"And now, Mr. Foreman and gentlemen of the jury, we come at last to the consideration of the case against the prisoner, and here, for the first time, we find a chain of evidence, circumstantial, to be sure, but in every link so firm and true that it can not by any possibility be broken--a chain of evidence which leads indisputably to the conclusion that the murderer of James Mason and Rose Ashton sits here before you now, the perpetrator of as dastardly a crime as has ever marred the records of our county. The prisoner's story is absolutely unbelievable. He claims that he remembers seeing Mason and Miss Ashton enter the mine, that shortly afterwards he ate his lunch, and that he must have then dozed oft; to sleep, remembering nothing more until Harrison, coming to see what had become of the missing victims, shook him back to consciousness. Certainly an improbable story, even on its face, but in the light of other evidence, clearly appearing as a clumsy lie, an excuse for not being willing to lay himself open to the danger involved by permitting a more extended field for cross-examination. "Mr. Harrison's testimony is clear and concise. He has told us that, on reaching the entrance to the mine, he found Hinckley in a drunken stupor, an empty whisky bottle by his side; that being only partially successful in his efforts to arouse him, he went at once into the mine, descended to the fifth level, where he found Mason's body; then to the sixth, where he found Miss Ashton's; that on his return to the mouth of the mine he found Hinckley still only half aroused; that, upon taking away his revolver and examining it, he found two of the five chambers empty; and that the revolver was a thirty-two caliber. The expert testimony, as you scarcely need to be reminded, has shown that the bullets which killed the two victims fitted with exactness the revolver with which Hinckley was armed. In addition, Miss Mason, who accompanied Mr. Harrison as far as the entrance of the mine, has corroborated his testimony in every detail. Now take, in addition to this evidence, the testimony that Hinckley's work had been far from satisfactory; that since he had gone to work he had persistently got drunk, and several times neglected his duty; that he had on at least two occasions had words with Mason himself, and that on the latter of these occasions he had sworn at Mason, and said that he would 'square up with him some day.' Take all this testimony together, and is not what happened on the afternoon of December seventeenth pretty plainly to be imagined? 'Nothing but theory' perhaps my learned brother may say, and this of necessity is so, for the prisoner will not speak, and from the mute lips of James Mason and Rose Ashton the story of the tragedy we shall never learn. 'Nothing but theory,' and yet how plainly we can see it all. Mason, on coming to the mine, has further words with Hinckley; Hinckley, perhaps even then partly drunk, later,