"Ready, Follett? Time's come."
Springing to his feet, he found handcuffs slipped round his wrists before he was aware of what was being done. It was an unexpected indignity. He had never been handcuffed before.
"Say, fellows," he protested, "I'll go all right. I don't want these on me."
"Come along wid ye."
The words were friendly rather than rough, as was also the hand of a guard on each shoulder as they steered him along the corridor. The Brig is a rambling building, or succession of buildings, with courthouse and house of detention under the same series of roofs. The pilgrimage was long—upstairs, downstairs, through passages, past offices, past courtrooms, with guards, police, clerks, lawyers, litigants, loungers, standing about everywhere. The sight of a man in handcuffs arrested all eyes for the moment, and stilled all tongues. With his glances flying from right to left and from left to right, Teddy again began to feel the sense of separation from the human race which had struck to his soul that day on the marshes.
Of his other impressions, the chief was that of squalor. It seemed as if all the elements had been brought together that would make poor Justice vulgar and unimpressive. Out of a squalid cell he had been pushed along squalid hallways, through groups of squalid faces, into a squalid courtroom, where he was ushered into a squalid cage, long and narrow, with a seat hardly wider than a knife blade. Once within the cage the handcuffs were taken off, the door was locked, and each of the stalwart guards took his stand at one end. The cage being raised some six or eight inches above the level of the floor, the boy was well in sight of everyone. It was like being on a throne—or a Calvary.
On taking his seat, he was vaguely conscious of a bank of faces, tier above tier, at the back of the courtroom. Before him some fifteen or twenty officials, reporters, and lawyers lolled at their tables, walked about, yawned, picked their teeth, or told anecdotes that raised a smothered laugh. Most of them struck him as untidily dressed; few looked intelligent. Among them a portly man, whom he afterward saw as the district attorney, in a cutaway coat, with a line of piqué at the opening of his waistcoat, seemed like a person in fancy costume. Everyone paused as he entered the cage, but, a glance having satisfied their curiosity, they paid him no further attention.
The trial lasted three days, passing before his eyes like a motion-picture film of which he was only a spectator. Try as he would, he found it hard to believe that the proceedings had anything to do with him. "All this fuss," he would comment to himself, grimly, "to get the right to kill a man." The strain of being under so many cruel or indifferent eyes sent him back with relief to his cell, where during the nights he slept soundly.
His one bit of surprise came from Stenhouse's final argument in his defense. Up to that point, both defense and prosecution had struck him as more or less silly. The state had tried to prove him a desperado whom it was dangerous to let live; the defense had done its best to show him a youth of arrested intelligence, not responsible for his acts. He grinned inwardly when Jennie, Gussie, and half a dozen of his old chums testified to foolish pranks, forgotten or half forgotten by himself, in the hope of convincing the court that he had never had the normal sense.
But Stenhouse in his concluding speech transcended all that, taking Teddy's own stand as the only one which offered the ghost of a chance of acquittal. He began his final appeal quietly, in a tone little more than colloquial.