know who was right. “ Gradually their suspicion
of me disappeared,” the Judge says. “They
came to regard me and my Court as engaged in
a fight for them against the hated police.” The
Judge let them think that. It was true. He
explained how it was true, how “the police were
not to blame,” not the policemen. They were
reared in a school that taught them that it was
their duty to fight crime with crime, craft with
craft, violence with force, and maybe that was
the only way. Certainly, “fellers like Tatters
and the Eel made it hard for the police. Hadn’t
the boys added to the work of the “cops,” and
to their worries ?
They had indeed. The Judge laid down the kid law, which was the criminal law, about “snitching”; how snitching on the other fellow was wrong, but snitching on yourself was all right, if you believed what you told was to be used to help you. This they understood, and as their confidence grew, they began to snitch on themselves.
They told the Judge their stories, and they were amazing stories of crime and of hate. The Eel especially hated anything in the nature of legal machinery with a bitterness that amazed me,” the Judge says, “till I had heard his story.” And then the Judge tells the Eel’s story. His
