The attorney made a drawling assent.
“Yes,” he said, “that was a bad find.”
His voice went again into a strange laugh.
“It was mighty near a hangin’ find for Old Bill and Lyin’ Louie! You got on better then, Mr. Barkman. You found two polka-dot handkerchiefs that had been stuffed down into a vase in the library, and then you found Old Bill and Lyin’ Louie. Now you are goin’ to hang ’em, I reckon.”
There was a suppressed giggle in the court room. It was not shared by the prisoners.
The big, old man of the close-cropped skull plucked the attorney by the sleeve and spoke in an audible whisper.
“Looka here, Colonel,” he said, “I thought you was defendin’ us.”
The attorney replied, a higher note in his deep drawl.
“Yes,” he said, “that’s what I am doing. But you’ve got no sense, Bill! You never had any sense. If you had had any sense you would not have been in the pen-i-ten-tia-ry house. There was no reason for you going to the pen-i-ten-tia-ry. Old Lansky tried to make a bank-cracker out of you—I was in the cell with him on the night he was hanged—he said you had no sense. He said you would never make anything but a fence, and a damned poor fence ... that’s what he said, Bill.”
He interrupted the long narrative by getting ponderously on his feet. He reached out and took the two handkerchiefs from the table of the prosecuting attorney and laid them down on his own.