The daily Alaskan., 1917-01-02

of the Law Was Cautiously Turned
 Aside From lnHiOting Punishment
 Upon an Innocent Person.
 As a rule, law proceedings are dry affairs, but there have been some wherein the facts riyaled the most TO- mantle fiction.
 About the middle of the eighteenth century vessel arrived one day at an English port from India. The captain reported that, while sailing through the Indian ocean, one of his passen- gers, a man of wealth and rank, had been murdered and then accused one of his passengers, a young brother of the murdered man, of the crime.
 Though protesting his innocence, the accused was brought to trial. When put upon the stand the captain swore that about midnight on the evening of the murder, which was Christmas eve, he had seen the accused leave his own cabin, creep stealthily along the deck to the cabin of his brother and there enter Shortly after, the captain test- fed, he heard the sounds of a struggle and then saw the accused emerge and return to his cabin. On going to the cabin of the elder brother be found him dead from strangulation. Under cross examination the captain said that he, himself, was concealed from the view of the accused man by the deep shadow cast by the sail in the light of a full moon, while the accused had been compelled to creep in the light for quite a distance, which rendered him perfectly recognizable. The sec ond mate, who testified that he was with the captain, swore to the same facts.
 There was no other evidence except the denial of the aSGused, who, 1t was shown, would profit largely by his brothers death. Just as the case was about to be given to the jury a man in the courtroom asked permission to put O single question to the captain.
 "Now." said the stranger when the captain had returned to the stand, If you recognized the prisoner in the light of a full moon on last Christmas eve, how do you, who know something of astronomy, account for the fact that on last Christmas eve there occurred a total eclipse of the sun"
 Trapped thus in his own circumstan- tial lies, the captain broke down and confessed that he and the mate had been hired to commit the murder by a third relative, who, upon the death of the younger brother, would have fallen heir to both their estates.
 In a celebrated court martial case which came up for trial in 1871 young lieutenant was accused of hay Ing forged another mans name to a promissory note and obtained money on it. The accusing witness produced the note ln question, which was writ ten upon a sheet of blue ruled fOolscap paper and bore date of the year 1867.
 Everything had gone against the de- fendant and the case was about to go to the Jury, when the sweetheart of the lieutenant, who was sitting beside him at the trial, happened 10 pick up the note and hold 1t in such way that strong light from the window shone through the paper. There, to her joy, she read the watermark, "Swampscott Mills, 1S69." In other words, the note purpOrted to have been written on the paper two years before the paper had been manufactured.
 The year 1869 figures in another strange lawsuit. In the year 1880 cer- tain persons in New Mexico claimedNa huge tract of hundreds of thousands of acres as the heirs of one Bartolomo Baca, to whom, they alleged, the Span iSh government had, in 1917, made a grant They exhibited the deed of grant and sued to obtain possession. On the trial the deed of grant stood every test of genuineness, and a de cree was entered awarding the i'm mense property to the claimants.
 Some months afterward as John Waldron, the attorney for the Santa Fe railroad, who had been the princi-  pal losers, was reading a paper his eye rested on this little paragraph, Ami line ink was invented in 1869 in Ger many" As he read the thought flashed through his mind, What kind of ink was the Baca land grant written in| By permission of the court he had a chemist make a quiet test of the ink of the grant, and when he read the chemists report he cabled to a certain German chemist in Europe. Six months after, when the case was, by permission of the court, reopened on account of newly discovered evidence, a white bearded stranger took the stand and in ten minutes sent the case of the Baca heirs out of court and the heirs themselves into the penitentiary by swearing that he was the inventor of aniline ink, that the invention was