The same impulse which leads little boys and girls to tear the wings from butterflies and tie cans to cats' tails impels them later in life to fill the audience chairs at criminal trials at which human life and freedom are at stake.
Long lines of motors hugged the curbs on both sides of Hedgewood's main street on the morning Dudley Drake's trial opened at the tidy new courthouse. The case was a seven days' wonder. The New York papers, suffering a late August paucity of sensations, had kept it upon the front page and lavished upon it their best trial reporters, photographers, sob sisters, and rapid-fire sketch artists. Reporters had penetrated by bribery and fraud to Dudley's cell, only to meet with a stony silence when they sweatingly attained their goal. Sob sisters had invaded the grounds of Carmelita's house but Carmelita's stalwart and sympathetic butler had proven an effective menace. Minions of the press had even sought to storm the private ward of the Soundview Hospital but Rao-Singh had sent down curt word that he was seeing nobody.
But they could not be kept out of the court-
