“Sure thing,” agreed the captain.  “I never yet had any trouble finding a crime to charge a man with, once I got the nippers on him.”

“That’s so,” interjected the plain-clothes man.  “Did you ever know it was a crime to mismanage a steam boiler?  Well, it is.”

“Quite right,” agreed Mr. Magnus, the indictment clerk.  “The great difficulty for the perfectly honest man nowadays is to avoid some act or omission which the legislature has seen fit to make a crime without his knowledge.  Refilling a Sarsaparilla bottle, for instance, or getting up a masquerade ball or going fishing or playing on Sunday or loitering about a building to overhear what people are talking about inside—­”

“That’s no crime,” protested the captain scornfully.

“Yes, it is too!” retorted Mr. Magnus, otherwise known to his fellows as Caput, because of his supposed cerebral inflation.  “Just like it is a crime to have any kind of a show or procession on Sunday except a funeral, in which case it’s a crime to make a disbursing noise at it.”

“What’s a disbursing noise?” demanded O’Brien.

“I don’t know,” admitted Magnus.  “But that’s the law anyway.  You can’t make a disbursing noise at a funeral on Sunday.”

“Oh, hell!” ejaculated the captain.  “Come to think of it, it’s a crime to spit.  What man is safe?”

“It occurs to me,” continued Mr. Magnus thoughtfully, “that it is a crime under the law to build a house on another man’s land; now I should say that there was a close analogy between doing that and sleeping in his bed.”

“Hear!  Hear!” commented O’Brien.  “Caput Magnus, otherwise known as Big Head, there is no doubt but that your fertile brain can easily devise a way out of our present difficulty.”

“Well, I’ve no time to waste on tramp cases,” remarked District Attorney Peckham.  “I’ve something more important to attend to.  Indict this fellow and send him up quick.  Charge him with everything in sight and trust in the Lord.  That’s the only thing to be done.  Don’t bother me about it, that’s all!”

Meantime Mr. Hepplewhite became more and more agitated.  Entirely against his will and, so far as he could see, without any fault of his own, he suddenly found himself the center of a violent and acrimonious controversy respecting the fundamental and sacred rights of freemen which threatened to disrupt society and extinguish the supremacy of the dominant local political organization.

On the one hand he was acclaimed by the conservative pulpit and press as a public-spirited citizen who had done exactly the right thing—­disinterestedly enforced the law regardless of his own convenience and safety as a matter of principle and for the sake of the community—­a moral hero; on the other, though he was president of several charitable organizations and at least one orphan asylum he was execrated as a heartless brute, an oppressor of the poor, an octopus, a soulless capitalist who fattened on the innocent and helpless and who—­Mr. Hepplewhite was a bachelor—­probably if the truth could be known lived a life of horrid depravity and crime.