"Held to answer! Bail doubled! Adjourned!"
The gavel fell sharply, and the eyes of the Court darted a warning glance beyond the rail as if to forestall a possible demonstration of any sort. But there was none. A kind of restraint appeared to hold the court and spectators in thrall. Then the official reporter closed his notebook with an audible whisk; the clerk, gathering his papers, snapped them loudly with rubber bands; and the judge arose and started toward his chambers, while Wyatt moved over and took his place significantly by the side of Hampstead. As if this broke the spell, there was a shuffling of many feet, while the minister was immediately surrounded by his bondsmen and a few friends. The friends pressed his hand and stepped away into the outgoing crowd; but the bondsmen went with him into the judge's chambers, where the new surety was quickly executed. After this, wringing the hand of each of the three men feelingly, Hampstead asked to be excused.
"I have an humiliating experience to undergo," he explained, with a meaningful glance at Detective Larsen who, representing the Bureau of Identification, stood waiting. "I prefer to face that humiliation alone."
"I understand," exclaimed Wilson, his face flushing. "It is a damned outrage! I didn't know such a thing could be done. I thought every man was presumed innocent until proven guilty! Instead of that, they put him in the Rogues' Gallery!"
"You are as innocent as an angel from heaven," averred the white-bearded Wadham extravagantly, as he laid an affectionate hand upon the shoulder of the younger man.
"You are, indeed," echoed Hayes, his voice hoarse with emotion. "I confess again that we doubted for a time, but your character rises triumphant to the test."
The minister was unwilling to trust himself to further speech; for his disappointment with the verdict had been great, and the sympathetic loyalty of these trusted friends made self-control difficult, so with only a nod of comprehension, he turned quickly to where Detective Larsen waited.
It was nearly one hour later when the minister, clothed again, stepped out upon the street. Behind him was his record in the criminal history of the State of California. He had seen his name go into the card index with a wife murderer on one side of him and the author of an unmentionable crime upon the other. With the sickening memory of his loathsome ordeal searing his brain he was only half-conscious of the clatter and bang of the busy city life about him. Mercifully the gaping crowd had dispersed. Hurrying people went this way and that, intent upon their own concerns. But a newsboy, intent, too, on his concerns, thrust the noon edition of The Sentinel before the minister's eyes. Seeking the headline by habit, as the eyes of the victim turn to the torturing irons, he read in letters as black and bold as any he had seen that week, the verdict of Judge Brennan.
"HELD TO ANSWER!"
Instinctively Hampstead paused, like a man in a daze, then passed his hand before his eyes to blot the black letters from his sight. In the identification bureau, the meaning of those three words had just been defined to the most sensitive part of his nature in abhorrent and revolting terms. The sight of that headline to be flaunted on every street corner was like seeing these words, with their loathsome connotation, spread upon a banner that arched over the whole sky of life for him. It overwhelmed him with a sense of the public obloquy to which he was now to be subjected.