There was no doubt about the old man's crime, not the slightest. It had
been only the tweedledum and tweedledee of the law that had saved him
the first time. They would not serve him now. The evidence was too
conclusive, the facts too plain. The "deadwood," as such evidence is
called by the initiated, lay in heaps--more than enough to send him to
State prison for the balance of his natural life. The buzzard of a
District Attorney who had first scented out his body with an indictment,
and who all these eleven months and ten days had sat with folded wings
and hunched-up shoulders, waiting for his final meal--I had begun to
dislike him in the Bud Tilden trial, but I hated him now (a foolish,
illogical prejudice, for he was only doing his duty as he saw it)--had
full control of all the "deadwood"; had it with him, in fact. There were
not only some teaspoonfuls of the identical whiskey which this
law-breaker had sold, all in an eight-ounce vial properly corked and
labelled, but there was also the identical silver dime which had been
paid for it.
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