THE REGULAR HABITUES
of the court begin to arrive. People slip in by degrees and take their seats in that portion of the room reserved for the public. Here comes a poor, pale-faced woman, meanly clad and sick-looking, who with her thin, trembling hand vainly tries to conceal the mark over her eye dealt by her husband’s brutal fist. She has come to appear against him. There, as she sits nursing her griefs and wrongs, she unconsciously falls into that swaying motion peculiar to a woman who is nursing her child to sleep. Here comes a middle-aged man, whose hairs are already white, and whose face is seamed with lines. The sorrow and shame that he feels does not obliterate the expression of stern justice on his face. He has come to see what can be done for his rascal of a son who is charged with burglary. He would not have come of his own accord, he would have let justice take its course, but the cries and moanings of the nearly-crazed wife and mother, whom he has left at home, has driven him here. He has come for her poor sake. Here comes a plainly dressed and modest looking girl, who is sueing for her wages that she earned in the mean kitchen of some meaner man. The quarter to ten rings out and as Micky Free’s father would say “now the pop’lace” comes pouring in. They have been feasting their eyes on the Black Maria, which has just discharged its contents into the station below. They are white, speckled, saddle-colored and black. They are well and poorly dressed.