he
would not take up any more of their valuable time in talk.

And having made this opening statement with all the earnestness and
solemnity of which he was capable Mr. Tutt called to prove the
defendant's good reputation, first, Father Plunkett, the priest to whom
Danny made his monthly confession and who told the jury that he knew no
better man in all his parish; second, Mulqueen, who described Danny's
love of horses, his knowledge of them, his mysterious intuition
concerning their hidden ailments, which, being as they could not speak,
it was given to few to know, and how night after night he would sit up
with a sick or dying animal to relieve its pain without thought of
himself or of any earthly reward; then, man after man and woman after
woman from the neighborhood of West Twenty-third Street who gave Danny
the best of characters, including policemen, firemen, delicatessens,
hotel keepers, and Salvatore, the proprietor of the night lunch
frequented by Mr. Tutt.

And last of all little Katie Lowry. It was she who found the crack in
Bently's moral armor. For Eleanor his wife was of Irish ancestry and of
the colleen type, like Katie; and Bently had always played up to her
Irish side when courting her as a humorous short cut to a quasi
familiarity, for you may call a girl "acushla" and "Ellin darlint" when
otherwise you are fully aware, but for the Irish of it, she would have
to be referred to as Miss Dodworth. And this wisp of a girl with her big
black-fringed gray eyes peering up and out over her gray knitted shawl,
but for the holes in her white stockings and the fact that the alabaster
of her neck was a shade off color--faith, an' it might have been
Eleanor hersilf! It is obvious that any juryman who allows his mind to
be influenced by the mere fact that one of the witnesses for the defense
is a pretty woman--even if she recalls to him his wife or
sweet-heart--is a poor weakling, a silly ass.

Otherwise all a crook need do would be to hire a half dozen of
Ziegfeld's midnight beauties to testify for him by day; and the slender
darlings could work in double shifts and be whisked in auto busses from
roof garden to court room. Bently was no weakling, but Katie--perhaps
because it was the moment of apple blossoms and dogwood and the
anniversary of his wedding day--Katie got him. Kathleen Mavourneen, and
all! No man could have brought up a fatherless and motherless girl like
that and keep her so simple, frank and inno