This somewhat disingenuous argument created a profound impression.
"Say, now you've said something!" declared the salesman. "You'd oughta been a lawyer yourself. Let's take another vote."
Curiously enough Bently's argument seemed to have had a revolutionary effect, for the jury now stood ten to two for acquittal. He began to feel encouraged. If ever there was a case-- Then he heard an altercation going on fiercely between the salesman and Brown's summer friend, the latter insisting loudly that the detective was a perfect gentleman and entirely all right.
"Nobody questions Mr. Brown's entire honesty," interposed Bently hastily, in a friendly way. "The question before us is the sufficiency of the evidence. Upon this, it seems to me, there is what might fairly be called a reasonable doubt."
"And you have to give that to the defendant--it's the law!" shouted the salesman in fury.
It was at this point that Mr. Tutt and Phelan had taken up their positions outside the door, and the friend of Brown had told the salesman that he gave him a pain; that his doubt wasn't a reasonable doubt.
"Gentlemen! Gentlemen!" protested Bently. "Let us discuss this matter calmly."
"But I'm a reasonable man!" shouted the salesman. "And so, if I have any doubt, my doubt is bound to be reasonable."
"You--a reasonable man?" sneered Brown's friend. "You're nothin' but a damn fool!"
"I am, am I?" yelled the salesman, starting to remove his coat. "I'll show you--"
"Oh, cut it out!" expostulated the fat man complacently. "Settle all that afterward! We ain't interested."
"Vell, take annoder vote," mildly suggested the foreman.
This time it stood eleven to one for acquittal. All concentrated upon the friend of Brown, over whose face had settled a look of grim determination. But a similar expression occupied the features of Mr. Bently Gibson, erstwhile the exponent of the-law-as-it-is, the bulwark of the jury system, now adrift upon the ship of justice, blindly determined that no matter what--law or no law, principles or no principles--that old man was going to be acquitted.
"My friend," he remarked solemnly, taking the floor, "of course you want to do justice in this case. We have nothing against Mr. Brown at all. He is doubtless a very honest and efficient officer. But surely the good character of this defendant may well create a reasonable doubt--and the rest of us feel that it does."