“It’s a good deal less risky than not doing it, so far as your candidacy next autumn is concerned!” retorted his assistant.  “We won’t let her suspect what we’re goin’ to do; and the last minute I’ll call her to the stand and cinch the case!  She won’t even know who called her!  Perhaps I can arrange with Judge Babson to call her on some other point and then pretend to sort of stumble onto the fact of the confession and examine her himself.  That would let us out.  I can smear it over somehow.”

“You’d better,” commented Peckham, “unless you want a howl from the papers!  It would make quite a story if Miss Althea Beekman got on the rampage.  She could have your scalp, my boy, if she wanted it!”

“And McGurk could have yours!” retorted O’Brien with the impudence born of knowledge.

The prosecution of Shane O’Connell, which otherwise might have slowly languished and languishing died, took on new life owing to the evidence thus innocently delivered into the hands of the district attorney; in fact it became a cause celebre.  The essential elements to convict were now all there—­the corpus delicti, evidence of threats on the part of the defendant, of motive, of opportunity, and—­his confession.  The law which provides that the statement of an accused “is not sufficient to warrant his conviction without additional proof that the crime charged has been committed” would be abundantly satisfied—­though without his confession there would have been no proof whatever that the crime charged had been committed by him.

Thus, without her knowing it, Miss Beekman was an essential witness and, in fact, the pivot upon which the entire case turned.

The day of the great sporting event came.  With it arrived in full panoply the McGurks, their relatives and followers.  All Cherry Hill seemed to have packed itself into Part I of the Supreme Court.  There was an atmosphere somehow suggestive of the races or a prize fight.  But it was a sporting event which savored of a sure thing—­really more like a hanging.  They were there to make holiday over the law’s revenge for the killing of the darling of the Pearl Button Kids.  Peckham personally assured McGurk that everything was copper-fastened.

“He’s halfway up the river already!” he said jocularly.

And McGurk, swelling with importance and emotion, pulled a couple of cigars from his pocket and the two smoked the pipe of peace.

But the reader is not particularly concerned with the progress of the trial, for he has already attended many.  It is enough to say that a jury with undershot jaws, who had proved by previous experience their indifference to capital punishment and to all human sympathy, were finally selected and that the witnesses were duly called, and testified to the usual facts, while the Pearl Button Kids and the rest, spitting surreptitiously beneath the benches, eagerly drank in every word.  There was nothing for Mr. Tutt