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Guilty As Charged
by
It was so on this particular afternoon. Here it was nearly dusk. The windows toward the east showed merely as opaque patches set against a wall of thickening gloom, and the third deputy commissioner had started in at two-thirty and was not done yet. Sparse and bony, he crouched forward on the edge of his chair, with his lean head drawn down between his leaner shoulders and his stiff stubble of hair erect on his scalp, and he looked, perching there, like a broody but vigilant old crested cormorant upon a barren rock.
Except for one lone figure of misery, the anxious bench below him was by now empty. Most of the witnesses were gone and most of the spectators, and all the newspaper men but two. He whetted a lean and crooked forefinger like a talon on the edge of the docket book, turned the page and called the last case, being the case of Patrolman James J. Rogan. Patrolman Rogan was a short horse and soon curried. For being on such and such a day, at such and such an hour, off his post, where he belonged, and in a saloon where he did not belong, sitting down, with his blouse unfastened and his belt unbuckled; and for having no better excuse, or no worse one, than the ancient tale of a sudden attack of faintness causing him to make his way into the nearest place where he might recover himself–that it happened to be a family liquor store was, he protested, a sheer accident–Patrolman Rogan was required to pay five days’ pay and, moreover, to listen to divers remarks in which he heard himself likened to several things, none of them of a complimentary character.
Properly crushed and shrunken, the culprit departed thence with his uniform bagged and wrinkling upon his diminished form, and the third deputy commissioner, well pleased, on the whole, with his day’s hunting, prepared to adjourn. The two lone reporters got up and made for the door, intending to telephone in to their two shops the grand total and final summary of old Donohue’s bag of game.
They were at the door, in a little press of departing witnesses and late defendants, when behind them a word in Donohue’s hard-rolled official accents made them halt and turn round. The veteran had picked up from his desk a sheet of paper and was squinting up his hedgy, thick eyebrows in an effort to read what was written there.
“Wan more case to be heard,” he announced. “Keep order there, you men at the door! The case of Lieutenant Isidore Weil”–he grated the name out lingeringly–“charged with–with—-” He broke off, peering about him for some one to scold. “Couldn’t you be makin’ a light here, some of you! I can’t see to make out these here charges and specifications.”
Some one bestirred himself and many lights popped on, chasing the shadows back into the far corners. Outside in the hall a policeman doing duty as a bailiff called the name of Lieutenant Isidore Weil, thrice repeated.
“Gee! Have they landed that slick kike at last?” said La Farge, the older of the reporters, half to himself. “Say, you know, that tickles me! I’ve been looking this long time for something like this to be coming off.” Like most old headquarters reporters, La Farge had his deep-seated prejudices. To judge by his present expression, this was a very deep-seated one, amounting, you might say, to a constitutional infirmity with La Farge.
“Who’s Weil and what’s he done?” inquired Rogers. Rogers was a young reporter.
“I don’t know yet–the charge must be newly filed, I guess,” said La Farge, answering the last question first. “But I hope they nail him! I don’t like him–never did. He’s too fresh. He’s too smart–one of those self-educated East Side Yiddishers, you know. Used to be a court interpreter down at Essex Market–knows about steen languages. And he–here he comes now.”