"Yes, Your Honor," responded Mr. Tutt in velvet tones.
"Call the first talesman!"
The fight was on, the professional duel between traditional enemies, in
which the stake--a human life--was in truth the thing of least concern,
had begun. Yet no casual observer would have suspected the actual
significance of what was going on or the part that envy, malice,
uncharitableness, greed, selfishness and ambition were playing in it. He
would have seen merely a partially filled courtroom flooded with
sunshine from high windows, an attentive and dignified judge in a black
silk robe sitting upon a dais below which a white-haired clerk drew
little slips of paper from a wheel and summoned jurymen to a service
which outwardly bore no suggestion of a tragedy.
He would have seen a somewhat unprepossessing assistant district
attorney lounging in front of the jury box, taking apparently no great
interest in the proceedings, and a worried-looking young Italian sitting
at the prisoner's table between a rubicund little man with a round red
face and a tall, grave, longish-haired lawyer with a frame not unlike
that of Abraham Lincoln, over whose wrinkled face played from time to
time the suggestion of a smile. Behind a balustrade were the reporters,
scribbling on rough sheets of yellow paper. Then came rows of benches,
upon the first of which, as near the jury box as possible, sat Rosalina
in a new bombazine dress and wearing a large imitation gold cross
furnished for the occasion out of the legal property room of Tutt &
Tutt.
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