This resulted in his lawyer becoming so affluent that it wasn’t necessary for him to bother with Cassius, so he withdrew from the case.  After some delay, another lawyer was appointed to defend him and things began to look up.  But by this time the dockets had become so jammed with unrelated dilemmas, and the summer heat was so intense, that the new lawyer informed him he couldn’t possibly sandwich him in unless he would consent to change his plea to “guilty”, contending that the combination of humility and humidity would go a long ways towards softening the judge.  But Cassius sturdily refused to cheapen himself.

In the meantime, new crimes had been committed by countless gentlemen of leisure; the Tombs was full of men clamoring for attention, and there was an undetected waiting list outside that stretched all the way from the Battery to the lower extremities of Yonkers.

The principal witness, Mr. Crittenden Yollop, did his best to behave nobly.  He thrice postponed a business trip to Paris in order to be within reach when Cassius needed him.  Then, in the fall, when things looked most propitious for a speedy termination of Smilk’s suspense, the millinery business took a sudden and alarming turn for the worse and Mr. Yollop fell into the hands of the specialists.  He had his teeth ex-rayed, his sinuses probed, his eyes examined, his stomach sounded, his intestines visited, his nerves tampered with, his blood tested, his kidneys explored, his heart observed, his ears inspected, his gall stones (if he had any) shifted, his last will and testament drawn up, his funeral practically arranged for,—­all by different scientists,—­and then was ordered to go off somewhere in the country and play golf for his health.  He went to Hot Springs, Virginia, and inside of two weeks contracted the golf disease in its most virulent form.  He got it so bad that other players looked upon him as a scourge and avoided him even to the point of self-sacrifice.  It was said of him that when he once got on a green it was next to impossible to get him off of it.

But all this is neither here nor there.  Suffice to say that shortly after his return to New York, Mr. Yollop paid a more or less clandestine visit to the Tombs, where he saw Cassius.  This was the week before the trial was to open.  He found the crook in a disconsolate frame of mind.

“Don’t call me Yollop,” he managed to convey to the prisoner.  “I gave another name to the jailer or whatever he is.  Is it jail bird?  It wouldn’t look right for the prosecuting witness to come down here to see you.  They think I’m your brother-in-law.”

Smilk glowered.  “Has your hearin’ improved any?” he inquired, after locating the disc.

“No, of course not.”

“Then,” said the prisoner, “I can’t tell you what I think of you without the whole damn’ jail hearin’ me, so I guess you’d better beat it.”

“Splendid!  That’s just the way I might have expected you to talk to your brother-in-law.”