There would be
the rifle carefully uncleaned, with the fouling marks about breech
and muzzle, to be sworn to by half a dozen superfluous privates;
there would be heat, reeking heat, till the wet pencil slipped
sideways between the fingers; and the punkah would swish and the
pleaders would jabber in the verandahs, and his Commanding Officer
would put in certificates of the prisoner's moral character, while
the jury would pant and the summer uniforms of the witnesses would
smell of dye and soaps; and some abject barrack-sweeper would lose
his head in cross-examination, and the young barrister who always
defended soldiers' cases for the credit that they never brought
him, would say and do wonderful things, and would then quarrel
with me because I had not reported him correctly. At the last, for
he surely would not be hanged, I might meet the prisoner again,
ruling blank account-forms in the Central Jail, and cheer him with
the hope of a wardership in the Andamans.
The Indian Penal Code and its interpreters do not treat murder,
under any provocation whatever,
in a spirit of jest. Sergeant Raines would be very lucky indeed if
he got off with seven years, I thought. He had slept the night
upon his wrongs, and had killed his man at twenty yards before any
talk was possible.
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