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particular respect for any of them—not even Harper Steger, though he liked
him. They were tools to be used—knives, keys, clubs, anything you will; but
nothing more. When they were through they were paid and dropped—put
aside and forgotten. As for judges, they were merely incompetent lawyers, at
a rule, who were shelved by some fortunate turn of chance, and who would
not, in all likelihood, be as efficient as the lawyers who pleaded before them
if they were put in the same position. He had no respect for judges—he
knew too much about them. He knew how often they were sycophants,
political climbers, political hacks, tools, time-servers, judicial door-mats
lying before the financially and politically great and powerful who used them
as such. Judges were fools, as were most other people in this dusty, shifty
world. Pah! His inscrutable eyes took them all in and gave no sign. His only
safety lay, he thought, in the magnificent subtley of his own brain, and
nowhere else. You could not convince Cowperwood of any great or inherent
virtue in this mortal scheme of things. He knew too much; he knew himself.
When the judge finally cleared away the various minor motions pending, he
ordered his clerk to call the case of the City of Philadelphia versus Frank A.
Cowperwood, which was done in a clear voice. Both Dennis Shannon, the
new district attorney, and Steger, were on their feet at once. Steger and
Cowperwood, together with Shannon and Strobik, who had now come in and
was standing as the representative of the State of Pennsylvania—the
complainant—had seated themselves at the long table inside the railing
which inclosed the space before the judge's desk. Steger proposed to Judge
Payderson, for effect's sake more than anything else, that this indictment be
quashed, but was overruled.
A jury to try the case was now quickly impaneled—twelve men out of the
usual list called to serve for the month—and was then ready to be
challenged by the opposing counsel. The business of impaneling a jury was
a rather simple thing so far as this court was concerned. It consisted in the
mandarin-like clerk taking the names of all the jurors called to serve in this
court for the month—some fifty in all—and putting them, each written on a
separate slip of paper, in a whirling drum, spinning it around a few times,
and then lifting out the first slip which his hand encountered, thus
glorifying chance and settling on who should be juror No. 1. His hand
reaching in twelve times drew out the names of the twelve jurymen, who as
their names were called, were ordered to take their places in the jury-box.
Cowperwood observed this proceeding with a great deal of interest. What
could be more important than the men who were going to try him? The
process was too swift for accurate judgment, but he received a faint
impression of middle-class men. One man in particular, however, an old
man of sixty-five, with iron-gray hair and beard, shaggy eyebrows, sallow
complexion, and stooped shoulders, struck him as having that kindness of
temperament and breadth of experience which might under certain
circumstances be argumentatively swayed in his favor. Another, a small,
sharp-nosed, sharp-chinned commercial man of some kind, he immediately
disliked.
"I hope I don't have to have that man on my jury," he said to Steger, quietly.
"You don't," replied Steger. "I'll challenge him. We have the right to fifteen
peremptory challenges on a case like this, and so has the prosecution."
When the jury-box was finally full, the two lawyers waited for the clerk to
bring them the small board upon which slips of paper bearing the names of
the twelve jurors were fastened in rows in order of their selection—jurors
one, two, and three being in the first row; four, five, and six in the second,
and so on. It being the prerogative of the attorney for the prosecution to
examine and challenge the jurors first, Shannon arose, and, taking the
board, began to question them as to their trades or professions, their
knowledge of the case before the court, and their possible prejudice for or
against the prisoner.
It was the business of both Steger and Shannon to find men who knew a
little something of finance and could understand a peculiar situation of this
kind without any of them (looking at it from Steger's point of view) having
any prejudice against a man's trying to assist himself by reasonable means
to weather a financial storm or (looking at it from Shannon's point of view)
having any sympathy with such means, if they bore about them the least
suspicion of chicanery, jugglery, or dishonest manipulation of any kind. As
both Shannon and Steger in due course observed for themselves in
connection with this jury, it was composed of that assorted social fry which
the dragnets of the courts, cast into the ocean of the city, bring to the
surface for purposes of this sort. It was made up in the main of managers,
agents, tradesmen, editors, engineers, architects, furriers, grocers, traveling
salesmen, authors, and every other kind of working citizen whose experience
had fitted him for service in proceedings of this character. Rarely would you
have found a man of great distinction; but very frequently a group of men
who were possessed of no small modicum of that interesting quality known
as hard common sense.
Throughout all this Cowperwood sat quietly examining the men. A young
florist, with a pale face, a wide speculative forehead, and anemic hands,
struck him as being sufficiently impressionable to his personal charm to be
worth while. He whispered as much to Steger. There was a shrewd Jew, a
furrier, who was challenged because he had read all of the news of the panic
and had lost two thousand dollars in street-railway stocks. There was a
stout wholesale grocer, with red cheeks, blue eyes, and flaxen hair, who
Cowperwood said he thought was stubborn. He was eliminated. There was a
thin, dapper manager of a small retail clothing store, very anxious to be
excused, who declared, falsely, that he did not believe in swearing by the
Bible. Judge Payderson, eyeing him severely, let him go. There were some
ten more in all—men who knew of Cowperwood, men who admitted they
were prejudiced, men who were hidebound Republicans and resentful of this
crime, men who knew Stener—who were pleasantly eliminated.
By twelve o'clock, however, a jury reasonably satisfactory to both sides had
been chosen.
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