“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.”

“Sure!  ’Course it does!” came from all sides.  Mr. Brown’s red-faced friend having escaped the salesman’s wrath began to show somewhat less aggressiveness.

“I don’t care a damn about Brown!” he assured them.  “He can go to hell for all of me!  But I don’t see how you can acquit this feller when the evidence is uncontradicted that he told Brown he was a veterinary and treated his horse.  I’d be violating my oath if I voted for acquittal after that testimony.  I ain’t going to commit perjury for nobody!  I’d like to oblige you gentlemen, too, and vote your way, but I just can’t with that evidence stickin’ in my crop.  If it wasn’t for that—­”

“He could ‘a’ treated the horse without doing it as a veterinary, just as Mr. Tutt said!” interjected the tall man.

“Good for you!” said the salesman, fully restored to equanimity.  “You’re gettin’ intelligent.  Serve on a few more juries—­”

“But he said he was a veterinary,” insisted Brown’s friend.  “How could he have treated the horse as anything else but as a veterinary when he said he was treating him as a veterinary?”

“Maybe he just thought he was doing it as a veterinary”, commented the gloom in black.  “He may have tried to do it as a veterinary and failed.  In that case he didn’t do it as a veterinary but just as a plain man.  Get me?”

“No, I don’t!” snorted the red-faced one.  “That’s all bull.  He said he was a vet and he treated the horse as a vet and got five dollars for it.”

“How do you know he did?” unexpectedly asked Bently.

“Because he said so himself.  That was part of the conversation between Brown and Lowry,” declared the obstinate summer friend of Brown.  “If it wasn’t for that—­”

“If it wasn’t for that you’d acquit?” demanded Bently sharply.

“Yes.  Sure I would!”

“Then I say you should disregard all that conversation because it was a privileged communication between a doctor—­Brown—­and his patient—­Lowry!” declared Bently heatedly.