“The deuce you say!” exclaimed the proprietor of the Bulletin. “What have they got him for?”
“Breaking the new anticamera law. I’m afraid he’s in bad, too, sir. Looks as if they’ve got him dead to rights. He took a photograph on the street outside the city hall, and they caught him at it. Of course, Hodgins will make the most of this opportunity to get square.”
“Suffering Cæsar!” muttered Carroll, a troubled look on his face. “What magistrate are they taking him before, Parsons?”
“Judge Wall, sir.”
“Wall!” The troubled look on Carroll’s face deepened. “He’s the biggest grouch on the bench, and a personal friend of Hodgins. Poor old Hawley! I’m afraid they’ll give him the limit. All right, Parsons, I’ll be right over. We must see what we can do.”
As he hurried to court, Carroll said to himself, with a frown: “The reckless chump! What the dickens did he want with that picture, when he knew that telegram was a fake? I suppose that was the big laugh he promised me. He made up his mind that he’d get that snapshot, anyway, just to show those fellows how little he was afraid of them. Unfortunately, though, it looks as if they’ve turned the laugh on him. I wish I’d guessed what he was going to do, so that I could have persuaded him not to take such a desperate chance.”
Although Carroll lost no time in getting to the courtroom, the Camera Chap was already being arraigned when he arrived there. Chief Hodgins was in such a fever of impatience to wreak his vengeance upon that young man that he had prevailed upon his honor to try the case ahead of several other less important cases which, according to the regular order, should have preceded it.
News of Hawley’s arrest evidently had traveled fast, for Carroll recognized in the courtroom several men whose presence there, he felt sure, was prompted solely by a desire to see the Camera Chap sentenced to six months in the county jail.
Prominent among these was old Delancey Gale, who stood beside his son, within the railed inclosure in front of the magistrate’s desk—a privilege accorded to representatives of the press—stroking his white, mutton-chop whiskers and shaking his head deprecatingly every time his gaze rested upon the prisoner’s smiling countenance, as though such depravity as he saw there was almost past his comprehension.
Most of the other men in the spectators’ benches were politicians—members of the ring against which the Bulletin was waging war. They had no grievance against Hawley personally, but they regarded his prosecution as a blow at Carroll and his newspaper, and therefore they had come there with thumbs down.[Pg 50]