And, finally, when it is considered that the suppression of the paper was not the overt act of any one man, but the result of a strictly formal presentation of the record on the part of the Judge-Advocate, aided, it may be, by a timely sleight-of-hand in writing the order of approval, and of a blind carelessness on the part of the President in the examination of the papers; this hypothesis goes far to explain the reluctance of General Holt to rest his defense on his own evidence of the confidential interview, his eager grasping after Cabinet corroboration, and the abstention of both Judge-Advocate and President from taking official action upon the charge, the one for vindication, the other for punishment. * * * * * And so the history of this murder of a woman by the forms of military rule slowly unrolls itself, to disclose, as its appropriate finis, the writer of the death-warrant struggling in the meshes of his own fraud. The draughtsman of the unaddressed petition for commutation, after waiting eight years for death to clear the way, comes to the help of his old colleague, only to be caught in the same net. The entangled twain call up the sullen shade of their departed master, and force him to father the trick he fain would have scorned. These three are the men who, when the summary methods of martial law would else have failed to crush out entirely the life of their victim, contrived to attain their bloody end by cool and deliberate chicanery. The other actors on the scene may plead the madness of the time. For these three no such plea is open. They superadded to the common madness of the time the particular malice of the felon. Upon their three heads should descend the full weight of criminal turpitude involved in this most unnatural execution.