If the spectators had expected a piteous appeal for mercy or a burst of prison rhetoric, they were disappointed. The prisoner summed his case up carefully, arguing that there was a reasonable doubt upon the evidence to which he was entitled; begged the jury not to condemn him merely because he appeared before them as one charged with a crime; appealed to them for justice; and at the close, for the first time forgetting the proprieties of the situation, exclaimed, "I did not do it, gentlemen! I did not do it! There is an absolute failure of proof! You cannot find that I took the purse from the old gentleman on such evidence! It is all a lie!"
It was his one false touch. To raise the issue of veracity is usually a mistake on the part of a defendant, and the defiant look in Graham's eyes might well have suggested conscious guilt.
As he paused for a moment after this concluding sentence, an Italian band came marching down Centre Street playing the dead march. Some patriot was being borne to his last sleep in an alien land. Outside the court-house it paused for a moment with one melancholy crash of funeral chords. It seemed a vibrant echo of the discord of his own fruitless life. At the same moment a ray from the red sun setting over the Tombs fell upon the prisoner's face.
Dockbridge summed the case up in the stock fashion, and then for half an hour the Judge addressed the jury in a calm and dispassionate analysis of the evidence, not hesitating to compare the abilities of the prosecutor and prisoner to the disadvantage of the former, saying in this respect: "Neither must you be influenced by any feeling of admiration at the capacity shown by this defendant to conduct his own case. If he has appeared more than a match for the prosecution, it must not affect the weight which you give to the evidence against him."
"More than a match for the prosecution!" That had been rather rough, to be sure, and the fifth juror had looked at Dockbridge and grinned.
The jury filed out, the prisoner was led back to the pen, the Judge vanished into his chambers, and the prosecutor, his feet on the counsel table, lit a cigar and indulged in retrospection. The benches were deserted. There was no one but himself left in the court-room. Usually, when a jury retired, there was some mother or wife or daughter, with her handkerchief to her eyes, waiting for them to come back, but this fellow had none such. He had fought alone. Well, damn him, he deserved to! But who the deuce was he? It had been clever on his part not to take the stand. Strange to be trying a man you had never seen before—of whom you knew nothing, who had merely side-stepped into your life and would soon back out of it. "Poor devil!" thought the deputy as he lit another Perfecto.
Now the jury, as juries sometimes do, wanted to talk and had a consuming desire to smoke, so they both smoked and talked; and when O'Reilly came to turn on the lights in the court-room, they were still out, and Dockbridge had fallen fast asleep.
III
At half past ten o'clock the big court-room still remained almost empty. Inside the rail the clerk and the stenographer, having returned from a short visit to Tom Foley's saloon across the way, were languidly discussing the condition of the stock-market. A nebulous illumination in the vastness above only served to increase the shadowy dimness of the room. The talk of the pair made a scarcely audible whisper in the great silence. Outside, an electric car could be heard at intervals; within, only the slam of iron doors, subdued by distance, echoed through the corridors.