The boatswains testified that they had not, and Tom requested that his irons be removed for his demonstration. He was freed, and stepped toward the weather alley. "Now, I'll go aloft, Mr. Rogers," he said, "to the same place on the yard as he was, and you take the same place on the quarter where you was when you seed him up there. Then you start forward, just as you did, and I'll do just what he did." The captain nodded assent to this, and I went aft to the log while Tom danced aloft to the lee topsail yard. "All ready, sir!" he called. "Start now!" I faithfully reproduced my steps along the alley, down to the main deck, and into the passage, where I killed time at the log desk. As I turned to leave it I heard Tom call, "Now it is, sir!" from the mate's window, and, stepping out on deck, I went through the pantomime of leaning over Mabel, talking with the captain, and going to the mate's room to call him. Before I had reached the door, however, Tom's voice came from aloft. "Four bells!" he shouted. "All's well!" I came out. The captain was holding his watch, and Tom was leisurely descending. "You were slightly mistaken, Mr. Rogers," said the captain. "He did it in less than three minutes. He slid down the middle buntlines of the treesails, took time enough at the window, and went up hand over hand forward of the cro'-jack, then up the topmast rigging. He has proved his innocence by proving his brother guilty. But--God help such brothers!" "And Gawd help you, you old fool," yelled Bill, as he waved his manacled hands at the skipper, "if I get out o' this fix! I didn't kill him, though I meant to, and I'll kill you yet as sure as I meant to kill him!" "Down below with him, Mr. Rogers!" said the captain, and I took the frenzied Bill to the 'tween deck, where I lashed him to a stanchion, still raving and threatening, not only the captain, but his brother Tom and myself. "For it's you," he raved, "that give him a chance to show off his climbin'! What if there was time? D'ye think I'd ha' been fool enough, up aloft where I could see, to come down on that job with the girl puttin' herself in the way? He was on the poop, and couldn't see where she was." Though I made him no answer, I confess that this aspect of the case troubled me as we sailed on toward Sydney. I said no more about it, though at the trial of Bill at Sydney I introduced it in my testimony. It had little weight. A captain's preconceived opinion of a sailor's guilt often has more influence in court than solid evidence to the contrary, and Bill was convicted of murder in the first degree on the testimony of his brother and the captain's story of the climb.