"It's all right, kid. Leave it to me," he said, encircling him with a protecting arm. Then to the clerk: "Pleads not guilty."
The magistrate glanced over the complaint, in which Delany, to save Froelich trouble, had sworn that he had seen Tony throw the brick. Hadn't the butcher said he'd seen him? Besides, that let the Dutchman out of a possible suit for false arrest. Then the magistrate looked down at the cop himself.
"Do you know this boy?" he asked sharply.
"Sure, Yerroner. He's a gangster. Admitted it to me on the way over."
"Are you really over sixteen?" suddenly demanded the judge, who knew and distrusted Delany, having repeatedly stated in open court that he wouldn't hang a yellow dog on his testimony. The underfed, undersized boy did not look more than fourteen.
"Yes, sir," said Tony. "I was sixteen last week."
"Got anybody to defend you?"
Tony looked at Simpkins inquiringly. He seemed a very kind gentleman.
"Mr. Hogan's case, judge," answered Joey. "Please make the bail as low as you can."
Now this judge was a political accident, having been pitchforked into office by the providence that sometimes watches over sailors, drunks and third parties. Moreover, in spite of being a reformer he was nobody's fool, and when the other reformers who were fools got promptly fired out of office he had been reappointed by a supposedly crooked boss simply because, as the boss said, he had made a hell of a good judge and they needed somebody with brains here and there to throw a front. Incidentally, he had a swell cousin on Fifth Avenue who had invited the boss and his wife to dinner, by reason of which the soreheads who lost out went round asking what kind of a note it was when a silk-stocking crook could buy a nine-thousand-dollar job for a fifty-dollar dinner. Anyhow, he was clean and clean-looking, kindly, humorous and wise above his yearswhich were thirty-one. And Tony looked to him like a poor runt, Simpkins and Delany were both rascals, Froelich wasn't in court, and he sensed a nigger somewhere. He would have turned Tony out on the run had he had any excuse. He hadn't, but he tried.
"Would you like an immediate hearing?" he asked Tony in an encouraging tone.
"Mr. Hogan can't be here until to-morrow morning," interposed Simpkins. "Besides, we shall want to produce witnesses. Make it to-morrow afternoon, judge."
Judge Harrison leaned forward.
"Are you sure you wouldn't prefer to have the hearing now?" he inquired with a smile at the trembling boy.
"Well, I want to get Froelich hereif you're going to proceed now," spoke up Delany. "And I'd like to look up this defendant's record at headquarters."
Tony quailed. He feared and distrusted everybody, except the kind Mr. Simpkins. He suspected that smooth judge of trying to railroad him.
"No! No!" he whispered to the lawyer. "I want my mother should be here; and the janitor, he knows I was in my house. The rabbi, he will give me a good character."
The judge heard and shrugged his bombazine-covered shoulders. It was no use. The children of darkness were wiser in their generation than the children of light.
"Five hundred dollars bail," he remarked shortly. "Officer, have your witnesses ready to proceed to-morrow afternoon at two o'clock."
"Mr. Tutt," said Tutt with a depressed manner as he watched Willie remove the screen and drag out the old gate-leg table for the firm's daily five o'clock tea and conference in the senior partner's office, "if a man called you a shyster what would you do about it?"
The elder lawyer sucked meditatively on the fag end of his stogy before replying.
"Why not sue him?" Mr. Tutt inquired.
"But suppose he didn't have any money?" replied Tutt disgustedly.
"Then why not have him arrested?" continued Mr. Tutt. "It's libelous per se to call a lawyer a shyster."
"Even if he is one," supplemented Miss Minerva Wiggin ironically, as she removed her paper cuffs preparatory to lighting the alcohol lamp under the teakettle. "The greater the truth the greater the libel, you know!"
"And what do you mean by that?" sharply rejoined Tutt. "You don't"
"No," replied the managing clerk of Tutt & Tutt. "I don't! Of course not! And frankly, I don't know what a shyster is."
"Neither do I," admitted Tutt. "But it sounds opprobrious. Still, that is a rather dangerous test. You remember that colored client of ours who wanted us to bring an action against somebody for calling him an Ethiopian!"
"There's nothing dishonorable in being an Ethiopian," asserted Miss Wiggin.
"A shyster," said Mr. Tutt, reading from the Century Dictionary, "is defined as 'one who does business trickily; a person without professional honor; used chiefly of lawyers.'"
"Well?" snapped Tutt.
"Well?" echoed Miss Wiggin.
"H'm! Well!" concluded Mr. Tutt.
"I nominate for the first pedestal in our Hall of Legal Ill FameRaphael B. Hogan," announced Tutt, complacently disregarding all innuendoes.
"But he's a very elegant and gentlemanly person," objected Miss Wiggin as she warmed the cups. "My idea of a shyster is a down-at-the-heels, unshaved and generally disreputable-looking police-court lawyerpreferably with a red nosewho murders the English languageand who makes his living by preying upon the ignorant and helpless."
"Like Finklestein?" suggested Tutt.
"Exactly!" agreed Miss Wiggin. "Like Finklestein."
"He's one of the most honorable men I know!" protested Mr. Tutt. "My dear Minerva, you are making the great mistakecommon, I confess, to a large number of peopleof associating dirt and crime. Now dirt may breed crime, but crime doesn't necessarily breed dirt."
"You don't have to be shabby to prey upon the ignorant and helpless," argued Tutt. "Some of our most prosperous brethren are the worst sharks out of Sing Sing."
"That is true!" she admitted, "but tell it not in Gath!"
"A shyster," began Mr. Tutt, unsuccessfully applying a forced draft to his stogy and then throwing it away, "bears about the same relation to an honest lawyer as a cad does to a gentleman. The fact that he's well dressed, belongs to a good club and has his name in the Social Register doesn't affect the situation. Clothes don't make men; they only make opportunities."
"But why is it," persisted Miss Wiggin, "that we invariably associate the idea of crime with that of 'poverty, hunger and dirt'?"
"That is easy to explain," asserted Mr. Tutt. "The criminal law originally dealt only with crimes of violencesuch as murder, rape and assault. In the old days people didn't have any property in the modern senseexcept their land, their cattle or their weapons. They had no bonds or stock or bank accounts. Now it is of course true that rough, ignorant people are much more prone to violence of speech and action than those of gentle breeding, and hence most of our crimes of violence are committed by those whose lives are those of squalor. But"and here Mr. Tutt's voice rose indignantly"our greatest mistake is to assume that crimes of violence are the most dangerous to the state, for they are not. They cause greater disturbance and perhaps more momentary inconvenience, but they do not usually evince much moral turpitude. After all, it does no great harm if one man punches another in the head, or even in a fit of anger sticks a dagger in him. The police can easily handle all that. The real danger to the community lies in the crimes of duplicitythe cheats, frauds, false pretenses, tricks and devices, flimflamspractised most successfully by well-dressed gentlemanly crooks of polished manners."
By this time the kettle was boiling cheerfully, quite as if no such thing as criminal law existed at all, and Miss Wiggin began to make the tea.