Bud had sat perfectly stolid during the harangue. Once he reached down with one long arm and scratched his bare ankle with his forefinger, his eyes, with the gentle light in them that had first attracted me, glancing aimlessly about the room; then he settled back again in his chair, its back creaking to the strain of his shoulders. Whenever he looked at the speaker, which was seldom, a slight curl, expressing more contempt than anxiety, crept along his lips. He was, no doubt, comparing his own muscles to those of the buzzard and wondering what he would do to him if he ever caught him out alone. Men of enormous strength generally measure the abilities of others by their own standards. "Mr. Bowditch will take the chair!" cried the prosecutor. At the summons, a thin, wizen-faced, stubbly-bearded man of fifty, his shirt-front stained with tobacco-juice, rose from his seat and took the stand. The struggle for possession of the bag must have been a brief one, for he was but a dwarf compared to the prisoner. In a low, constrained voice--the awful hush of the court-room had evidently impressed him--and in plain, simple words, in strong contrast to the flowery opening of the prosecutor, he recounted the facts as he knew them. He told of the sudden command to halt; of the attack in the rear and the quick jerking of the mail-bags from beneath his saddle, upsetting him into the road; of the disappearance of the robber in the bushes, his head and shoulders only outlined against the dim light of the stars; of the flight of the robber, and of his finding the bag a few yards away from the place of assault with the bottom cut. None of the letters was found opened; which ones were missing tie couldn't say. Of one thing he was sure--none were left behind by him on the ground, when he refilled the bag. The bag, with a slash in the bottom as big as its mouth, was then passed around the jury-box, each juror in his inspection of the cut seeming to be more interested in the way in which the bag was manufactured (some of them, I should judge, had never examined one before) than in the way in which it was mutilated. The bag was then put in evidence and hung over the back of a chair, mouth down, the gash in its bottom in full view of the jury. This gash, from where I sat, looked like one inflicted on an old-fashioned rubber football by a high kicker. Hank Halliday, in a deerskin waistcoat and dust-stained slouch hat, which he crumpled up in his hand and held under his chin, was the next witness.