"No, you wouldn’t. Lot of it subconscious—suppressed desire, Freud, and all that. But start him talking, and it’s ’God! I’d have shot that fellow if I’d had a gun!’ or it’s, ’If I’d had a dose of poison, they’d never have got me alive.’ Mind ran on it. Yes, sir! Always thinking of doing somebody in—if not another fellow, then himself." "I don’t think he knew it." "Of course he didn’t know it. Seemed natural to him. Our own vices always do seem natural to us. If you put it up to him now, he’d say he’d never had a thought of shooting up anyone, and he wouldn’t be lying out of it, either. Way it seems to him. Way it seems to every criminal of the class. But to judges and juries it’s just so much ’bull,’ and tells against the accused in the end. Sure you won’t have a cigar?" Having again declined the cigar, Bob argued in favor of Teddy, but Stenhouse was fixed in his convictions. "I’ll do what I can for him, of course; only, I’m blocked by his refusal to plead guilty. Pleading guilty might—I don’t say it would, but it might—incline the judge to mercy. It would get him off, too, with the second degree, only that, when his own story shows him as guilty as hell, he keeps pulling the innocent stuff to beat a jazz band. The rascal who plumps with his confession will always get the clemency, while the fellow with a mouthful of innocence will be sent to the chair." "But if he does feel that he’s innocent—" "Sure he feels that he’s innocent! That’s it! That’s what I’m talking about—the ingrained criminal’s lack of consciousness that his kind of crime is crime. The other fellow’s—yes; but his—why, the law is a fool to be made that way and trip a good fellow up! To hear this young shaver talk, you’d think the courts should be manned by pickpockets." "All the same, he was in a tight place—" "What’s that got to do with it? If we didn’t get into tight places, there’d be no need for laws of any kind." "I was only thinking of his motive—" "His motive may have been all right. I’ll not dispute you there, because you’ll find that legally there’s a difference between motive and intent. His motive may have been to provide for his mother, just as he says. Good! No harm in that whatever. But his intent was to rob a bank and shoot the guy that came out after him. The court won’t go into his motives. It’ll deal only with his intent, and with what came of it."