ays the sickening odor of the overheated court-room choked him, and
his head throbbed unceasingly, and the balls of his eyes beat in
anguished unison.

The first electric-car passing the house in the early dawn crashed into
his dream as the bullet that was speeding from his revolver to Dr.
Morgan's heart, and found its resting-place in Sydney's breast instead.
He woke to find himself soaked with the sweat of exhaustion.

The cloud of that day on the mountain still clung around his fancy as
he went out upon the street again. A horrible something, as penetrable
as mist, as keen as the sting of conscience, as inevitable as the
burden of life, seemed to inwrap him. He felt it dully, and wondered
how much of it was physical and how much mental, and he didn't care
which it was.

He ate a little breakfast, though it was odious to him, and went out
to meet again the lantern-jawed mountaineers, who, like him,--_like
him_,--were drifting towards the Federal Building.

Yes, he was going to the court-room to be tried for a criminal offence;
he was a criminal, a criminal, a criminal. It buzzed angrily through
his head.

He stumbled over a child sitting beside his mother on the edge of the
sidewalk in front of the post-office. The woman had her elbows on her
knees and her face in her hands, and in her eyes was the look of
waiting that comes to women with uncertain husbands. She cuffed the
child, and then shook him to still the uproar she had created. Two more
children sat on the curb beyond her, and beyond them, up Haywood
Street, men leaned against the iron fence or squatted in pairs upon the
sidewalk. Friedrich wondered how they kept their balance, and went on
up the stairs, through pools of tobacco-juice, to the court-room, where
the day's work already had begun.

He secured a seat, and leaned his head against the wall. A negro man,
accused of fraudulently obtaining a pension, was explaining volubly how
he had received the injury upon which he based his claim.

His case was given to the jury, which filed out, and the second set of
men made themselves comfortable in the abandoned seats, with much
scraping of chairs and of throats, and adjustment of cuspidors to the
range of each juror.

The case of the next prisoner, tried on a charge of a fraudulent use of
the mails, lashed to frenzy the prosecuting attorney. He compared this
foul violator of the laws of his country with Sextus and Benedict
Arnold and Judas Iscariot. The