CHAPTER IV

JUVENILE COURT


The goddess of justice is popularly supposed to bandage her eyes in order
to maintain an impartial attitude, but it is quite possible that she does
it to keep from seeing the dreary court-rooms which are supposed to be
her abiding place.

On the hot Friday morning following the fight, the big anteroom to the
juvenile court, which was formerly used for the police court, was just as
dirty and the air just as stale as in mid-winter, when the windows were
down and the furnace going.

Scrub women came at dawn, to be sure, and smeared its floors with sour
mops, and occasionally a janitor brushed the cobwebs off the ceiling, but
the grime was more than surface deep, and every nook and cranny held the
foul odor of the unwashed, unkempt current of humanity that for so many
years had flowed through it. Ghosts of dead and gone criminals seemed to
hover over the place, drawn back through curiosity, to relive their own
sorry experiences in the cases of the young offenders waiting before the
bar of justice.

On the bench at the rear of the room the delegation from Calvary Alley
had been waiting for over an hour. Mrs. Snawdor, despite her forebodings,
had achieved a costume worthy of the occasion, but Uncle Jed and Dan had