The aspect of the court-martial was far from reassuring even to men of worldly experience on broad lines. The impassive, serious, bearded faces, the military figures in full-dress uniform, the brilliant insignia of high rank being specially pronounced, for of course no officer of lower degree than that of the prisoner was permitted to sit, were ranged on each side of a long table on a low rostrum in a large room, formerly a fraternity hall, in a commercial building now devoted to military purposes. The spectacle might well have made the heart quail. It seemed so expressive of the arbitrary decrees of absolute force, oblivious of justice, untempered by mercy! A jury as an engine of the law must needs be considered essentially imperfect, and subject to many deteriorating influences, only available as the best device for eliciting fact and appraising crises that the slow development of human morals has yet presented. But to a peaceful civilian a jury of ignorant, shock-headed rustics might seem a safe and reasonable repository of the dearest values of life and reputation in comparison with this warlike phalanx, combining the functions of both judge and jury, the very atmosphere of destruction sucked in with every respiration. The president, a brevet brigadier-general, at the head of the table, was of a peculiarly fierce physiognomy, that yet was stony cruel. The judge-advocate at the foot had the look of laying down the law by main force. He had a keenly aggressive manner. He was a captain of cavalry, brusque, alert; he had dark side whiskers and a glancing dark eye, and was the only man on the rostrum attired in an undress uniform. His multifarious functions as the official prosecutor for the government, and also adviser to the court, and yet attorney for the prisoner to a degree,--by a theory similar to the ancient fiction of English law that the judge is counsel for the accused,--would seem, in civilian estimation, to render him "like Cerberus, three gentlemen at once," as Mrs. Malaprop would say, or a military presentment of Pooh-Bah. The nominal military accuser, acting in concert with the judge-advocate, seated at a little distance, was conscious of sustaining an unpopular _rôle_, and it had tinged his manner with disadvantage. The prisoner appeared without any restraint, of course, but wearing no sword. The special values of his presence, his handsome face, his blond hair and beard that had a glitter not unlike the gold lace of his full-dress uniform, his fine figure and highbred, reserved manner, were very marked in his conspicuous position, occupying a chair at a small table on the right of the judge-advocate. Baynell had a calm dignity and a look of steady, immovable courage incongruous with his plight, arraigned on so base a charge, and yet a sort of blighted, wounded dismay, as unmistakable as a burn, was on his face, that might have moved even one who had cared naught for him to resentment, to protest for his sake.