Scathlan 2

Until within 48 hours of the actual trial O'Donnell's legal advisers had to contemplate on the charge that he was specially appointed to carry out the killing. Evidence was needed to corroborate O'Donnell's declaration to the contrary: a complete chain of irreproachable evidence was patiently and skilfully collected. They traced the prisoner, step by step, from Nevada to Philadelphia - to New York - to Derry - to London and to the Cape. They proved at every stage the express purpose of his visit to his native Donegal lto make a pilgrimage to Doon Well) and his reasons to try his fortunes at the South African diamond fields. Among these witnesses was his bank manager in Derry who .arranged his cash draft in Capetown and gave him a letter of introduction to a gentleman there long before the Crown thought of sending Carey to the Cape. This portion of the defence preparations not only cost an enormous amount of money but taxed to the utmost strain the physical and mental strain of O'Donnell's legal advisers through every hour of the night and day. After all this trouble - after America, South Africa, Ireland and London had been ransacked - after they had triumphantly vindicated O'Donnell's truthfulness and a whole chain of witnesses had been collected - then at the last moment the Crown threw in the sponge after having carried out their own investigations on the same point. They admitted that O'Donnell had no preconceived idea or purpose against the life of Carey. There then remained only the other portion of the Crown story and a very lame and improbable portion: that O'Donnell without any cause or provocation, heat or anger, dispute or difference, in a public saloon, before half a dozen people, while quietly seated on a bench, face to face with a powerful athletic man who could have doubled him up in a minute, deliberately took out a small nickel revolver and began leisurely firing into that powerful and desperate man till he fell dead. This lunatic story rested totally on the evidence of two individuals, one of whom was demonstrably a liar - that is young Carey: the other was the officer's servant, Parish; to his last breath O'Donnell declared Parish was absent from the saloon till the noise of the first bullet attracted his attention. · On the other hand O'Donnell's story was probably natural and almost self-evident. Carey in an electrically sudden flash of over-charged suspicion and fear, when provoked by O'Donnell's savage explosion against "blasted informers", drew a pistol. O'Donnell dashed it from his hand just as he fired his own into Carey's face. His blood was now raised and he followed with two other shots as he saw the Phoenix Park murder-plotter stoop towards the fallen pistol. Mr. Russell's masterly and irresistiblP. argument at the trial showed that there were hundreds of circumstances and considerations to prove that Carey had that pistol there and then - then if ever and there if anywhere: and that young Carey picked it off the floor in the following confusion was a conclusion that needed little oroof. But was it safe to trust to this circumstantial evidence and to the drawing of Carey's pistol? This was the critical and determining point of the whole case and could they find any direct and positive testimony? 52