It is the characteristic picture of a prisoner on trial; guilty or innocent makes little difference on the surface.  Nature, when we have reached the limit of endurance, lends us apathy.

Ambrose had suffered so much he was dulled to suffering.  He had not a friend in the court-room except Arthur Denholm.  Peter Minot, after making a deposition in his favor, had been obliged to hasten north to look after their endangered business.

There were others who would have been glad to support him, but he would not call on them.  Indeed what he most dreaded were the occasional testimonials of sympathy which reached him.  Friendliness unmanned him.

The other way in which his ordeal made itself felt was in his great longing to have it over with.  He looked forward to the cell which he believed awaited him as to relief.  There at least he would be safe from the hard, inquisitive eyes which empaled him.

Meanwhile, as they argued back and forth and his fate hung in the balance, he found himself staring at the patch of pale winter sky which showed in the tall window.  The air was clean up there.  The sky was a noble, empty place unpolluted by foul breath and villainy and lies!

When Denholm arose to speak for the prisoner, the jury regarded him with curiosity tempered by pity.  They liked Denholm, liked his resourcefulness, his unassailable good-humor, his gallant struggle on behalf of a bad cause.  Plainly they were wondering what he could say for his client now.

If Denholm felt that his case was hopeless, he gave no sign of it.  He was frank, unassuming, friendly with the jury.  His style of delivery was conversational.

“I will be brief,” he said.  “I do not mean to take you over the evidence again.  Every detail must be more than familiar to you.

“What my learned friend has just said to you, what I say to you now, and what his lordship will presently say to you from the bench all amounts to the same thing—­choose for yourselves what you are to believe.  Somewhere in this jungle of contradictions lurks the truth.  It is for you to track it down.

“The prisoner’s case stands or falls by his own testimony.  We have an instinct that warns us to disregard what a man says in his own defense.  In this case we cannot disregard it.  I ask you not to consider it as evidence against the prisoner that he has no witnesses.

“If we go over the story in our minds, we will see that under the conditions of these happenings he could not have witnesses.  Therefore, if we wish to do justice, we must weigh his own story.

“Never mind the details now, but consider his attitude in telling it.  For an entire session of the court he sat in the witness chair telling us with the most painstaking detail everything that happened from the time of his first arrival at Fort Enterprise up to his arrest.

“During the whole of the following day he was on the stand under a perfect fusillade of questions from my learned friend, admittedly the most brilliant cross-examiner at the bar.  He did not succeed in shaking the prisoner’s story in any important particular.