"I won't say that we 've got him nailed," Saul hastened to explain, "but it begins to look bad for him."
"But, man dear," gasped Donaldson, "he is n't a thug! He isn't—"
"If he 's like the others he 's anything when he wants his smoke. I 've seen more of them than you."
"Saul," he said, "you 're dead wrong about this! You 've made a horrible mistake!"
"Perhaps. But he 'll have to explain some things."
Donaldson took a grip on himself.
"What's the nature of your evidence?"
"There 's the question of where he got his funds, first; then the fact that all the attacks took place within a small radius of this house; then the motive, and finally the fact, that in a general way he answers to the description given by four witnesses. He 'll have to take the third degree on that, anyway."
The third degree would undoubtedly kill the boy, or, worse, break his spirit and drive him either to a mad-house or the solace of his drug. It was a cruel thing to confront him with this at such a point in his life. It was fiendish, devilish. It was possible that they might even make the boy believe that in his blind madness he actually did commit these crimes. Then, as in a lurid moving picture, Donaldson recalled the uneasiness of the girl; the morning papers with their glaring headlines of the Riverside robberies, which he had found that morning scattered about the floor; her fear of the police, and the mystery of the untold story at which she had hinted. Take these, and the fact that in his madness Arsdale had actually made an attack upon the girl and upon himself, similar to those outside the house, and the chain was a strong one. The pity of it—coming now!
Yes, it was in this that the cruel injustice lay. Even admitting the boy to be guilty, it was still an injustice. The man who had done those things was outside the pale of the law; he was no more. Arsdale himself, Arsdale the clean-minded young man with a useful life before him, Arsdale with his new soul, had no more to do with those black deeds than he himself had. Yet that lumbering Juggernaut, the Law, could not take this into account. The Law did not deal with souls, but bodies.