oncluded, the few jurymen who had
managed to wriggle through the judicial sieve were allowed to withdraw,
the balance of the calendar was adjourned, those spectators who were
standing up were ordered to sit down and those already sitting down were
ordered to sit somewhere else, the prisoners in the rear of the room
were sent back to the Tombs to await their fate upon some later day, the
reporters gathered rapaciously about the table just behind the
defendant, a corpulent Ganymede in the person of an aged court officer
bore tremblingly an opaque glass of yellow drinking water to the bench,
O'Brien the prosecutor blew his nose with a fanfare of trumpets, Mr.
Tutt smiled an ingratiating smile which seemed to clasp the whole world
to his bosom--and the real battle commenced; a game in which every card
in the pack had been stacked against the prisoner by an unscrupulous
pair of officials whose only aim was to maintain their record of
convictions of "murder in the first" and who laid their plans with
ingenuity and carried them out with skill and enthusiasm to habitual
success.

They were a grand little pair of convictors, were Babson and O'Brien,
and woe unto that man who was brought before them. It was even alleged
by the impious that when Babson was in doubt what to do or what O'Brien
wanted him to do the latter communicated the information to his
conspirator upon the bench by a system of preconcerted signals. But
indeed no such system was necessary, for the judge's part in the drama
was merely to sustain his colleague's objections and overrule those of
his opponent, after which he himself delivered the _coup de grace_ with
unerring insight and accuracy. When Babson got through charging a jury
the latter had always in fact been instructed in brutal and sneering
tones to convict the defendant or forever after to regard themselves as
disloyal citizens, oath violators and outcasts though the stenographic
record of his remarks would have led the reader thereof to suppose that
this same judge was a conscientious, tender-hearted merciful lover of
humanity, whose sensitive soul quivered at the mere thought of a prison
cell, and who meticulously sought to surround the defendant with every
protection the law could interpose against the imputation of guilt.

He was, as Tutt put it, "a dangerous old cuss." O'Brien was even worse.
He was a bull-necked, bullet-headed, pugnosed young ruffian with beery
eyes, who had an insatiable ambiti