It was four o’clock in the morning, and the twelve men who were to decide Archie’s fate were still huddled in the jury room. For eleven hours they had been there, balloting, arguing, disputing, quarreling, and then balloting again. Time after time young Menard had passed around his hat for the little scraps of paper, and always the result was the same, eleven for conviction, one for acquittal. For a while after the jury assembled there had been three votes for conviction of murder in the second degree, but long ago, as it seemed at that hour, these three votes had been won over for conviction of murder in the first degree, which meant death. At two o’clock Broadwell had declared that there was no use in wasting more time in voting, and for two hours no ballot had been taken. The electric lamps had glowed all night, filling the room with a fierce light, which, at this hour of the winter morning, had taken on an unnatural glare. The air was vitiated, and would have sickened one coming from outside, but these men, whose lungs had been gradually accustomed to it, were not aware how foul it was. Once or twice in the night some one had thrown up a window, but the older men had complained of the cold, and the window had to be closed down again. In that air hung the dead odor of tobacco smoke, for in the earlier hours of the night most of the men--all, indeed, save Broadwell--had smoked, some of them cigars, some pipes. But now they were so steeped in bodily weariness and in physical discomfort and misery that none of them smoked any longer. On the big oaken table in the middle of the room Menard’s hat lay tilted on its side, and all about lay the ballots. Ballots, too, strewed the floor and filled the cuspidors, little scraps of paper on which was scribbled for the most part the one word, "Guilty," the same word on all of them, though not always spelled the same. One man wrote it "Gildy," another "Gilty," still another "Gility." But among all those scattered scraps there was a series of ballots, the sight of which angered eleven of the men, and drove them to profanity; on this series of ballots was written "Not guilty." The words were written in an invariable, beautiful script, plainly the chirography of some German.