Marcus White, like his father, was a man of no small intellectual power. A journalist who is to write anything worth reading must read much before he writes, and the prisoner’s son had read much. At one time it had been intended that he should join the army of advocates, but he turned away with repugnance after a preliminary survey of the law. Later, his father, to whom he was devotedly attached, gave him some training in his own profession, the profession of the pen. The elder White had long had in hand a book on the subject of barbarous punishments, and his son diligently assisted him in looking up and collating ancient records of the shocking violence in times past done to humanity under the sanction of the law. He knew that the English Criminal Code included at one time nearly two hundred offences punishable with death; he knew that this dreadful catalogue comprised innumerable offences of the most trifling character, while it omitted enormities of the utmost atrocity. A study of these penal statutes and their ruthless application had shattered his instinctive reverence for the law and its administration. He had learnt to see in the sanguinary monuments of so-called justice the oppression of the strong, the cruelty of the cowardly, a terrible revelation of “man’s inhumanity to man.” His mind revolted at the idea of a divine right in kings to hang, draw, and quarter any one who criticised their conduct or advocated another form of government. It was, he held, only the _Lex talionis_, supported by force, and all the traps and complexities of criminal pleading were but the miserable devices of lawyers ever ready to prostitute a calling that in itself was noble. History proved it--history of which nearly every page was stained with judgments of expediency or the dark crime of judicial murder. “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” was supposed to have come from the poisonous lips of such creatures as Titus Oates. The judge--he might be a Jeffreys or a Scroggs--was but the Government in wig and ermine. The Crown counsel were paid pleaders for the party in power. The docile jury, ruled by the judge, were in effect the most obedient servants of the Government. This, then, was human justice--which in its true essence was supernal and divine. This was the Western Baal that men were called on to revere! Rightly or wrongly, thus he reasoned. From such thoughts there had sprung up and still was growing and destined to grow in the mind of Marcus White a loathing for the law and a desire for vengeance on all who followed it as servitors. Such were the feelings with which he had seen his own father caught in these dreadful toils; practised advocates, perjured witnesses, and crafty detectives, all combining to bring about the climax that was imminent. * * * * *