This mannerism led a lot of people into thinking that the judge must be an uneducated man--until they heard him charging a jury or reading one of his rulings. The judge had other peculiarities. In conversation he nearly always called men younger than himself, son. He drank a little bit too much sometimes; and nobody had ever beaten him for any office he coveted. Durham didn't know what to make of this old judge--sometimes he seemed simple-minded to the point of childishness almost. The others were gathered about a table by a lighted kerosene lamp, but the old judge sat at an open window with his low-quarter shoes off and his white-socked feet propped against the ledge. He was industriously stoking at a home-made corncob pipe. He pursed up his mouth, pulling at the long cane stem of his pipe with little audible sucks. From the rocky little street below the clatter of departing farm teams came up to him. The Indian medicine doctor was taking down his big white umbrella and packing up his regalia. The late canvas habitat of the Half Man and Half Horse had been struck and was gone, leaving only the pole-holes in the turf and a trodden space to show where it had stood. Court would go on all week, but Court Monday was over and for another month the town would doze along peacefully. Durham slumped himself into a chair that screeched protestingly in all its infirm joints. The heart was gone clean out of him. “I don't understand these people at all,” he confessed. “We're beating against a stone wall with our bare hands.” “If it should be money now that you're needing, Mister Durham,” spoke up Felsburg, “that boy Tandy's father was my very good friend when I first walked into that town with a peddling pack on my back, and if it should be money----?” “It isn't money, Mr. Felsburg,” said Durham. “If I didn't get a cent for my services I'd still fight this case out to the aid for the sake of that game boy and that poor little mite of a wife of his. It isn't money or the lack of it--it's the damned hate they've built up here against the man. Why, you could cut it off in chunks--the prejudice that there was in that courthouse today.” “Son,” put in Judge Priest in his high, weedy voice, “I reckon maybe you're right. I've been projectin' around cotehouses a good many years, and I've taken notice that when a jury look at a prisoner all the time and never look at his women folks it's a monstrous bad sign. And that's the way it was all day today.” “The judge will be fair--he always is,” said Hightower, the local lawyer, “and of course Gilliam is only doing his duty. Those jurors are as good solid men as you can find in this country anywhere. But they can't help being prejudiced. Human nature's not strong enough to stand out against the feeling that's grown up round here against Tandy since he shot Ab Rankin.” “Son,” said Judge Priest, still with his eyes on the darkening square below, “about how many of them jurors would you say are old soldiers?”