Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Silent Sam and other stories.djvu/33

Rh against libel. Judge Purvis was handled with a sarcastic courtesy that could not be prosecuted for contempt of court. Four "professional jurors," who had sat on the case, were ringingly denounced, but not by name. The witness Gahn was "alleged" to be everything suspicious. The whole article, written to make a charge of criminality against the railway, was ingeniously worded to give the effect of making the charge, without actually making it, so that the sovereign D. & C. might not have the opportunity of defending itself in its own courts, before its own judges, with a jury picked to find it innocent.

Sam's case, in fact, was carried to that almighty court of ultimate appeal in the democracy—the people. And they began to sit on it.

They were assisted by the ironic editorials of the little labor journal and by the dignified exterior of silence preserved by the "kept" newspapers of the ruling powers. The D. & C. refused, of course, to come into any such court. The case began to go against the railway by default. Deputy Johns carried himself with such circumspection that he refused to recognize the reporter when they passed on the street. And Silent Sam, trudging up and down the cement corridor of his cell-house—stared at through the bars by visitors, interrogated in vain by the guards—remained as insensible to his notoriety as he was to the mumbling of the maniac, in a neighboring cell, who thought himself the Czar of Russia and accepted Sam as the sentry at his palace gate.