After they had debated the matter some time among them, Richard Mills, jun., proposed this method: “As Chater is already chained to a post, let us,” said he, “load a gun with two or three bullets, lay it upon a stand, with the muzzle of the piece levelled at his head, and, after having tied a long string to the trigger, we will all go to the butt end, and, each of us taking hold of the string, pull it together; thus we shall be all equally guilty of his death, and it will be impossible for any one of us to charge the rest with his murder, without accusing himself of the same crime; and none can pretend to lessen or mitigate their guilt by saying they were only accessories, since all will be principals.” But some, more infernally barbarous than the rest (but who, the witness Steel could not recollect), objected to this proposal as too expeditious a method of dispatching him, and that it would put him out of his misery too soon; for they were resolved that he should suffer as much and as long as they could make his life last, as a terror to all such informing rogues (as they termed it) for the future. This proposal being rejected, another was offered and agreed to, and that was--to go to old Major Mills, and fetch him away from thence, and carry him up to Harris’s Well, near Lady Holt Park, and throw him in there, as they intended to have done with Galley, as the most effectual method to secrete the murder from the knowledge of the world; forgetting that the eye of Providence was constantly upon them, watched all their motions, and would certainly, one day or other, bring to light their deeds of darkness; and that Divine Justice never forgets the cries of the oppressed, but will, in due time, retaliate the cruelties exercised on the innocent, on the heads of their inexorable tormentors. All this while the unhappy Chater remained in the most deplorable situation that ever miserable wretch was confined to; his mind full of horror, and his body all over pain and anguish with the blows and scourges they had given him, and every moment in expectation of worse treatment than he had yet met with, without any sustenance to support his wretched life, than now and then a little bread and water, and once some pease porridge. Besides all this, he was continually visited by one or other of them, not to comfort or relieve him with words of kindness, or promises of better usage; not to refresh him with cordials or agreeable nourishment, but to renew their cruel exercise of beating and abusing him, and to swear and upbraid him in the vilest terms and the most scurrilous language that their tongues could utter.