"The defense is ready." Cecil Warner was standing also, heavy and old, a man listening to other voices though capable of employing his own heavy thunder. The other voices were conscience, tradition, books; overtones of what witnesses and lawyers don't say. The seamed ancient face was fat, the kindness obvious but not the strength. Mann wondered occasionally whether Warner had ever, like Darrow, faced all the implications of a certain pessimism that colored most of his opinions. A fracture imperfectly set had crippled Cecil Warner's left arm in childhood; he could not bend the elbow beyond a ninety-degree angle. And Warner's mind, the Judge speculated, might suffer a similar limitation, never hitting with quite all its power. He would need it all in the next few days. "The People of the State of New Essex against Callista Blake." Reasonable words; but as Mr. Delehanty intoned them, the Judge's mind perversely visualized an army of five or six million, uniformed, with rifles, tanks, flame-throwers, advancing in ponderous wrath against one cornered chipmunk with tinfoil helmet and paper sword. Foolish, he knew: the individual was not alone, and faced not the People roaring and multitudinous but merely their representative, who might be no more powerful a champion than his own counsel. Yet the image had pestered Judge Mann before now, and faded in the style of the Cheshire Cat. At other times he could not avoid the impression that the adversary system was too distressingly close in nature as well as origin to the absurdities of medieval justice, in which truth could be determined by the beef of a hired champion. Were prosecutor and defender today any more concerned with truth than those bumbling muscle-men? Were juries? And judges? "Counsel to the bench, please." They approached, Hunter light on his feet, Warner slow and carrying too much weight in the middle. "When we get started, gentlemen, I intend to bear down on the formalities, some. I think it's that kind of case. Anything more we should discuss now?" Warner's hand rested on the bench. Mann noticed the pale freckles, the frailty of deep-crinkled flesh, blurred rims of the irises of Warner's melancholy brown eyes. Cecil Warner was sixty-eight. "Don't think so, Judge, unless T. J.'s got some load on his mind." Hunter murmured: "Can't imagine a plea--poison and drowning." "My God, do you imagine us taking one?" Mann frowned; Warner's anger was rumbling too loudly. "We're here for acquittal. My girl didn't do it. It's that simple, and that's where we stand." Hunter nodded gravely, courteously, unmoved.