Continuing his evidence in a defiant manner, the witness said he remembered the deceased agent, James Wilson.  He saw him last the day before his death.  It was in Carlisle they met.  Wilson showed witness a warrant with which he was charged for Ray’s arrest, and told him that Ray had often threatened him in years past, and that he believed he meant to take his life.  Wilson had said that he intended to be beforehand, for the warrant was a sure preventive.  He also said that the Rays were an evil family; the father was a hard, ungrateful brute, who had ill repaid him for six years’ labor.  The mother was best; but then she was only a poor simple fool.  The worst of the gang was this Ralph, who in the days of the Parliament had more than once threatened to deliver him—­Wilson—­to the sheriff—­the other so-called sheriff, not the present good gentleman.

Ralph asked the witness three questions.

“Have we ever met before?”

“Ey, but we’ll never meet again, I reckon,” said the man, with a knowing wink.

“Did you serve under me in the army of the Parliament?”

“Nowt o’ t’ sort,” with a growl.

“Were you captured by the King’s soldiers, and branded with a hot iron, as a spy of their own who was suspected of betraying them?”

“It’s a’ a lie.  I were never brandet.”

“Pull up the right sleeves of your jerkin and sark.”

The witness refused.

Justice Hide called on the keeper to do so.

The witness resisted, but the sleeves were drawn up to the armpit.  The flesh showed three clear marks as of an iron band.

The man was hurried away, amid hissing in the court.

The next witness was the constable, Jonathan Briscoe.  He described being sent after Wilson early on the day following that agent’s departure from Carlisle.  His errand was to bring back the prisoner.  He arrived at Wythburn in time to be present at the inquest.  The prisoner Stagg was then brought up and discharged.

Ralph asked if it was legal to accuse a man a second time of the same offence.

Justice Millet ruled that the discharge of a coroner (even though he were a resident justice as well) was no acquittal.

The witness remembered how at the inquiry the defendant Ray had defended his accomplice.  He had argued that it was absurd to suppose that a man of Stagg’s strength could have killed Wilson by a fall.  Only a more powerful man could have done so.

“Had you any doubt as to who that more powerful man might be?”

“None, not I. I knew that the man whose game it was to have the warrant was the likest man to have grabbed it.  It warn’t on the body.  There was not a scrap of evidence against Ray, or I should have taken him then and there.”

“You tried to take him afterwards, and failed.”

“That’s true enough.  The man has the muscles of an ox.”

The next two witnesses were a laborer from Wythburn, who spoke again to passing Sim on the road on the night of the murder, and meeting Wilson a mile farther north, and Sim’s landlord, who repeated his former evidence.