"Impanel a jury!" continued the judge, and Mr. Tutt conducted Tony inside the rail and sat down beside him at the table reserved for the defendant.
"It's all right, Tony!" he whispered. "The frame-up isn't on you this time, my lad."
Cowering in the back of the room Delany tried to hide himself among the spectators. Some devilish thing had gone wrong. He hadn't heard all that had passed between the judge and Hogan, but he had caught enough to perceive that the whole case had gone blooey.
Judge Watkins was wise! He was going after Hogan just as old Tutt would go after him, Delany. There was a singing in his head and the blood smarted in his eyes. He'd better beat it! Half bent over he started sneaking for the door.
"Who is that man trying to go out?" shouted the judge in terrifying tones that shook Delany to the ankles. Hastily he tried to sit down.
"Bring that man to the bar!"
Half blind with fear Delany attempted to make a show of bravado and swagger to the rail.
"What is your name?"
"Delany. Officer attached to the Second Precinct."
"What were you leaving the room for?"
Delany could not answer. His wits were befogged, his throat numb. He simply stared vacuously at Judge Watkins, his lips vibrating with fear.
"Sit down. No; take the stand!" cried Judge Watkins. "I'll try this case myself."
As if his foot were already attached to a ball and chain Delany dragged himself up—up—hundreds of feet up, it seemed—to the witness chair. As if from a mountain side he saw dim forms moving into the jury box, heard the judge and Mr. Tutt exchanging meaningless remarks. The faces before him grinned and gibbered at him like a horde of monkeys. They had got him at last—all for a few pieces of rotten beef! That lean, hungry wolfhound would tear his tongue out by the roots if he even opened his mouth; claw wide open his vitals. And old Tutt was fixing him with the eye of a basilisk and slowly turning him to stone. Somebody sure had welshed! He had once been in a side show at Coney Island where the room simulated the motion of an ocean steamer. The courtroom began to do the same—slanting this way and that and spinning obliquely round and round. Through the swirl of its gyrations he could see old Tutt's vulture eyes, growing bigger, fiercer, more sinister every instant. It was all up with him! It was an execution, and the crowd down below were thirsting for his blood, waiting to tear him to bits!
"You saw this boy throw a brick through Mr. Froelich's window, didn't you?" coaxed Judge Watkins insinuatingly. Delany sensed that the old white fox was trying to trick him—get him for perjury. No! He wouldn't perjure himself again! No! But what could he do? His head swung stupidly, swaying like a dazed bull's. The sweat poured from every pore in his vast bulk. A hoarse noise—like a death rattle—came from his throat. The room dissolved in waves of white and black. Then in a vertigo he toppled forward and pitched headlong to the floor.
Deacon Terry, star reporter for the Tribune, who happened to be there, told his city editor at noon that he had never passed such a pleasant morning. What he saw and heard really constituted, he alleged, a great big full front-page story "in a box"—though it got only four sticks on the eleventh page—being crowded out by the armistice. Why, he said, it was the damnedest thing ever! There had been no evidence against the defendant at all! And after the cop had collapsed Judge Watkins had refused to dismiss the case and directed Mr. Tutt to go on in his own way.
The proceeding had resolved itself into a criminal trial of Hogan and Simpkins. Tony's good character had been established in three minutes, and then half a dozen reputable witnesses had testified that the brick had been thrown by an entirely different boy. Finally, Sussman and his assistant both swore positively that Delany had been in the back of the tobacco shop with his back to the door, holding them up for cigars, when the crash came.
Terry wanted two columns; he almost cried when they cut his great big full-page story to:
SHYSTERS ACCUSED OF EXTORTION
A dramatic scene was enacted at the conclusion of a minor case in Part I of the General Sessions yesterday, when upon the motion of Ephraim Tutt, of the firm of Tutt & Tutt, Judge Simeon Watkins, sitting as a committing magistrate, held for the action of the grand jury Raphael B. Hogan and Joseph P. Simpkins, his assistant, for the crime of extortion, and directed that their case be referred to the Grievance Committee of the County Lawyers' Association for the necessary action for their disbarment.
Earlier in the trial a police officer named Delany, the supposed chief witness for the prosecution, fainted and fell from the witness chair. Upon his recovery he was then and there committed for perjury, in default of ten thousand dollars bail. It is understood that he has signified his willingness to turn state's evidence, but that his offer has not been accepted. So far as can be ascertained this is the first time either Hogan or Simpkins has been accused of a criminal offense. District Attorney Peckham stated that in addition to separate indictments for extortion and perjury he would ask for another, charging all three defendants with the crime of conspiracy to obstruct the due administration of the law.
At the conclusion of the proceedings Judge Watkins permitted a voluntary collection to be taken up by Mr. Tutt on behalf of the accused among the jury, the court attendants and the spectators, which amounted to eleven hundred and eighty-nine dollars. In this connection the judge expressed the opinion that it was unfortunate that persons falsely accused of crime and unjustly imprisoned should have no financial redress other than by a special act of the legislature. The defendant in the case at bar had been locked up for six weeks. Among the contributions was found a new one-thousand-dollar bill.
"Talk about crime!" quoth the Deacon savagely to Charlie Still, of the Sun. "That feckless fool at the city desk committed assault, mayhem and murder on that story of mine!" Then he added pensively: "If I thought old man Tutt would slip me a thousand to soothe my injured feelings I'd go down and retain his firm myself!"
The Kid and the Camel
Breathes there the man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
—LAY OF THE LAST MINSTREL.
The shortest street in the world, Edgar Street, connects New York's financial center with the Levant. It is less than fifty feet through this tiny thoroughfare from the back doors of the great Broadway office buildings to Greenwich Street, where the letters on the window signs resemble contorted angleworms and where one is as likely to stumble into a man from Bagdad as from Boston. One can stand in the middle of it and with his westerly ear catch the argot of Gotham and with his easterly all the dialects of Damascus. And if through some unexpected convulsion of Nature 51 Broadway should topple over, Mr. Zimmerman, the stockbroker, whose office is on the sixth story, might easily fall clear of the Greek restaurant in the corner of Greenwich Street, roll twenty-five yards more down Morris Street, and find himself on Washington Street reading a copy of Al-Hoda and making his luncheon off baha gannouge, majaddarah and milookeiah, which, after all, are only eggplant salad, lentils and rice, and the popular favorite known as Egyptian Combination.
To most New Yorkers this is a section of the city totally unknown and unsuspected, yet existing as in a fourth dimension within a stone's throw—and nearer—of our busiest metropolitan artery—and there within one hundred yards of the aforesaid Mr. Zimmerman's office above the electric cars of Broadway, and within earshot of the hoots of many a multimillionaire's motor, on a certain evening something of an Oriental character was doing in the hallway of a house on Washington Street that subsequently played a part in the professional lives of Tutt & Tutt.
Out of the literally Egyptian darkness of the tenement