The boy started on in business-like fashion. As his interlocutor had predicted, a hatless "feller" overtook him, breathless, and entered into voluble explanation. The messenger exchanged bundles, and then, eyes front, continued up the street until the detective should pounce upon his victim. For some strange reason no such event took place. At the end of the block he cast a furtive glance behind him. Both Paddy and the Central Office man had vanished, to dispose in a Bowery pawnshop of the fruits of their short hour of toil, dividing between them one hundred and sixty dollars as the equivalent of the diamond stud which the box had contained.
Half an hour later, drawn by a fascination which he found irresistible, the hero of this legal memoir took a car to the Criminal Courts Building, and made his way to the General Sessions.
"Forgot my subpœna, Cap'n. I'm a witness. Just let me in, please!" he said, with a smile of easy good-nature.
Old Flaherty, the superannuated door-keeper, known as The Eagle, eyed the young man suspiciously for a moment, and then, grumbling, allowed him to enter the court-room. The thief who had so easily secured admittance, fought his way persistently through the throng, elbowed by the gruff officer at the inner gate, and selecting the best seat on the front bench, compelled its earlier occupants to make room for him with a calm assurance and matter-of-course superiority which they had not the courage to oppose.
Supple Jim listened with interest to the call of the calendar. A few lawyers, with their witnesses, whose cases had gone over until the morrow, struggled out through the crush at the door, with no perceptible diminution in the throng within. The clerk prepared to call the roll of the jury.
"Trial jurors in the case of 'The People against Richard Monohan,' please answer to your names."
The twelve, in varying keys, had all replied; the trial was "on" again, having been interrupted, evidently, by the adjournment of the afternoon before. A venerable complainant now resumed the story of how two young men, whose acquaintance he had made in a saloon the previous Sunday evening, had followed him into the street, assaulted him on his way home and robbed him of his ring. He positively identified the prisoner as the one who had wrenched it from his finger.
Next, an officer testified to having arrested the defendant upon the old gentleman's description, and to having found in his pocket a pawn-ticket calling for the ring in question.
The case, in the vernacular of the courts, was "dead open and shut."
The People "rested," and the defendant, a miserable specimen of those wretched beings that constitute the penumbra of crime, took the stand. His defence was absurd. He denied ever before having seen his accuser, had not been in the saloon, had not taken the ring, had not pawned it, had bought the ticket from a man on the corner who, he remembered, had told him he was getting a bargain at three dollars. He could not describe this "man," or account for his own whereabouts on the evening in question. He had been drunk at the time. It was a story as old as theft itself.