“Yes, sir,” said Tony.  “I was sixteen last week.”

“Got anybody to defend you?”

Tony looked at Simpkins inquiringly.  He seemed a very kind gentleman.

“Mr. Hogan’s case, judge,” answered Joey.  “Please make the bail as low as you can.”

Now this judge was a political accident, having been pitchforked into office by the providence that sometimes watches over sailors, drunks and third parties.  Moreover, in spite of being a reformer he was nobody’s fool, and when the other reformers who were fools got promptly fired out of office he had been reappointed by a supposedly crooked boss simply because, as the boss said, he had made a hell of a good judge and they needed somebody with brains here and there to throw a front.  Incidentally, he had a swell cousin on Fifth Avenue who had invited the boss and his wife to dinner, by reason of which the soreheads who lost out went round asking what kind of a note it was when a silk-stocking crook could buy a nine-thousand-dollar job for a fifty-dollar dinner.  Anyhow, he was clean and clean-looking, kindly, humorous and wise above his years—­which were thirty-one.  And Tony looked to him like a poor runt, Simpkins and Delany were both rascals, Froelich wasn’t in court, and he sensed a nigger somewhere.  He would have turned Tony out on the run had he had any excuse.  He hadn’t, but he tried.

“Would you like an immediate hearing?” he asked Tony in an encouraging tone.

“Mr. Hogan can’t be here until to-morrow morning,” interposed Simpkins.  “Besides, we shall want to produce witnesses.  Make it to-morrow afternoon, judge.”

Judge Harrison leaned forward.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to have the hearing now?” he inquired with a smile at the trembling boy.

“Well, I want to get Froelich here—­if you’re going to proceed now,” spoke up Delany.  “And I’d like to look up this defendant’s record at headquarters.”

Tony quailed.  He feared and distrusted everybody, except the kind Mr. Simpkins.  He suspected that smooth judge of trying to railroad him.

“No!  No!” he whispered to the lawyer.  “I want my mother should be here; and the janitor, he knows I was in my house.  The rabbi, he will give me a good character.”

The judge heard and shrugged his bombazine-covered shoulders.  It was no use.  The children of darkness were wiser in their generation than the children of light.

“Five hundred dollars bail,” he remarked shortly.  “Officer, have your witnesses ready to proceed to-morrow afternoon at two o’clock.”

* * * * *

“Mr. Tutt,” said Tutt with a depressed manner as he watched Willie remove the screen and drag out the old gate-leg table for the firm’s daily five o’clock tea and conference in the senior partner’s office, “if a man called you a shyster what would you do about it?”

The elder lawyer sucked meditatively on the fag end of his stogy before replying.