o, and maybe
Morgan. Who could tell? There was no use in abandoning hope when he was
just where he could see a little daylight.

Joe sat up again, and lifted his head with new confidence. His mother
sat beside him, watching everything with a sharpness which seemed
especially bent on seeing that Joe was given all his rights, and that
nothing was omitted nor slighted that might count in his favor.

She watched Hammer, and Captain Taylor; she measured Sam Lucas, the
prosecutor, and she weighed the judge. When Hammer did something that
pleased her, she nodded; when the prosecutor interposed, or seemed to be
blocking the progress of the case, she shook her head in severe
censure.

And now Joe came in for his first taste of the musty and ancient savor
of the law. He had hoped that morning to walk away free at evening, or
at least to have met the worst that was to come, chancing it that Morgan
failed to appear and give him a hand. But he saw the hours waste away
with the most exasperating fiddling, fussing and scratching over
unprofitable straw.

What Hammer desired in a juryman, the prosecuting attorney was hotly
against, and what pleased the state's attorney seemed to give Hammer a
spasmodic chill. Instead of selecting twelve intelligent men, the most
intelligent of the sixty empaneled, both Hammer and the prosecutor
seemed determined to choose the most dense.

That day's sweating labor resulted in the selection of four jurymen.
Hammer seemed cheered. He said he had expected to exhaust the panel and
get no more than two, at the best. Now it seemed as if they might secure
the full complement without drawing another panel, and that would save
them at least four days. That must have been an exceedingly lucky haul
of empty heads, indeed.

Joe could not see any reason for elation. The prospect of freedom--or
the worst--had withdrawn so far that there was not even a pin-point of
daylight in the gloom. Alice had not shown her face. If she had come at
all, she had withheld herself from his hungry eyes. His heart was as
bleak that night as the mind of the densest juryman agreed upon between
Hammer and the attorney for the state.

Next day, to the surprise of everybody, the jury was completed. And then
there followed, on the succeeding morning, a recital by the prosecuting
attorney of what he proposed and expected to prove in substantiation of
the charge that Joe Newbolt had shot and killed Isom Chase; and Hammer's
no shorter