Criminals -- Fiction; Social problems -- Fiction; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918 -- Fiction
Glassford paused; no one in the court-room moved. Archie still kept his
eyes on Glassford, and Glassford kept his eyes on the wall. Glassford
had remembered that in olden days the judge, when he donned the black
cap, at some such time as this used to pray that God would have mercy on
the soul of the man for whom he himself could find no mercy; but
Glassford did not like to say this; it seemed too old-fashioned and he
would have felt silly and self-conscious in it. And yet, he felt that
the proprieties demanded that something be said in the tone of piety,
and, thinking a moment, he added:
"And I hope, Koerner, that you will employ the few remaining days of
life left to you in preparing your soul to meet its Maker."
With an air of relief, Glassford turned, and wrote in his docket. On
his broad, shining forehead drops of perspiration were glistening.
"The prisoner will be remanded," he said.
Archie faced about and held out his left wrist toward Danner. The
handcuffs clicked, Marriott turned, glanced at Archie, but he could not
bear to look in his white face. Then he heard Danner’s feet and
Archie’s feet falling in unison as they passed out of the courtroom.
XXIII
Danny Gibbs, having recovered from the debauch into which Archie’s fate
had plunged him, sat in his back room reading the evening paper. His
spree had lasted for a week, and the whole tenderloin had seethed with
the excitement of his escapades. Now that it was all over and reason
had returned, he had made new resolutions, and a certain moral
rehabilitation was expressed in his solemn demeanor and in the utter
neatness of his attire. He was clean-shaven, his skin glowed pink from
Turkish baths, his gray hair was closely trimmed and soberly parted, his
linen was scrupulously clean; he wore new clothes of gray, his shoes
were polished and without a fleck of dust. His meditations that evening
might have been profoundly pious, or they might have been dim, foggy
recollections of the satisfaction he had felt in heaping scathing curses
on the head of Quinn, whom he had met in Eva Clason’s while on his
rampage. He had cursed the detective as a representative of the entire
race of policemen, whom he hated, and Quinn had apparently taken it in
this impersonal sense, for he had stood quietly by without resenting
Gibbs’s profane denunciation. But whatever Gibbs’s meditations, they
were broken by the entrance of a woman.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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