The first witness was the clerk at the Harbor Hotel, who had seen Jack when he came. The second, the clerk at the Beach Hotel, where Jack had spent the night. What their testimony had to do with the matter no one could tell. Miss Hansford mentally called the attorney a fool for intruding such matters. She was anxious to get on. So were the spectators, and when the clerks were dismissed they straightened up with new courage and waited for what was to come next. Those who had witnessed the quarrel and knockdown at the hotel were called, their testimony all leaning towards Paul, who, now that his name was used so often, began to listen to what was said and to live it all over again,—hearing Jack’s insulting words, feeling the heavy blow which felled him and involuntarily putting his hand to his side, which was not well yet from the force of Jack’s fist. The boy who had seen him on the sands and heard him say, “I’d like to kill him!” told a straightforward story and identified Paul as the man. The ladies who had been at the Percy cottage when Paul came there testified very unwillingly to the state of high excitement he was in when he left them to find Jack. Miss Hansford’s lodgers, who had been brought from Boston for the trial, took the stand one by one and told of seeing him and speaking to him as he passed the steps on which they were sitting twenty minutes or half an hour before the shot was fired. He was looking for Jack and had asked if they had seen him pass that way. Up to this point, everything that Paul heard was strictly true and just as he remembered it. He would have sworn to it himself had they asked him to do so. But when Seth Walker, the man who had found the revolver with his initials upon it, came forward, he listened with a different interest, and as Seth described his meeting with Miss Hansford and her agitation as she demanded it of him and hid it under her apron, the confusion in his head increased and there was a buzzing in his brain like the sound of machinery in motion. Here was something he could not understand. The revolver was a mystery which he could not explain. “It’s mine; but I have no idea how it came there in the woods,” he said, when it was shown to him, and, returning it to the attorney, he sank into his seat with a feeling that it was going hard with the poor wretch being tried for his life.