he prosecution was Mrs. Dyson. She
described how on the night of November 29, 1876, she had come out of
the outhouse in the yard at the back of her house, and found herself
confronted by Peace holding a revolver; how he said: "Speak, or I'll
fire!" and the sequence of events already related up to the moment when
Dyson fell, shot in the temple.

Mr. Lockwood commenced his cross-examination of Mrs. Dyson by
endeavouring to get from her an admission; the most important to the
defence, that Dyson had caught hold of Peace after the first shot had
been fired, and that in the struggle which ensued, the revolver had gone
off by accident. But he was not very successful. He put it to Mrs. Dyson
that before the magistrate at Sheffield she had said: "I can't say
my husband did not get hold of the prisoner." "Put in the little
word 'try,' please," answered Mrs. Dyson. In spite of Mr. Lockwood's
questions, she maintained that, though her husband may have attempted to
get hold of Peace, he did not succeed in doing so. As she was the only
witness to the shooting there was no one to contradict her statement.

Mr. Lockwood fared better when he came to deal with the relations of
Mrs. Dyson with Peace previous to the crime. Mrs. Dyson admitted that
in the spring of 1876 her husband had objected to her friendship with
Peace, and that nevertheless, in the following summer, she and Peace
had been photographed together at the Sheffield fair. She made a vain
attempt to escape from such an admission by trying to shift the occasion
of the summer fair to the previous year, 1875, but Mr. Lockwood put
it to her that she had not come to Darnall, where she first met Peace,
until the end of that year. Finally he drove her to say that she could
not remember when she came to Darnall, whether in 1873, 1874, 1875, or
1876. She admitted that she had accepted a ring from Peace, but could
not remember whether she had shown it to her husband. She had been
perhaps twice with Peace to the Marquis of Waterford public-house, and
once to the Star Music Hall. She could not swear one way or the other
whether she had charged to Peace's account drink consumed by her at an
inn in Darnall called the Half-way House. Confronted with a little girl
and a man, whom Mr. Lockwood suggested she had employed to carry notes
to Peace, Mrs. Dyson said that these were merely receipts for pictures
which he had framed for her. On the day before her husband's murder,
Mrs. Dyson was at