Page:Stories of Bengalee life - Prabhat Kumar Mukerji.pdf/75

Rh Nagendra Babu delivered the judgment. The accused were all found guilty and sentenced to undergo three months' rigorous imprisonment and to pay a fine of fifty rupees each.

As soon as this was known, the boys gave three shouts of Bande Mataram, just to cheer up the accused. With great difficulty the Police stopped the outburst and cleared the room.

Babu Kalikant, the leading pleader for the defence, asked for the judgment and read it through. The Deputy Magistrate wrote that no doubt there were many discrepancies in the prosecution evidence but they were only "minor discrepancies." If anything, they served to show that the prosecution witnesses were not tutored. It was true that some witnesses said that the unlawful assembly consisted of fifteen or twenty boys while others gave the number as fifty or sixty. None of these witnesses actually counted the number of boys there, so it was quite natural that they should differ in their estimates. The complainant swore that the accused had caused the injury on his forehead by slaps and fisticuffs while the medical evidence was that it could not have been caused in that manner. The learned pleader for the defence laid great stress on this point and invited the Court to hold that the case was a got-up one. But to the Deputy