Had ever such a farce been enacted in the course of justice! He tossed away the paper and swore softly. Of course, the only thing that had rendered such a situation possible at all was the fact that the aged Farlan was a superlative old ass. To hear him tell his yarn on the stand, you would have thought that it gave him positive pain to testify against a fellow being. Did you ever see such white hair and such a big white beard? Why, he looked like Dowie or Moses, or some of those fellows. When Jim had tripped him up and slipped off the ring, the old chap had already swallowed half a dozen "County Antrims," and wasn't in a condition to remember anything or anybody. The idea of his going so piously into court and swearing the thing on to Monohan; it gave you the creeps! A fellow might go to "the chair" as easy as not, in just the same way. Of course, Jim had not intended to get the young greenhorn into any trouble when he had sold him the pawn-ticket. He had been just an easy mark. And when the police had arrested him and found the ticket in his pocket, there was not any call for Jim to set them straight. That was just Monohan's luck, curse him! Let him look out for himself.
But to see the patriarch carefully forging the shackles upon the wrong man, had filled Jim with a wondering and ecstatic bewilderment. The stars in their courses had seemed warring in his behalf.
Think of it! That fellow Monohan could get twenty years! It made him mad, this infernal conspiracy, as it seemed to him, between judges and prosecutors. It mattered little, apparently, whether they got the right man or not, so long as they got someone! What business had they to go and convict a fellow who was innocent, and put him, "Jim," the cleverest "gun" in the profession, in such a position? He wondered if folks in other lines of business had so many problems to face. The stupidity of witnesses and the trickery of lawyers was almost beyond belief. It was a perennial contest, not only of wit against wit, strategy against strategy, but, worst of all, of wit against impenetrable dulness. Why, if people were going to be so careless about swearing a man's liberty away, it was time to "get on the level." You might be nailed any time by mistake, and then your record would make any defence impossible. You had the right to demand common honesty, or, at least, _intelligence_, on the part of the prosecution.