"Look here, Judge, you're just like the rest of them, you don't understand, you don't know! A man doesn't smash his wife with an ax for nothing—"
"If you're going to try to justify him—"
"No, he doesn't want that, neither do I. He's a lost man and he knows it.... All he seemed to want of me was to have one human being understand it—just to tell me about it. He doesn't want to get off, he wants to die."
Carlin's intense blue eyes held the Judge's unwilling gaze; they both forgot the crowd outside, turned from the window. The Judge sat down again at his desk.
"Well, tell me about it," he said reluctantly. "But I'm sorry to see you so worked up.... I really don't see how we could handle a case like this, even if we had a chance to do anything with it. I tell you it isn't the thing, it's all off my beat—you know it. And you're just getting your start, and to handicap yourself right off with an unpopular case where you haven't the ghost of a show, where feeling's dead against you—no, Laurence, my boy, I oughtn't to let you—we can't do it!"
Laurence drew a chair to the other side of the desk, facing the Judge.
"If we can't, I'll try it alone," he said quietly. "All I want for Barclay is a hearing—just to have his side of it known, that's all. He'll have to pay the penalty, of course—he'll get life imprisonment at least and I'm not sure he wouldn't rather be hanged, in fact I'm sure he would, now.... But he did have provocation—if you could get anybody to see it."
"Well, see if you can get me to see it. I guess that's a good test," said the Judge coolly. "I'm as prejudiced against him as anybody. I wouldn't lynch him, maybe—but I don't want you to lose your first important case."
He leaned back in his chair and fixed his old, wise, wary eyes on Carlin, who, quite calm now, had an abstracted look.
"Well, to begin I'd have to tell you what I knew about Barclay before this.... He was in the first company to go from here—enlisted for three months, you know. Just dropped his tools and went—he was a machinist, making good wages, had a nice little home here, wife and two children. They were dependent on him, but the wife was sturdy and said she guessed they could get along somehow—and they did. She got work and people helped them, and she kept up the home. Barclay was awfully proud of her and the youngsters—another one was born after he went. He used to show me their pictures and talk about them. He was good at machinery—it was the only thing he did know—he was a gunner in my battery later and a good one. Strong as a horse and he'd fight like the devil when things got hot. A big fellow, good-natured too and kind of simple-minded—soft, you might say, except when he was fighting or drunk. He didn't seem to have but two ideas in his head—one was the war and the other was his family. He re-enlisted, of course, and went through the whole thing, but he was homesick all the time. He used to write home whenever he could, and when he didn't get letters as often as he thought he ought to, he'd come to me and worry, and ask if I'd heard and so on.... I'm telling you this, Judge," Carlin looked earnestly at the Judge's impassive face, "so you can understand what sort of a man he was and what his home meant to him—just everything, outside of what he was fighting for. That man made a real sacrifice, because he thought it his duty. He felt it all the time, but he thought the country needed him, and he had to do it, and he had a pride in it too—he didn't look for any reward, but I suppose he thought what he did would be appreciated somehow—anyhow he didn't expect to lose out altogether by it...."