People were apt to wonder why each succeeding administration inevitably retained stuffy old Tom Hingman at seventy-five hundred dollars a year to handle the calendar in Part Five.  Yet those on the inside knew why very well.  It was because Tom long ago, in his prehistoric youth, had learned that the way to secure verdicts was to appear not to care a tinker’s dam whether the jury found the defendant guilty or not.  He pretended never to know anything about any case in advance, to be in complete ignorance as to who the witnesses might be and to what they were going to testify, and to be terribly sorry to have to prosecute the unfortunate at the bar, though he wasn’t to blame for that any more than the jury were for having to find him guilty if proven to be so, which, it seemed to him, he had been clearly proven to be.  I say Tom pretended all this, yet it was more than half true, for Tom was a kind-hearted old bird.  But the point was that, whether true or not, it got convictions.  The jury sucking it all up in its entirety felt sorrier for the simple-minded old softy of a Tom, which they believed him to be, than they did for the defendant, who they concluded was a good deal cleverer than the assistant district attorney.

In a word, it put them on their honor as public officers not to let the administration of justice suffer merely because the A.D.A. was too old and easy-going and generally slab-sided to be really on his job.  Thus, they became prosecuting attorneys themselves—­in all, thirteen to one.  So Tom, having thus delegated his functions to the jury, calmly left it all to them and went to sleep, which was the best thing that he did.  Worth seventy-five hundred a year?  Rather, seventy-five thousand!

“Gentlemen of the jury,” he began haltingly, “this defendant seems to have been indicted for the crime of practising medicine without a license—­a misdemeanor.  I don’t see exactly how he gets into this court, which is supposed to try only felony cases, but I assume my old friend Tutt made a motion to transfer the case from the Special to the General Sessions on the theory that he would stand more chance with a jury than three—­er—­hardened judges.  Well, maybe he will—­I don’t know!  I gather from the papers that Mr. Lowry here, after holding himself out to be a properly licensed veterinary, treated a horse belonging to the complainant.  It is not a very serious offense, and you and I have no great interest in the case, but of course the public has got to be protected from charlatans, and the only way to do it is to brand as guilty those who pretend they are duly licensed to practise medicine when they are not.  If you had a sick baby, Mr. Foreman, and you saw a sign ‘A.S.  Smith, M.D., Children’s Specialist,’ you would want to be sure you were not going to hire a plumber, eh?  You see!  That’s all there is to this case!”

“All there is to this case!” murmured Mr. Tutt audibly, raising his eyes ceilingward.