In questioning him.  Bill Brown brought out one little surprise.  From the prisoner’s story, he had made a hard fight against the two mysterious men.  “If,” Brown asked, “such were the case, how can you explain away the fact that you came out of the struggle unmarked?  On examination of the body of John Borg, many bruises and contusions were noticeable.  How is it, if you put up such a stiff fight, that you escaped being battered?”

St. Vincent did not know, though he confessed to feeling stiff and sore all over.  And it did not matter, anyway.  He had killed neither Borg nor his wife, that much he did know.

Frona prefaced her argument to the meeting with a pithy discourse on the sacredness of human life, the weaknesses and dangers of circumstantial evidence, and the rights of the accused wherever doubt arose.  Then she plunged into the evidence, stripping off the superfluous and striving to confine herself to facts.  In the first place, she denied that a motive for the deed had been shown.  As it was, the introduction of such evidence was an insult to their intelligence, and she had sufficient faith in their manhood and perspicacity to know that such puerility would not sway them in the verdict they were to give.

And, on the other hand, in dealing with the particular points at issue, she denied that any intimacy had been shown to have existed between Bella and St. Vincent; and she denied, further, that it had been shown that any intimacy had been attempted on the part of St. Vincent.  Viewed honestly, the wash-tub incident—­the only evidence brought forward—­was a laughable little affair, portraying how the simple courtesy of a gentleman might be misunderstood by a mad boor of a husband.  She left it to their common sense; they were not fools.

They had striven to prove the prisoner bad-tempered.  She did not need to prove anything of the sort concerning John Borg.  They all knew his terrible fits of anger; they all knew that his temper was proverbial in the community; that it had prevented him having friends and had made him many enemies.  Was it not very probable, therefore, that the masked men were two such enemies?  As to what particular motive actuated these two men, she could not say; but it rested with them, the judges, to know whether in all Alaska there were or were not two men whom John Borg could have given cause sufficient for them to take his life.

Witness had testified that no traces had been found of these two men; but the witness had not testified that no traces had been found of St. Vincent, Pierre La Flitche, or John the Swede.  And there was no need for them so to testify.  Everybody knew that no foot-marks were left when St. Vincent ran up the trail, and when he came back with La Flitche and the other man.  Everybody knew the condition of the trail, that it was a hard-packed groove in the ground, on which a soft moccasin could leave no impression; and that had the ice not gone down the river, no traces would have been left by the murderers in passing from and to the mainland.