Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/131



What was, to be done with the burglars? They were to be sent to the reformatory, of course; the Law prescribed the penalty. The Judge shook his head, “No.”

He didn’t say so in court then, but he tells now how he was recalling the time when he, as a boy, went robbing a pigeon-loft. He didn’t actually commit “burglary,” but he would have if he hadn’t lost his nerve. He was “scared”; the other kids had told him so, and it was true. And they left him, in contempt and ashamed, while they robbed the coop. So he wasn’t an ex-convict, not because he was a good boy, no; nor because he was “smaller than them,” though that was a plea set up in the gang in his behalf. He wasn’t a burglar, like these boys before him now, simply because he didn’t have as much “sand” as they had. Was he going to punish them as burglars, “send them up” for crime, to live among criminals ? No.

But the complainant had a view to present. A worried, old, persecuted man, he told how boys were forever stealing his pigeons; how he had “laid for them” again and again; how they generally escaped; and how, finally, after many failures, he had caught these three. He wanted them punished; he begged to have them “sent to jail.”

There was something familiar in the appearance