, had worked up a case that made the best lawyers in the room stare at him with looks of puzzled surprise and amazed respect.

When he rose to sum up, he slowly and thoughtfully drew a tin tobacco-box from his trousers’ pocket, opened it and deposited therein his quid, after passing his right hand, with a rapid and skillful motion, across his gray moustache. This feat he performed with a dignity that at once fascinated and awed the beholder. Then he began:

“Your Honor and Gentlemen of the Jury: It is a rare and a seldom occurrence that a prosecuting official, sworn to exert his utmost energies to further the execution of the law, is called upon to invoke the awful vengeance of that law, and the retribution demanded by outraged humanity, upon the head of one under whose blanket he has lain within the cold hollows of the snow-clad woods; with whom he has shared the meagre food of the pioneer; side by side with whom he has struggled for his rights and his liberties, at the daily and hourly risk of his life, with half-breed Injuns and with half-breeder Kanucks. Sech, gentlemen, is the duty that lies before this servant of the Law to-day; and sech, gentlemen, is the duty that will be done, without fear or favor, without consideration of friendship or hallowed association; and this man, Jim Adsum, knows it, knowing me, as well as he ever knew anything in the fool life that is now drawing to a close.

“You have heard, Gentlemen of the Jury, the evidence that has been laid before you on the part of the prosecution, and you have heard the attempt made by the learned counsel for the defence to discredit that evidence in his eloquent but frivolous opening on behalf of his unfortunate client. I trust that you have given to the one the appreciative attention which it deserves, and that you have let the other slip, naked and shivering, into the boundless oblivion of your utter contempt.

“What, Gentlemen of the Jury, are the circumstances of this case? We learn by the testimony for the people that on the twenty-seventh of November a party of seven men started off for the upper waters of the Sagus River, some to join a lumber camp, and others, among them this defendant, James Adsum, and his victim, Peter Biaux, a Frenchman, in the pursuit of their usual vocation—which may be said to be hunting for fur-skins, on general principles. This party of seven men is snowed up, and goes into camp at the junction of Sagus and First Rivers, and for eleven days remains thus snow-bound in that icy solitude, the only human beings within hundreds of miles.

“There has been, Gentlemen of the Jury, as has been shown to you, an old grudge between the prisoner at the bar and the deceased; a grudge of many years standing. There is no use of going into the origin of that grudge. Some says it was cards; some, business; some, drink; and I personally know that it was a woman; but that makes no difference before this present tribunal. Let it be enough that there was bad blood between the men; that it broke forth, as two witnesses have told you, day

after day, within the confines of that little camp crowded within its snow-bound arena in the heart of the immeasurable solitudes of the wintry forest. Again and again the other members of the party intervened to make peace between them. At last, upon the eighth day of December, matters come to a crisis, and a personal encounter ensued between the two men, in the course of which the deceased, being a Frenchman, is badly mauled, and Jim, here, being without his knife, through carelessness, is correspondingly cut. The two are separated; and, for fear of further mischief, the Frenchman is sent down the river to fish through the ice, and the prisoner is kept in the camp. That night, by order of the head of the party, he sleeps between two men. These two men have told you their story—how one of them woke in the night at the sound, as he thought, of a distant shot, and became aware that Adsum was no longer at his side—how, reaching out his hand, he grasped another hand, and taking it for the prisoner’s, was reassured and fell asleep again—and how, weeks afterward, he first found out that that hand was the hand of the man who had been detailed to sleep on the other side of the prisoner. You have heard, gentlemen, how these two men awoke in the morning to find Adsum lying between them, shaking and shivering with a chill under his heavy blanket. You have heard of the long and unsuccessful search for Peter Biaux, and of the accidental discovery of his mangled body three months later, under the ice of the Sagus River, at a point ten miles below the camp. You have heard how each of these witnesses was haunted by a suspicion that he had unwittingly betrayed the trust reposed in him, and how, at last, when they spoke together of their watch on that fatal night, their suspicion flashed, illumined with the fire of heaven’s truth, into a hijjus certainty.

“You have been told, gentlemen, that the case of the people rests upon circumstantial evidence. It does, gentlemen; it does; and the circumstances are all there. You have heard how when these two witnesses exchanged notes, they came to one conclusion, and that is the conclusion to which I shall bring your minds. The witness Duncan said to the witness Atwood: ‘Jim done it!’ The witness Atwood replied to him: ‘Jim done it!’ And I say to you, Gentlemen of the Jury: ‘Jim done it!’ And you done it, Jim; you know you did!

“And now, gentlemen, what sort of a man is this prisoner at the bar? We must consider him for the purposes of this trial as two men—on the one hand, as the brave, upright and courageous trapper which he has on numberless occasions, to my personal knowledge, shown himself to be—and I may say to you, Gentlemen of the Jury, that I would not be here talking to you now if he had not a-been on one or two occasions. And on the other hand, Gentlemen of the Jury, I am going to show him to you as the red-handed murderer I always told him he would be if he gave the rein to his violent passions. Besides, the darn fool’s drunk half the time.

“You have been told, gentlemen, by the learned counsel for the defence, that this crime was committed in a rough country, where deeds of violence are so common that it is possible that this man may have died by another hand, murdered by a totally different person, for totally different causes and reasons, and under circumstances totally unconnected with the circumstances set forth in this case. Gentlemen, it is a rough country—rough as the speech of its children, rough as their food and fare, rough as the storms they face, and nigh as rough as the whiskey they drink. But it is a country, gentlemen, where every man knows his neighbor’s face and his neighbor’s heart, where the dangers and privations of life draw men closer together than they are drawn in great cities like this beautiful town of yours, which is honored by the citizens I see sot before me in this jury box. In that great snow-clad wilderness, on that bitter eighth of December, with the thermometer thirty degrees below zero, I can assure you, gentlemen, that there was no casual, accidental, extemporaneous murderer lilly-twiddling around that chilly solitude, sauntering among twenty-foot snowdrifts for the purpose of striking down a total stranger with nineteen distinct and separate cuts, and then fading away into nothingness like the airy fabric of a vision. And Jim doing nothing all that time? Gentlemen, the contention of the counsel ain’t sense!

“Gentlemen, I wish I could tell you that it was so. I wish I could tell you so for Jim’s sake. I wish I could tell you so for your own sakes, for on you is soon to rest the awful yet proud responsibility of deciding that a fellow human being’s life is forfeit to his blood-guiltiness. I wish I could tell you so for my own sake, regarding myself as a friend of Jim’s. But it is the District Attorney, the Prosecutor for the People, that you must listen to while he tells you the story of what happened that night.

“It was half-past eleven of that night when this man Adsum arose. How do I know? Look in the almanac and see where the moon stood at half-past eleven! It was then that he slipped from between his two guards and drew back to where the flickering camp-fire cast the shadow of a pine tree on the wall of snow that shut in their little resting-place. There he stood in that shadow—a shadow that laid on his soul and on his face—and waited to see if one of his comrades stirred. At his feet lay the two men that had been set to guard him, Jared Duncan and Bill Atwood. Eb Spence laid over the way with his feet to the fire. By him laid Sol Geary and Kentucky Wilson. Why, Jim, I can see it all just as if I was there! And then you—he—then, Gentlemen of the Jury, this prisoner at the bar, slipped from that camp where his companions lay, bound to him as he was bound to them, in the faith of comradeship; and, as he left that little circle, that spot trodden out of the virgin snow, he left behind him his fidelity, his self-respect and his manhood; his mind and soul and heart full of the black and devilish thought of taking by treacherous surprise the life of a comrade. Up

to that hour, his spirit had harbored no sech evil thought. The men he had theretofore killed—and I am not saying, gentlemen, that he had not killed enough—had been killed in fair and open fight, and there is not a one of them all but will be glad and proud to meet him as gentleman to gentleman at the Judgement Day. But now it was with murder in his heart—base, cowardly, faithless murder—that he left that camp; it was with murder in his heart that he sneaked, crouching low, down where the heavy shadows hid the margin of the ice-bound stream. It was with murder in his heart that he laid himself flat upon his belly on the ice when he came within two rod of the Beaver Dam, and worked along, keeping ever in the shadow till he come down to where that Frenchman, who, six hours before, had et out of the same pan with him, stood with his light by his side, gazing down into the black hole in the ice that was to be the mouth of his grave and the portal of his entrance into eternity. Murder, gentlemen, murder nerved his arm when he struck out that light with the fur cap you see now in his hand; and murder’s self filled him with a maniac’s rage as he rose to his feet and shot and stabbed the defenceless back of his unsuspecting comrade. This, gentlemen, this—and no tale of a prowling stranger—this, gentlemen, is the truth; and I will appeal to the prisoner, himself, gentlemen, to bear me out. Jim Adsum, you can lie to this Judge and you can lie to this Jury; you can lie to your neighbors and you can lie to your own conscience; but you can’t lie to old man Cutwater, and you know it. Now, Jim, was not that just about the way you done it?”

And Jim nodded his head, turned the fur cap over in his hands, and assented quietly:

“Just about.”

Twenty-five minutes later the Jury went out, and Judge Cutwater stalked slowly and thoughtfully over to the prisoner, and touched him on the shoulder.

“Jim,” he said, meditatively, “if I know anything about juries, and I think I do, I’ve hanged you on that talk as sure as guns. Your man’s summing-up didn’t amount to pea-soup. I’m sorry, of course; but there wasn’t no way out of it for either you or me. However, I’ll tell you what I’ll do. My term as District Attorney expires to-morrow at twelve; and, if you’ll send that fool counsel of yours round to me at the tahvern, I’ll show him how to drive a horse and cart through the law in this case and get you a new trial, like rolling off a log.”

And as Mr. Adsum got not only one but three new trials during the time that I kept track of him, I have every reason to believe that Judge Cutwater of Seneca kept his promise as a man, as faithfully as he performed his duty as a prosecutor for the people.