And then at last came Stuyvesant's turn to speak for himself, and in dead silence all men present faced him and listened with bated breath to his brief, sorrowful words. He was the officer halted by the sentry on Number 6 and called upon to come back. The sentry did not catch his name and had to have it spelled. He frankly admitted his impatience, but denied all anger at the enforced detention. The information about the fire at Colonel Brent's had caused him anxiety and alarm, and as soon as released by the sentry he had run, had passed the patrol on the run, but there had been no altercation, no misunderstanding even. The sentry had carried out his orders in a soldierly way that compelled the admiration of the witness, and before leaving him Stuyvesant had told him that he had done exactly right. The news that the sentry was found dead five minutes thereafter was a shock. Lieutenant Stuyvesant declared he carried no fire-arms whatever that night and was utterly innocent of the sentry's death. He recognized, he said, the revolver exhibited by Major MacNeil. He did not hesitate to admit that he had seen and examined it late the previous afternoon at the quarters of Colonel Brent, that he had actually put it in his trousers pocket not two minutes before he left the house to go in search of Lieutenant Ray, but he solemnly declared that as he left the veranda he placed the pistol on a little table just to the right of the broad entrance to the salon, within that apartment, and never saw it again until it was produced here. Frank, candid, "open and aboveboard" as was the manner of the witness, it did not fail to banish in great measure the feeling of antagonism that had first existed against him in the crowded throng. But in the cold logic of the law and the chain of circumstantial evidence they plainly saw that every statement, even that of Stuyvesant himself, bore heavily against him. A lawyer, had he been represented by counsel, would have permitted no such admissions as he had made. A gentleman, unschooled in the law, preferred the frank admission to the distress of seeing Mrs. Brent--and perhaps others--called into that presence to testify to his having had the pistol with him when he left the gallery. Brent in his bewilderment had blurted out his wife's words in the hearing of the provost-marshal's people late the night before, and he and his household were yet to be called, and when called would have to say that though they passed and possibly repassed through the salon between the moment of Stuyvesant's departure and that of their going out to dinner, not one of their number noticed even so bright and gleaming an object as Maidie's revolver. True, the lights were not brilliant in the salon. True, the little table stood back against the wall five or six feet from the door-way. Still, that pistol was a prominent object, and a man must have been in extraordinary haste indeed to leave a loaded weapon "lying round loose" in the hall.