When the man-of-straw of outraged community virtue is dislodged the court-room is redolent of prejudice and policy and pedantry and plausibility; of many things that lie on each other in layers like morning griddle cakes. But it seldom suggests atmosphere of health and light and true cleanliness and earnest religious progressiveness; of the earnest desire to administer true justice, of the earnest wish to analyze specific examples of crime, to conserve all goodness, to see straighter, more freely, with greater charity and more modern scientific accuracy. Of these things few court-rooms smell. It may have been the stale, dreary, intrenched and pompous atmosphere of the Trout County court-room that finally drove the Minga Bunch from their original intention of following Terence O'Brien to the last ditch of his trial. Youthful enthusiasm and curiosity had long since died out, leaving only a grudging sense of clan obligation, and the long hours of reviewing circumstantial evidence, the cross-questioning of this and that dull witness, the peering faces of the family of the murdered man and the grim and relentless attitude of the jury, these things had somehow robbed the circumstances of all their dramatic values. The sight of Terry standing day after day in the pen, his tow-colored hair always brushed the same way, his eyes always nervously blinking the same way, and his dry mouth unable to testify in his own defense, nettled the group of young people who had interested themselves in his behalf. They had supposed the young accused would rise suddenly and pelt the people with polemics. They had looked for dynamics; they found only musty, fusty technique, sour looks of old men, rigidities of convention and a bewildered effect of vital issues lost in a grand tea-party of form and precedent. Also, Watts Shipman disappointed them. Not experienced enough to comprehend the poise and power that lay behind Shipman's calm, his deferential giving way to his "distinguished opponent," his punctilious observance of every known courtesy and tradition of the bar, they found him tepid and unconvincing. They saw their great man as rather a simple soul, apparently a negligible factor in the trial, apparently dominated by the sleek, shining country counsel for the prosecution, and did not know that those very simplicities were the earnest of his greatness. The Bunch did not know the modern function of the lawyer to hold himself rigidly from emphasis until all of the case has been digested. To work out by the slow sifting of evidence the four sides of his construction, the meticulous dotting of _I's_ and crossing of _T's_, the subterfuge of the trained, technical response of witness when asked certain specific questions; in short, the suave chicanery and subtle craft that has been slowly built up around the narrowing arena where two brains tourney for the life or honor of a prisoner--these things were so much mortification of the flesh for the restive "Bunch."