Part of the crowd stayed behind, forming a scrooging, shoving ring around the spot in front of Benny Michelson's pawn shop where the body of old Ranee lay face upward across the gutter with the stiffening legs on the sidewalk, and the oddly foreshortened body out in the dust of the road; and the rest followed Allard Jones and young Jim as they walked side by side up Market Square to Court Street and along Court Street a short block to the lock-up. The sympathy of the community was with young Jim--and the law of the land was dead against him on all counts. He had not fired in sudden heat and passion; there had been time, as the statutes measured time, for due deliberation. However great the provocation and by local standards the provocation had been great enough and pressing hard to the breaking point, he could not claim self-defense. Even though Fleming's purpose had been, ultimately, to bring things to a violent issue, he was retreating, actually, at the moment itself. As a bar to punishment for homicide, the plea of temporary insanity had never yet been set up in our courts. Jim Faxon was fast in the snarls of the law. From the lock-up he went to the county jail, the charge, wilful and premeditated murder. Dr. Lake and Mr. Herman Felsburg and Major Covington, all customers of the accused, and all persons of property, stood ready to go bail for him in any sum namable, but murder was not bailable. In time a grand jury buttressed the warrant with an indictment--murder in the first degree, the indictment read--and young Jim stayed in jail awaiting his trial when circuit court should open in the spring. Nobody, of course, believed that his jury would vote the extreme penalty. The dead man's probable intentions and his past reputation, taken with the prisoner's youth and good repute, would stand as bars to that, no matter how the letter of the law might read; but it was generally accepted that young Jim would be found guilty of manslaughter. He might get four years for killing old Ranee, or six years or even ten--this was a subject for frequent discussion. There was no way out of it. People were sorrier than ever for Jim and for his aunt and for the tacky, pretty little Hardin girl. All through the short changeable winter, with its alternate days of snow flurrying and sunshine, Emmy Hardin and Miss Puss Whitley, a crushed forlorn pair, together minded the stall on the market, accepting gratefully the silent sympathy that some offered them, and the awkward words of good cheer from others. Miss Puss put a mortgage of five hundred dollars on her little place out in the edge of town. With the money she hired Dabney Prentiss, the most silvery tongued orator of all the silver tongues at the county bar, to defend her nephew. And every day, when market hours were over, in rain or snow or shine, the two women would drive in their truck wagon up to the county jail to sit with young Jim and to stay with him in his cell until dark.