"That one I had against Burroughs—and old Laurie was sitting, too. The jury was only out ten minutes." O’Mara was pink with triumph. "What was the charge?" asked Luke. "Larceny. It was hard work to make out; but the fellow’s past record did for him. I got that in while Burroughs was asleep at the switch. When he did object, Laurie ruled against me, but the jury’d heard it all right. Laurie’s the strictest man on the bench, and Burroughs is about the cleverest criminal lawyer in town." Luke blushed for this victor: "Was the man guilty?" O’Mara’s eyes were first wondering and then amused. "They all are," he said. "If he didn’t do this he did something else we didn’t know about—lots else. They’re all guilty." Luke supposed they were, but he could not understand his associates’ desire to secure convictions for the convictions’ sake. The innocent did not always suffer, nor yet the guilty. Luke was not directly attached to the homicide bureau, the name applied to that branch of the staff regularly employed to investigate and try cases of suspected murder. Nevertheless, Leighton believed in giving his men some chance at many branches of practice, because he wanted them to be what he called "all-round criminal practitioners" when the time should come for them to leave his service, and so Luke was once or twice called into a capital trial. On one such occasion he was helping young Uhler. Leighton himself had tried a striker named Gace on the charge of shooting and killing a detective during a strike-riot, and Gace, greatly to the District-Attorney’s chagrin, was acquitted. Some slight evidence adduced at the Gace trial seemed to point to another striker, Reardon, and, though there was small hope of convicting Reardon, popular clamor forced Leighton to plead for a true bill against him and bring him to trial. "I won’t touch it any more, though," laughed Leighton. "Uhler, you’ll have to take it, and you might as well have Huber with you. We’re bound to lose, and so I’m going to give my assistants a chance to bear the discredit. That’s what you boys are here for." Smarting under his chief’s prophecy, Uhler, one of the youngest of the staff, went into court and fought hard, which was doubtless the intention behind Leighton’s words. His enthusiasm was strong and contagious. He convinced himself of Reardon’s guilt, and he ended by convincing Luke. The proceedings, indeed, went largely in the State’s favor until, shortly after the defense had opened its case, the man Gace, who had previously been acquitted, was called to the stand to testify to some minor detail. His examination was about to be completed when he quite calmly volunteered the statement that it was he who had done the killing. "Cross-examine," said the defending lawyer and, covering amazement, sat down.