Yetta had wanted to tell the judge the truth. It was only because Braun insisted that it would endanger the success of the strike that she had consented to lie. But when she was led into the court-room, her scruples left her. Telling the truth is like a quarrel--there must be two parties to it. Nicolas Gay, the Russian painter, has a canvas called, "What is Truth?" It portrays Pontius Pilate, putting this question to the Christ. And you realize at once why the Prisoner could not answer. Truth is not the enunciation of certain words. Nothing which the scorned and scourged and thorn-crowned Jesus might have said about His Truth could have penetrated the thick skull of the gross and pride-filled Roman proconsul. Yetta, in a somewhat similar situation, understood at once that this dingy court-room was not an Abode of Truth. Magistrate Cornett, before whom she was led, although a young man, was quite bald. He sat hunched up in his great chair, and the folds of his heavy black robe made him look deformed. His finger nails were manicured. His skin was carefully groomed, but the flesh under it was flabby. His face and hands were those of a gourmand. The clerk read the complaint. It charged Yetta with assault in all its degrees in that on that very day she had with felonious intent struck one Michael Brennan on the head with a dangerous weapon, to wit a blackjack. "Guilty or not guilty?" "Not guilty," Braun replied. The plain-clothes man deposed that he knew nothing about the case except that he had served the warrant as directed by the court. He had found the defendant in the strike headquarters of the vest-makers. The man who had helped Brennan get up was a clerk in a neighboring wholesale house. He had been sent out with a telegram, and in the rain-swept, deserted street he had seen no one but the prostrate detective, who was just regaining consciousness as he came up. He helped the stricken man to his feet, and that was all he knew. Then Michael Brennan, alias Pick-Axe, took the stand. Ordinarily he made a fairly good appearance in court. He felt himself among friends, felt a reassuring kinship with the policemen, the clerks, and even with the judge. To be sure they all knew he was a perjurer, and very few of them would shake hands with him. But still he was a necessary part in the great machine for preserving social order, by which they all were paid. But this day he was not at his ease. In the first place his head ached horribly. In the second, he was so infuriated that he could scarcely control his tongue. And thirdly, he knew that he was in for a grilling from Braun. And he was more than usually afraid of this ordeal because he was not sure what had happened. He remembered kicking Mrs. Muscovitz, he had a vague conviction that Yetta had rushed at him--and then he remembered coming to and being helped to his feet.