I knew why the man refused to answer.

He didn't understand the phraseology.
"Where were you previous to the eighth and immediately subsequent thereto ?" the attorney asked him for the third time.
All the prisoner could do was look guilty and say nothing.
"Answer the question," ordered the judge, "or I'll send you up for vagrancy." Still the man kept silent.

Then I spoke up: "John, tell the court where you were before you came here and also where you have been since you arrived in the city." "I was in Pittsburgh," he said, and he proceeded to tell the whole story of his life.

He was still talking when they chased him out of court and took up the next case.

He was a free man, and yet he had come within an inch of going to jail.