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Peter Blood had listened to the intemperate, the blasphemous, and
almost obscene invective of that tirade with a detachment that
afterwards, in retrospect, surprised him. He was so amazed by the
man, by the reactions taking place in him between mind and body,
and by his methods of bullying and coercing the jury into bloodshed,
that he almost forgot that his own life was at stake.
The absence of that dazed jury was a brief one. The verdict found
the three prisoners guilty. Peter Blood looked round the
scarlet-hung court. For an instant that foam of white faces seemed
to heave before him. Then he was himself again, and a voice was
asking him what he had to say for himself, why sentence of death
should not be passed upon him, being convicted of high treason.
He laughed, and his laugh jarred uncannily upon the deathly stillness
of the court. It was all so grotesque, such a mockery of justice
administered by that wistful-eyed jack-pudding in scarlet, who was
himself a mockery - the venal instrument of a brutally spiteful and
vindictive king.


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