Page:Heroes of the hour- Mahatma Gandhi, Tilak Maharaj, Sir Subramanya Iyer.djvu/177

 High Court was surcharged with emotional electricity. It is a wonder if the imagination of some people did not show them bombs hanging from the ceiling or pistols stuck up on the walls of the Court House! The friends of Mr. Tilak could see nothing but the unseen Andaman Islands, or the Penal Settlement of Port Blair. People who had not read the Penal Code might have even thought that on conviction Mr. Tilak might be blown off from the cannon's mouth. It was a time when the habitually merry became serious and the habitually serious dazed and awe-stricken."

The preliminaries to the Court House scene were equally awe-striking. As one batch of police officers was hunting after Mr. Tilak, another had left from Bombay to make great searches in Poona and elsewhere. It was at 10 P.M. in the night that the protectors of public tranquillity appeared before the Gaikwad's Wada in Narayanapet Poona, where Mr. Tilak's house and the Kesari and the Maharatta offices are located. Even the worst panic-stricken Government could not have ordered searches during* the night. So the police did the next best thing. They turned out every other resident in the wada