nary
effect, for the jury now stood ten to two for acquittal. He began to
feel encouraged. If ever there was a case-- Then he heard an altercation
going on fiercely between the salesman and Brown's summer friend, the
latter insisting loudly that the detective was a perfect gentleman and
entirely all right.

"Nobody questions Mr. Brown's entire honesty," interposed Bently
hastily, in a friendly way. "The question before us is the sufficiency
of the evidence. Upon this, it seems to me, there is what might fairly
be called a reasonable doubt."

"And you have to give that to the defendant--it's the law!" shouted the
salesman in fury.

It was at this point that Mr. Tutt and Phelan had taken up their
positions outside the door, and the friend of Brown had told the
salesman that he gave him a pain; that his doubt wasn't a reasonable
doubt.

"Gentlemen! Gentlemen!" protested Bently. "Let us discuss this matter
calmly."

"But I'm a reasonable man!" shouted the salesman. "And so, if I have any
doubt, my doubt is bound to be reasonable."

"You--a reasonable man?" sneered Brown's friend. "You're nothin' but a
damn fool!"

"I am, am I?" yelled the salesman, starting to remove his coat. "I'll
show you--"

"Oh, cut it out!" expostulated the fat man complacently. "Settle all
that afterward! We ain't interested."

"Vell, take annoder vote," mildly suggested the foreman.

This time it stood eleven to one for acquittal. All concentrated upon
the friend of Brown, over whose face had settled a look of grim
determination. But a similar expression occupied the features of Mr.
Bently Gibson, erstwhile the exponent of the-law-as-it-is, the bulwark
of the jury system, now adrift upon the ship of justice, blindly
determined that no matter what--law or no law, principles or no
principles--that old man was going to be acquitted.

"My friend," he remarked solemnly, taking the floor, "of course you want
to do justice in this case. We have nothing against Mr. Brown at all. He
is doubtless a very honest and efficient officer. But surely the good
character of this defendant may well create a reasonable doubt--and the
rest of us feel that it does."

"Sure! 'Course it does!" came from all sides. Mr. Brown's red-faced
friend having escaped the salesman's wrath began to show somewhat less
aggressiveness.

"I don't care a damn about Brown!" he assured them. "He can go to hell
for all of me! But I don't see how you can acquit this feller wh