THE STEADFAST HEART
in or of the importance to him of the proceedings which went on about him.
Malcolm Crane got to his feet and began his opening address. It was the speech of a prosecutor who seeks conviction for its own sake, bitter, full of veiled vindictiveness. It held the boy up to scorn, painted his life in colors calculated rather to prejudice than to express the exact truth. He described the crime and was apt to attribute a sufficient motive, referring to Angus as degenerate, possessed of a precocious-criminal mind, with dreadful inheritances from unspeakable parents. He saw in the child a menace to society, a sort of human mad dog to be shut away from the light of day and from contact with mankind. One inferred his regret that Michigan was not a hanging state…. An able address of its kind it was, and on the faces of jury and spectators could be read its effect. All eyed Angus with abhorrence, with repulsion. Their eyes saw not a boy but a monster.
As for Angus, he might have been listening to words about quite another person, one negligible to him—or he might not have been listening at all. His face did not change; no flush colored his cheeks, no shame or shrinking made itself visible. He sat like a boy of stone, with unseeing eyes fastened upon the steps which led up to the witness chair. It was no artificial garment of
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