"Suppose I may as well give up the idea for tonight," conceded Henry. "Get me the venire of the Adam John jury, and I'll see if we can't figure out somebody on it who might give the poor devil a ghost of a chance." He said this in a whisper that Adam John might not hear.
"Aw right, sir. Anything else?" The sergeant made this inquiry solicitously, with devoted eagerness, as if his own anxiety to be helpful might somehow compensate his chief for a world's cold injustice.
"Nope," said Henry indifferently. Everything on that desk seemed now so unimportant that he could have swept the whole mess into the waste basket. Yet there were interest-piquing documents upon it—new ones that had arrived since he departed from it.
Thorpe hurried out, greatly cast down. It was not his faith in the community which had been shattered. Thorpe was hard-boiled as to that. His confidence in community enthusiasms and loyalties had begun to languish the day he returned from the war and was long since stiff in death. It was his faith in his chief as a sort of superman that had been sickeningly jarred.
Harrington's head was in his hands again. The weight of the thing was beginning to tell. Everybody had failed him, except Lahleet. Everybody. Even—even . . . But his eyes brightened, his face lost its gray look. Not everybody. No! He wouldn't believe that Billie Suddenly he was exulting. The murder charge! Why, they'd done the very thing that would melt Billie up and bring her to him. Something swelled in his heart. Something mounted in his throat. The fools—they had defeated themselves. The
