"Mr. Tompkins--will you take the chair?"

Swiftly the jury was impaneled. O'Brien challenged everybody who did not
suit his fancy, while Tutt & Tutt sat helpless.

Ten minutes and the clerk called the roll, beginning with Mr. Walsh, and
they were solemnly sworn a true verdict to find, and settled themselves
to the task.

The mills of the gods had begun to grind, and Angelo was being dragged
to his fate as inexorably and as surely, with about as much chance of
escape, as a log that is being drawn slowly toward a buzz saw.

"You may open the case, Mr. O'Brien," announced Judge Babson, leaning
back and wiping his glasses.

Then surreptitiously he began to read his mail as his fellow conspirator
undertook to tell the jury what it was all about. One by one the
witnesses were called--the coroner's physician, the policeman who had
arrested Angelo outside the barber shop with the smoking pistol in his
hand, the assistant barber who had seen the shooting, the customer who
was being shaved. Each drove a spike into poor Angelo's legal coffin.
Mr. Tutt could not shake them. This evidence was plain. He had come into
the shop, accused Crocedoro of making his wife's life unbearable
and--shot him.

Yet Mr. Tutt did not lose any of his equanimity. With the tips of his
long fingers held lightly together in front of him, and swaying slightly
backward and forward upon the balls of his feet, he smiled benignly down
upon the customer and the barber's assistant as if these witnesses were