Courtmartialed

• Watchlist

Jules, scapegrace son of General Bleriat, overhears a conversation between his father and a messenger about some precious military secrets. At "The Stag," a roulette club where the son spends the evenings, he again loses heavily. On his way home he is accosted by a masked stranger who, having learned of the valuable papers at General Bleriat's house and desiring to possess them, volunteers to give Jules a handsome sum if he will obtain the papers. Fearing exposure by De Vorchien, to whom he owes a considerable sum and being reminded of this fact by the stranger, Jules agrees to the other's demands. The son, masked, is about to get the military secrets when his father awakens. There is a struggle in which the son is wounded on the arm with a knife. The son later escapes with the papers and exchanges them for the gold. The general the next day makes a report of the assault, and declares that the person who attacked him wore a uniform and received a wound on the arm. Greatly worried, Jules goes to the home of his sweetheart, Marie, where he finds his rival, Jeffry Le Bland. He observes the ring on Marie's finger, and knows that he has lost. A diabolical scheme is evolved by Jules which will jeopardize his rival in the eyes of Marie, and he determines to put it into effect. He takes a knife from his pocket under the pretext of killing himself. When Jeffry goes to stop him, Jules stabs his rival in the arm. At the barracks, Bleriat, who has learned of the enmity between his son and Jeffry, has the latter put into the military prison under suspicion. At the trial Jeffry swears innocence, and testifies that the wound was received in an encounter with Jules. But this assertion is refuted by the son, who under a terrible nervous strain, leaves for home and confesses everything to his mother. She goes to the barracks and tells her husband, who frees Jeffry. The mother pleads with her husband to spare their son, even if his act involves a scheme whereby he will be enabled to get into another country never to return. The old general, to satisfy his wife, consents, but in reality he remains obdurate and resolves to adhere to the law. He forgives his son for his attack on the night the papers were stolen, but the disgrace of treason is constantly in his mind. At sundown the son is executed. The general, unable to witness the affair, is at home with his wife, who is happy in the thought that her husband has seen to it that blank cartridges were substituted in place of bullets and that their son has feigned death and escaped.