half?" queried the deputy commissioner.

"I think I'd like to," answered Weil.

He stood to be sworn, took the chair Meagher vacated and sat facing the
room, appearing--so La Farge thought--more shamefaced and abashed than
ever.

"Now, then," commanded Donohue impressively, "what statement, if any,
have you to make, Lieutenant Weil, touchin' on this here charge
preferred by your superior officer?"

Weil cleared his throat. Rogers figured that this bespoke embarrassment;
but, to the biased understanding of the hostile La Farge, there was
something falsely theatrical even in the way Weil cleared his throat.

"Once a grandstander always a grandstander!" he muttered derisively.

"What did you say?" whispered Rogers.

"Nothing," replied La Farge--"just thinking out loud. Listen to what
Foxy Issy has to say for himself."

"Well, sir, commissioner," began the accused, "this here thing happens
last Thursday, just as Captain Meagher is telling you." He had slipped
already into the policeman's trick of detailing a past event in the
present tense.

"It's late in the afternoon--round five o'clock I guess--and I'm
downstairs in the Detective Bureau alone."

"Alone, you say?" broke in Donohue, emphasizing the word as though the
admission scored a point against the man on trial.

"Yes, sir, I'm alone. It happens that everybody else is out and I'm in
temporary charge, as you might say. It's getting along toward dark when
Patrolman Morgan, who's on duty out in the hall, comes in and says to me
there's a woman outside who can't talk English and he can't make out
what she wants. So I tells him to bring her in. She comes in. Right
away I see she's a Ginney--an Italian," he corrected himself hurriedly.
"She's got a child with her--a little boy about two years old."

"Describe this here woman!" ordered Donohue, who loved to drag in
details at a trial, not so much for the sake of the details themselves
as to show his skill as a cross-examiner.

"Well, sir," complied Weil, "I should say she's about twenty-five years
old. It's hard to tell about those Italian women, but I should say she's
about twenty-five--or maybe twenty-six. She's got no figure at all and
she's dressed poor. But she's got a pretty face--big brown eyes and----"

"That will do," interrupted the deputy commissioner--"that will do for
that. I take it you're not qualifyin' here for a beauty expert,
Lieutenant Weil!" he added with elaborate sarcasm.

"You asked m