But herein they were mistaken.  For when the constable had given his evidence, already known to the county, there was a disturbance in the fringe of humanity that lined the walls of the assembly room where the committee was sitting, and the hermit of Bolinas Plain limped painfully into the room.  He had evidently walked there:  he was soaked with rain and plastered with mud; he was exhausted and inarticulate.  But as he staggered to the witness-bench, and elbowed the constable aside, he arrested the attention of every one.  A few laughed, but were promptly silenced by the court.  It was a reflection upon its only virtue,—­sincerity.

“Do you know the prisoner?” asked the judge.

Ira Beasley glanced at the pale face of the acrobat, and shook his head.

“Never saw him before,” he said faintly.

“Then what are you doing here?” demanded the judge sternly.

Ira collected himself with evident effort, and rose to his halting feet. 
First he moistened his dry lips, then he said, slowly and distinctly,
“Because I killed the deputy of Bolinas.”

With the thrill which ran through the crowded room, and the relief that seemed to come upon him with that utterance, he gained strength and even a certain dignity.

“I killed him,” he went on, turning his head slowly around the circle of eager auditors with the rigidity of a wax figure, “because he made love to my wife.  I killed him because he wanted to run away with her.  I killed him because I found him waiting for her at the door of the barn at the dead o’ night, when she’d got outer bed to jine him.  He hadn’t no gun.  He hadn’t no fight.  I killed him in his tracks.  That man,” pointing to the prisoner, “wasn’t in it at all.”  He stopped, loosened his collar, and, baring his rugged throat below his disfigured ear, said:  “Now take me out and hang me!”

“What proof have we of this?  Where’s your wife?  Does she corroborate it?”

A slight tremor ran over him.

“She ran away that night, and never came back again.  Perhaps,” he added slowly, “because she loved him and couldn’t bear me; perhaps, as I’ve sometimes allowed to myself, gentlemen, it was because she didn’t want to bear evidence agin me.”

In the silence that followed the prisoner was heard speaking to one that was near him.  Then he rose.  All the audacity and confidence that the husband had lacked were in his voice.  Nay, there was even a certain chivalry in his manner which, for the moment, the rascal really believed.

“It’s true!” he said.  “After I stole the horse to get away, I found that woman running wild down the road, cryin’ and sobbin’.  At first I thought she’d done the shooting.  It was a risky thing for me to do, gentlemen; but I took her up on the horse and got her away to Lowville.  It was that much dead weight agin my chances, but I took it.  She was a woman and—­I ain’t a dog!”

He was so exalted and sublimated by his fiction that for the first time the jury was impressed in his favor.  And when Ira Beasley limped across the room, and, extending his maimed hand to the prisoner, said, “Shake!” there was another dead silence.