Читать книгу The Queen Versus Billy, and Other Stories онлайн

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Then rose Burder for the Queen. He was a cheeky youngster, with pink cheeks, a glib tongue, and no end of assurance.

“I don’t propose to waste the time of the honourable court,” he began; “but if ever there was a flat-footed, self-confessed murderer, I would say it is the dusky gentleman in the dock. The blood of Biggar cries aloud for vengeance, and it would be a shame if it cried in vain,” he said. He would point to that dreary ruin of which the defunct had been the manly ornament, radiating civilisation round him like a candle in the dark, and then to that black monster, who had felled him down. This kind of thing had got to stop in the Solomon Islands; the natives were losing all respect for whites, and he put it to the court whether they would not jeopardise the life of the new trader if they acquitted the murderer of the old. Now that they had got their hand in, he would go even further, and hang up with Billy the three witnesses for the prosecution, old Jib and the other brace of jossers, who had villain and cutthroat stamped—