The bailiff called it, still smiling, and in the pause half the occupants of the court-room boiled out onto the court-house lawn and gave vent to their pent-up emotions. Babe Thorne was going to buck Kilkenny and plead a case in court! He would make an impassioned appeal and raise Cain with Ike Crittenden's witnesses—it would be an event never to be forgotten! Still laughing they scattered through the town, and soon men came hurrying forth from the different saloons to verify the report; they gathered in a crowd by the sheriff's office and, as the word spread that it was true, gangs of cowboys and men on livery-stable plugs went dashing down the streets, whooping and laughing and crying the news to their friends. It was a new excitement—something doing—and the way an Arizona town will take on over some such trifling event is nothing short of scandalous. Within two hours the leisure male population of Geronimo was divided into two hostile camps—those who would get Babe drunk before the event and those who would keep him sober and have him take a fall out of Kilkenny. On the one side it was argued that, unless he was properly ginned up, Babe would not do justice to the occasion; but cooler heads won on the proposition that the judge would bar him if he got drunk and hollered, and a committee of prominent citizens was organized to protect him from himself. Being quick to see the news value of the incident the _Blade_ printed an exclusive interview with Angevine Thorne—formerly of the Kentucky bar—and announced that the trial would be covered in detail by "our Mr. Baker." A series of Communications, written under pressure in the card-rooms of various casinos, expressed the greatest indignation at the "dastardly attempt of a certain interested party to debar Mr. Thorne from the trial," and the hope that this exhibition of professional jealousy would receive the rebuke it so richly deserved. In an editorial the _Daily Blade_ spoke at some length of the rare eloquence of "our gifted fellow-citizen, Colonel Thorne," and felicitated Alcalde Dalhart upon the acumen he had shown in retaining counsel. Everything goes, in a case like that, and the _Blade_ played it up to the limit.