o combat; all my
life, man!--always! There were periods months long when devils came up
from the ugly corners of my soul to torture and tempt me.

"It wasn't the ordinary temptation, not a weak, pale idea of 'I'd like
to kill and see the blood!'--but an uproar, an imperial voice, an
endless command: 'Kill! Draw blood! Kill!'--What it did to me----

"But to this day I've beaten it! I've been a good citizen. I've observed
the law. I've refused to let that involuntary lust for blood ruin me or
cast me out.

"Let me tell you how. I decided that, if I had a hand in awarding just
punishments, my affliction would be abated enough for me to live in some
measure of security. There you have the explanation of my being on the
bench. I cheated the obsession to murder by helping to imprison or
execute those who did murder!

"That's why I can tell you of my innocence of the Brace murder. Do you
think I'd tell it unless I knew there could be not even an excuse for
suspecting me? On the other hand, if I had kept silent as to the true
motive that drove my hand to those unnecessary mutilations of young
Dalton--the only time, remember, that my weakness ever got the better,
or the worse, of me!--if I had kept silent on that, you would have had
ground for suspecting me of a barbarous murder then, and, arguing from
that, of the Brace murder now.

"Do I make myself clear?--Do you want me to go into further detail?"

He sank slowly back to his chair, spent by the strain of supreme effort.
His breathing was laboured, stertorous.

"That, Crown," Hastings denounced, "is a confession! Knowing he's
caught, he's got the insolence to whine for mercy because of his
'sufferings'! Think of it! The thing of which he boasts is the thing for
which he deserves death--since death is supposed to be the supreme
punishment. He tells us, in self-congratulatory terms, that he curbed
his inhuman longings, satisfied his lust for blood, by going on the
bench and helping to 'punish those who did murder!'

"Too cowardly to strike a blow, he skulked behind the protection of his
position. He made of the judicial robe an assassin's disguise. On the
bench, he was free to sate his thirst for others' sufferings--adding to
a sentence five undeserved years here, ten there; slipping into his
instructions to juries a phrase that would mean the death penalty!

"He revelled in judicial murders. He gloated over the helpless people
who, looking to him for justice, were me