It seemed to him, as he reflected on the probable sentiment of his friends and neighbors, that he had lived in a wolfish community, ready with cowardly cruelty to attack and mangle him since fortune had brought him down. “I’m carrion now; I’ll hev ter expec’ the wolves an’ buzzards,” he said bitterly to his lawyer, as they canvassed together what witnesses they had best summon to prove his general good character, and whom they should challenge on the jury list. There was hardly a man of the number on whom Mink had not played some grievous prank calculated to produce a rankling grudge and foster prejudice. He recited these with a lugubrious gravity incongruous enough with the subject matter, that often elicited bursts of unwilling laughter from the perplexed counsel. This was a bluff, florid man of forty, with a hearty, resonant voice, a light blue eye, thick, yellow hair, which he wore cut straight across beneath his ears, showing its density, and thrown back without parting from his forehead. When the locks fell forward, as they often did, he tossed them back with an impatient gesture. He had a long mustache and beard. His lips were peculiarly red. Altogether he was a high-colored, noisy, confident, blustering fellow, and he inspired Mink with great faith. “I done a better thing ’n I knowed of whenst I voted an’ electioneered so brash fur you-uns ez floater in the legislatur’,” said Mink one day, in a burst of hopefulness. When he had sent for the lawyer to defend him, he had based his appeal for aid partly on his political services, and relied on them to atone for any deficiency of fees. “Do it again, Mink, early and often!” And the floater’s jolly laughter rang out, jarring against the walls of the bare room, which was, however, far more cheerful for the sound. Mink had found in the requirements of the approaching trial, urged upon his attention by the lawyer, a certain respite from his mental anguish. But in the midst of the night, griefs would beset him. In his dreams the humble, foolish individuality of the idiot boy was invested with awe, with a deep pathos, with a terrible dignity. It seemed often that he was awakened by the clutch of a hand to an imperative consciousness of the crime of which he was accused, to a torturing uncertainty of his guilt or innocence. His conscience strove in vain to reckon with him. “Mebbe, though, the jury kin tell?” he said one morning, piteously, to his counsel, who had come cheerily in, to find him wild-eyed and haggard. “A jury,” said the lawyer sententiously, “is the cussedness of one man multiplied by twelve.”