Counsel for the Defense
by Leroy Scott · English · Gutenberg #28820 · 517,535 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Counsel for the Defense
Author: Leroy Scott
Illustrator: Charles Shepard Chapman
Release date: May 15, 2009 [eBook #28820]
Most recently updated: January 5, 2021
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28820
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COUNSEL FOR THE DEFENSE ***
Produced by D Alexander and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)
Counsel for the Defense
By
Leroy Scott
Author of
"The Shears of Destiny," "To Him That Hath,"
"The Walking Delegate"
Frontispiece by
Charles M. Chapman
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1912
_Copyright, 1911, 1912, by_
LEROY SCOTT
_All rights reserved, including that of
translation into foreign languages,
including the Scandinavian_
[Illustration: "THRILLING WITH AN UNEXPECTED HOPE, KATHERINE ROSE AND
TRIED TO KEEP HERSELF BEFORE THE EYES OF DOCTOR SHERMAN LIKE AN
ACCUSING CONSCIENCE"]
TO
HELEN
PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
KATHERINE WEST.
DR. DAVID WEST, her father.
ARNOLD BRUCE, editor of the _Express_.
HARRISON BLAKE, ex-lieutenant-governor.
MRS. BLAKE, his mother.
"BLIND CHARLIE" PECK, a political boss.
HOSEA HOLLINGSWORTH, an old attorney.
BILLY HARPER, reporter on the _Express_.
THE REVEREND DR. SHERMAN, of the Wabash Avenue Church.
MRS. SHERMAN, his wife.
MRS. RACHEL GRAY, Katherine's aunt.
ROGER KENNEDY, prosecuting attorney.
JUDGE KELLOG.
MR. BROWN, of the National Electric & Water Company.
MR. MANNING, a detective.
ELIJAH STONE, a detective.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Westville Prepares to Celebrate 3
II. The Bubble Reputation 15
III. Katherine Comes Home 30
IV. Doctor West's Lawyer 49
V. Katherine Prepares for Battle 63
VI. The Lady Lawyer 80
VII. The Mask Falls 98
VIII. The Editor of the _Express_ 116
IX. The Price of a Man 131
X. Sunset at The Sycamores 146
XI. The Trial 158
XII. Opportunity Knocks at Bruce's Door 172
XIII. The Deserter 191
XIV. The Night Watch 212
XV. Politics Make Strange Bedfellows 226
XVI. Through The Storm 240
XVII. The Cup of Bliss 250
XVIII. The Candidate and the Tiger 264
XIX. When Greek Meets Greek 276
XX. A Spectre Comes to Town 295
XXI. Bruce to the Front 311
XXII. The Last Stand 328
XXIII. At Elsie's Bedside 346
XXIV. Billy Harper Writes a Story 368
XXV. Katherine Faces the Enemy 388
XXVI. An Idol's Fall 403
XXVII. The End of The Beginning 418
COUNSEL FOR THE DEFENSE
CHAPTER I
WESTVILLE PREPARES TO CELEBRATE
The room was thick with dust and draped with ancient cobwebs. In one
corner dismally reposed a literary junk heap--old magazines,
broken-backed works of reference, novels once unanimously read but now
unanimously forgotten. The desk was a helter-skelter of papers. One of
the two chairs had its burst cane seat mended by an atlas of the
world; and wherever any of the floor peered dimly through the general
débris it showed a complexion of dark and ineradicable greasiness.
Altogether, it was a room hopelessly unfit for human habitation; which
is perhaps but an indirect manner of stating that it was the office of
the editor of a successful newspaper.
Before a typewriter at a small table sat a bare-armed, solitary man.
He was twenty-eight or thirty, abundantly endowed with bone and
muscle, and with a face----But not to soil this early page with
abusive terms, it will be sufficient to remark that whatever the
Divine Sculptor had carved his countenance to portray, plainly there
had been no thought of re-beautifying the earth with an Apollo. He was
constructed not for grace, but powerful, tireless action; and there
was something absurdly disproportionate between the small machine and
the broad and hairy hands which so heavily belaboured its ladylike
keys.
It was a custom with Bruce to write the big local news story of the
day himself, a feature that had proved a stimulant to his paper's
circulation and prestige. To-morrow was to be one of the proudest days
of Westville's history, for to-morrow was the formal opening of the
city's greatest municipal enterprise, its thoroughly modern
water-works; and it was an extensive and vivid account of the next
day's programme that the editor was pounding so rapidly out of his
machine for that afternoon's issue of the _Express_. Now and then, as
he paused an instant to shape an effective sentence in his mind, he
glanced through the open window beside him across Main Street to
where, against the front of the old Court House, a group of
shirt-sleeved workmen were hanging their country's colours about a
speakers' stand; then his big, blunt fingers thumped swiftly on.
He had jerked out the final sheet, and had begun to revise his story,
making corrections with a very black pencil and in a very large hand,
when there sauntered in from the general editorial room a pale, slight
young man of twenty-five. The newcomer had a reckless air, a humorous
twist to the left corner of his mouth, and a negligent smartness in
his dress which plainly had its origin elsewhere than in Westville.
The editor did not raise his eyes.
"In a minute, Billy," he said shortly.
"Nothing to hurry about, Arn," drawled the other.
The young fellow drew forward the atlas-bottomed chair, leisurely
enthroned himself upon the nations of the earth, crossed his feet upon
the window-sill, and lit a cigarette. About his lounging form there
was a latent energy like that of a relaxed cat. He gazed rather
languidly over at the Square, its sides abustle with excited
preparation. Across the fronts of stores bunting was being tacked;
from upper windows crisp cotton flags were being unscrolled. As for
the Court House yard itself, to-day its elm-shaded spaces were
lifeless save for the workmen about the stand, a litigant or two going
up the walk, and an occasional frock-coated lawyer, his vest
democratically unbuttoned to the warm May air. But to-morrow----
The young fellow had turned his head slowly toward the editor's copy,
and, as though reading, he began in an emotional, declamatory voice:
"To-morrow the classic shades of Court House Square will teem with a
tumultuous throng. In the emblazoned speakers' stand the Westville
Brass Band, in their new uniforms, glittering like so many grand
marshals of the empire, will trumpet forth triumphant music fit to
burst; and aloft from this breeze-fluttered throne of oratory----"
"Go to hell!" interrupted Bruce, eyes still racing through his copy.
"And down from this breeze-fluttered throne of oratory," continued
Billy, with a rising quaver in his voice, "Mr. Harrison Blake,
Westville's favourite son; the Reverend Doctor Sherman, president of
the Voters' Union, and the Honourable Hiram Cogshell, Calloway
County's able-bodiest orator, will pour forth prodigal and perfervid
eloquence upon the populace below. And Dr. David West, he who has
directed this magnificent work from its birth unto the present, he who
has laid upon the sacred altar of his city's welfare a matchless
devotion and a lifetime's store of scientific knowledge, he who----"
"See here, young fellow!" The editor slammed down the last sheet of
his revised story, and turned upon his assistant a square, bony,
aggressive face that gave a sense of having been modelled by a
clinched fist, and of still glowering at the blow. He had gray eyes
that gleamed dogmatically from behind thick glasses, and hair that
brush could not subdue. "See here, Billy Harper, will you please go to
hell!"
"Sure; follow you anywhere, Arn," returned Billy pleasantly, holding
out his cigarette case.
"You little Chicago alley cat, you!" growled Bruce. He took a
cigarette, broke it open and poured the tobacco into a black pipe,
which he lit. "Well--turn up anything?"
"Governor can't come," replied the reporter, lighting a fresh
cigarette.
"Hard luck. But we'll have the crowd anyhow. Blake tell you anything
else?"
"He didn't tell me that. His stenographer did; she'd opened the
Governor's telegram. Blake's in Indianapolis to-day--looking after his
chances for the Senate, I suppose."
"See Doctor West?"
"Went to his house first. But as usual he wouldn't say a thing. That
old boy is certainly the mildest mannered hero of the day I ever went
up against. The way he does dodge the spot-light!--it's enough to make
one of your prima donna politicians die of heart failure. To do a
great piece of work, and then be as modest about it as he is--well,
Arn, I sure am for that old doc!"
"Huh!" grunted the editor.
"When it comes time to hang the laurel wreath upon his brow to-morrow
I'll bet you and your spavined old Arrangements Committee will have to
push him on to the stand by the scruff of his neck."
"Did you get him to promise to sit for a new picture?"
"Yes. And you ought to raise me ten a week for doing it. He didn't
want his picture printed; and if we did print it, he thought that
prehistoric thing of the eighties we've got was good enough."
"Well, be sure you get that photo, if you have to use chloroform. I
saw him go into the Court House a little while ago. Better catch him
as he comes out and lead him over to Dodson's gallery."
"All right." The young fellow recrossed his feet upon the window-sill.
"But, Arn," he drawled, "this certainly is a slow old burg you've
dragged me down into. If one of your leading citizens wants to catch
the seven-thirty to Indianapolis to-morrow morning, I suppose he sets
his alarm to go off day before yesterday."
"What's soured on your stomach now?" demanded the editor.
"Oh, the way it took this suburb of Nowhere thirty years to wake up to
Doctor West! Every time I see him I feel sore for hours afterward at
how this darned place has treated the old boy. If your six-cylinder,
sixty-horse power, seven-passenger tongues hadn't remembered that his
grandfather had founded Westville, I bet you'd have talked him out of
the town long ago."
"The town didn't understand him."
"I should say it didn't!" agreed the reporter.
"And I guess you don't understand the town," said the editor, a little
sharply. "Young man, you've never lived in a small place."
"Till this, Chicago was my smallest--the gods be praised!"
"Well, it's the same in your old smokestack of the universe as it is
here!" retorted Bruce. "If you go after the dollar, you're sane. If
you don't, you're cracked. Doctor West started off like a winner, so
they say; looked like he was going to get a corner on all the patients
of Westville. Then, when he stopped practising----"
"You never told me what made him stop."
"His wife's death--from typhoid; I barely remember that. When he
stopped practising and began his scientific work, the town thought
he'd lost his head."
"And yet two years ago the town was glad enough to get him to take
charge of installing its new water system!"
"That's how it discovered he was somebody. When the city began to look
around for an expert, it found no one they could get had a tenth of
his knowledge of water supply."
"That's the way with your self-worshipping cross-roads towns! You
raise a genius--laugh at him, pity his family--till you learn how the
outside world respects him. Then--hurrah! Strike up the band, boys!
When I think how that old party has been quietly studying typhoid
fever and water supply all these years, with you bunch of hayseeds
looking down on him as a crank--I get so blamed sore at the place that
I wish I'd chucked your letter into the waste-basket when you wrote me
to come!"
"It may have been a dub of a town, Billy, but it'll be the best place
in Indiana before we get through with it," returned the editor
confidently. "But whom else did you see?"
"Ran into the Honourable Hiram Cogshell on Main Street, and he slipped
me this precious gem." Billy handed Bruce a packet of typewritten
sheets. "Carbon of his to-morrow's speech. He gave it to me, he said,
to save us the trouble of taking it down. The Honourable Hiram is
certainly one citizen who'll never go broke buying himself a bushel to
hide his light under!"
The editor glanced at a page or two of it with wearied irritation,
then tossed it back.
"Guess we'll have to print it. But weed out some of his flowers of
rhetoric."
"Pressed flowers," amended Billy. "Swipe the Honourable Hiram's copy
of 'Bartlett's Quotations' and that tremendous orator would have
nothing left but his gestures."
"How about the grand jury, Billy?" pursued the editor. "Anything doing
there?"
"Farmer down in Buck Creek Township indicted for kidnapping his
neighbour's pigs," drawled the reporter. "Infants snatched away while
fond mother slept. Very pathetic. Also that second-story man was
indicted that stole Alderman Big Bill Perkins's clothes. Remember it,
don't you? Big Bill's clothes had so much diameter that the poor,
hard-working thief couldn't sell the fruits of his industry. Pathos
there also. Guess I can spin the two out for a column."
"Spin 'em out for about three lines," returned Bruce in his abrupt
manner. "No room for your funny stuff to-day, Billy; the celebration
crowds everything else out. Write that about the Governor, and then
help Stevens with the telegraph--and see that it's carved down to the
bone." He picked up the typewritten sheets he had finished revising,
and let out a sharp growl of "Copy!"
"That's your celebration story, isn't it?" asked the reporter.
"Yes." And Bruce held it out to the "devil" who had appeared through
the doorway from the depths below.
"Wait a bit with it, Arn. The prosecuting attorney stopped me as I was
leaving, and asked me to have you step over to the Court House for a
minute."
"What's Kennedy want?"
"Something about the celebration, he said. I guess he wants to talk
with you about some further details of the programme."
"Why the deuce didn't he come over here then?" growled Bruce. "I'm as
busy as he is!"
"He said he couldn't leave."
"Couldn't leave?" said Bruce, with a snap of his heavy jaw. "Well,
neither can I!"
"You mean you won't go?"
"That's what I mean! I'll go to the very gates of hell to get a good
piece of news, but when it comes to general affairs the politicians,
business men, and the etceteras of this town have got to understand
that there's just as much reason for their coming to me as for my
going to them. I'm as important as any of them."
"So-ho, we're on our high horse, are we?"
"You bet we are, my son! And that's where you've got to be if you want
this town to respect you."
"All right. She's a great nag, if you can keep your saddle. But I
guess I'd better tell Kennedy you're not coming."
Without rising, Billy leaned back and took up Bruce's desk telephone,
and soon was talking to the prosecuting attorney. After a moment he
held out the instrument to the editor.
"Kennedy wants to speak with you," he said.
Bruce took the 'phone.
"Hello, that you Kennedy?... No, I can't come--too busy. Suppose you
run over here.... Got some people there? Well, bring 'em along.... Why
can't they come? Who are they?... Can't you tell me what the situation
is?... All right, then; in a couple of minutes."
Bruce hung up the receiver and arose.
"So you're going after all?" asked Billy.
"Guess I'd better," returned the editor, putting on his coat and hat.
"Kennedy says something big has just broken loose. Sounds queer.
Wonder what the dickens it can be." And he started out.
"But how about your celebration story?" queried Billy. "Want it to go
down?"
Bruce looked at his watch.
"Two hours till press time; I guess it can wait." And taking the story
back from the boy he tossed it upon his desk.
He stepped out into the local room, which showed the same kindly
tolerance of dirt as did his private office. At a long table two young
men sat before typewriters, and in a corner a third young man was
taking the clicking dictation of a telegraph sounder.
"Remember, boys, keep everything but the celebration down to bones!"
Bruce called out. And with that he passed out of the office and down
the stairway to the street.
CHAPTER II
THE BUBBLE REPUTATION
Despite its thirty thousand population--"Forty thousand, and growing,
sir!" loyally declared those disinterested citizens engaged in the
sale of remote fields of ragweed as building lots--Westville was still
but half-evolved from its earlier state of an overgrown country town.
It was as yet semi-pastoral, semi-urban. Automobiles and farm wagons
locked hubs in brotherly embrace upon its highways; cowhide boots and
patent leather shared its sidewalks. There was a stockbroker's office
that was thoroughly metropolitan in the facilities it afforded the
élite for relieving themselves of the tribulation of riches; and
adjoining it was Simpson Brothers & Company, wherein hick'ry-shirted
gentlemen bartered for threshing machines, hayrakes, axle grease, and
such like baubles of Arcadian pastime.
There were three topics on which one could always start an argument in
Westville--politics, religion, and the editor of the _Express_. A
year before Arnold Bruce, who had left Westville at eighteen and whom
the town had vaguely heard of as a newspaper man in Chicago and New
York but whom it had not seen since, had returned home and taken
charge of the _Express_, which had been willed him by the late editor,
his uncle. The _Express_, which had been a slippered, dozing, senile
sheet under old Jimmie Bruce, burst suddenly into a volcanic youth.
The new editor used huge, vociferous headlines instead of the mere
whispering, timorous types of his uncle; he wrote a rousing,
rough-and-ready English; occasionally he placed an important
editorial, set up in heavy-faced type and enclosed in a black border,
in the very centre of his first page; and from the very start he had
had the hardihood to attack the "established order" at several points
and to preach unorthodox political doctrines. The wealthiest citizens
were outraged, and hotly denounced Bruce as a "yellow journalist" and
a "red-mouthed demagogue." It was commonly held by the better element
that his ultra-democracy was merely a mask, a pose, an advertising
scheme, to gather in the gullible subscriber and to force himself
sensationally into the public eye.
But despite all hostile criticism of the paper, people read the
_Express_--many staid ones surreptitiously--for it had a snap, a go, a
tang, that at times almost took the breath. And despite the estimate
of its editor as a charlatan, the people had yielded to that
aggressive personage a rank of high importance in their midst.
Bruce stepped forth from his stairway, crossed Main Street, and strode
up the shady Court House walk. On the left side of the walk, a-tiptoe
in an arid fountain, was poised a gracious nymph of cast-iron, so
chastely garbed as to bring to the cheek of elderly innocence no
faintest flush. On the walk's right side stood a rigid statue,
suggesting tetanus in the model, of the city's founder, Col. Davy
West, wearing a coonskin cap and leaning with conscious dignity upon a
long deer rifle.
Bruce entered the dingy Court House, mounted a foot-worn wooden
stairway, browned with the ambrosial extract of two generations of
tobacco-chewing litigants, and passed into a damp and gloomy chamber.
This room was the office of the prosecuting attorney of Calloway
County. That the incumbent might not become too depressed by his
environment, the walls were cheered up by a steel engraving of Daniel
Webster, frowning with multitudinous thought, and by a crackled map of
Indiana--the latter dotted by industrious flies with myriad nameless
cities.
Three men arose from about the flat-topped desk in the centre of the
room, the prosecutor, the Reverend Doctor Sherman, and a rather
smartly dressed man whom Bruce remembered to have seen once or twice
but whom he did not know. With the first two the editor shook hands,
and the third was introduced to him as Mr. Marcy, the agent of the
Acme Filter Company, which had installed the filtering plant of the
new water-works.
Bruce turned in his brusque manner to the prosecuting attorney.
"What's the matter?" he asked.
"Suppose we all sit down first," suggested the prosecutor.
They did so, and Kennedy regarded Bruce with a solemn, weighty stare.
He was a lank, lantern-jawed, frock-coated gentleman of thirty-five,
with an upward rolling forelock and an Adam's-apple that throbbed in
his throat like a petrified pulse. He was climbing the political
ladder, and he was carefully schooling himself into that dignity and
poise and appearance of importance which should distinguish the
deportment of the public man.
"Well, what is it?" demanded Bruce shortly. "About the water-works?"
"Yes," responded Kennedy. "The water-works, Mr. Bruce, is, I hardly
need say, a source of pride to us all. To you especially it has had a
large significance. You have made it a theme for a continuous
agitation in your paper. You have argued and urged that, since the
city's new water-works promised to be such a great success, Westville
should not halt with this one municipal enterprise, but should refuse
the new franchise the street railway company is going to apply for,
take over the railway, run it as a municipal----"
"Yes, yes," interrupted Bruce impatiently. "But who's dead? Who wants
the line of march changed to go by his grocery store?"
"What I was saying was merely to recall how very important the
water-works has been to us," the prosecutor returned, with increased
solemnity. He paused, and having gained that heightened stage effect
of a well-managed silence, he continued: "Mr. Bruce, something very
serious has occurred."
For all its ostentation the prosecutor's manner was genuinely
impressive. Bruce looked quickly at the other two men. The agent was
ill at ease, the minister pale and agitated.
"Come," cried Bruce, "out with what you've got to tell me!"
"It is a matter of the very first importance," returned the
prosecutor, who was posing for a prominent place in the _Express's_
account of this affair--for however much the public men of Westville
affected to look down upon the _Express_, they secretly preferred its
superior presentment of their doings. "Doctor Sherman, in his
capacity of president of the Voters' Union, has just brought before me
some most distressing, most astounding evidence. It is evidence upon
which I must act both as a public official and as a member of the
Arrangements Committee, and evidence which concerns you both as a
committeeman and as an editor. It is painful to me to break----"
"Let's have it from first hands," interrupted Bruce, irritated by the
verbal excelsior which the prosecutor so deliberately unwrapped from
about his fact.
He turned to the minister, a slender man of hardly more than thirty,
with a high brow, the wide, sensitive mouth of the born orator,
fervently bright eyes, and the pallor of the devoted student--a face
that instantly explained why, though so young, he was Westville's most
popular divine.
"What's it about, Doctor Sherman?" the editor asked. "Who's the man?"
There was no posing here for Bruce's typewriter. The minister's
concern was deep and sincere.
"About the water-works, as Mr. Kennedy has said," he answered in a
voice that trembled with agitation. "There has been some--some crooked
work."
"Crooked work?" ejaculated the editor, staring at the minister.
"Crooked work?"
"Yes."
"You are certain of what you say?"
"Yes."
"Then you have evidence?"
"I am sorry--but--but I have."
The editor was leaning forward, his nostrils dilated, his eyes
gleaming sharply behind their thick glasses.
"Who's mixed up in it? Who's the man?"
The minister's hands were tightly interlocked. For an instant he
seemed unable to speak.
"Who's the man?" repeated Bruce.
The minister swallowed.
"Doctor West," he said.
Bruce sprang up.
"Doctor West?" he cried. "The superintendent of the water-works?"
"Yes."
If the editor's concern for the city's welfare was merely a political
and business pose, if he was merely an actor, at least he acted his
part well. "My God!" he breathed, and stood with eyes fixed upon the
young minister. Then suddenly he sat down again, his thick brows drew
together, and his heavy jaws set.
"Let's have the whole story," he snapped out. "From the very
beginning."
"I cannot tell you how distressed I am by what I have just been forced
to do," began the young clergyman. "I have always esteemed Doctor
West most highly, and my wife and his daughter have been the closest
friends since girlhood. To make my part in this affair clear, I must
recall to you that of late the chief attention of the Voters' Union
has naturally been devoted to the water-works. I never imagined that
anything was wrong. But, speaking frankly, after the event, I must say
that Doctor West's position was such as made it a simple matter for
him to defraud the city should he so desire."
"You mean because the council invested him with so much authority?"
demanded Bruce.
"Yes. As I have said, I regarded Doctor West above all suspicion. But
a short time ago some matters--I need not detail them--aroused in me
the fear that Doctor West was using his office for--for----"
"For graft?" supplied Bruce.
The minister inclined his head.
"Later, only a few weeks ago, a more definite fear came to me," he
continued in his low, pained voice. "It happens that I have known Mr.
Marcy here for years; we were friends in college, though we had lost
track of one another till his business brought him here. A few small
circumstances--my suspicion was already on the alert--made me guess
that Mr. Marcy was about to give Doctor West a bribe for having
awarded the filter contract to his company. I got Mr. Marcy
alone--taxed him with his intention--worked upon his conscience----"
"Mr. Marcy has stated," the prosecutor interrupted to explain, "that
Doctor Sherman always had great influence over him."
Mr. Marcy corroborated this with a nod.
"At length Mr. Marcy confessed," Doctor Sherman went on. "He had
arranged to give Doctor West a certain sum of money immediately after
the filtering plant had been approved and payment had been made to the
company. After this confession I hesitated long upon what I should do.
On the one hand, I shrank from disgracing Doctor West. On the other, I
had a duty to the city. After a long struggle I decided that my
responsibility to the people of Westville should overbalance any
feeling I might have for any single individual."
"That was the only decision," said Bruce. "Go on!"
"But at the same time, to protect Doctor West's reputation, I decided
to take no one into my plan; should his integrity reassert itself at
the last moment and cause him to refuse the bribe, the whole matter
would then remain locked up in my heart. I arranged with Mr. Marcy
that he should carry out his agreement with Doctor West. Day before
yesterday, as you know, the council, on Doctor West's recommendation,
formally approved the filtering plant, and yesterday a draft was sent
to the company. Mr. Marcy was to call at Doctor West's home this
morning to conclude their secret bargain. Just before the appointed
hour I dropped in on Doctor West, and was there when Mr. Marcy called.
I said I would wait to finish my talk with Doctor West till they were
through their business, took a book, and went into an adjoining room.
I could see the two men through the partly opened door. After some
talk, Mr. Marcy drew an envelope from his pocket and handed it to
Doctor West, saying in a low voice, 'Here is that money we spoke
about.'"
"And he took it?" Bruce interrupted.
"Doctor West slipped the envelope unopened into his pocket, and
replied, 'Thank you very much; it will come in very handy just now.'"
"My God!" breathed the editor.
"Though I had suspected Doctor West, I sat there stunned," the
minister continued. "But after a minute or two I slipped out by
another door. I returned with a policeman, and found Doctor West still
with Mr. Marcy. The policeman arrested Doctor West, and found the
envelope upon his person. In it was two thousand dollars."
"Now, what do you think of that?" Kennedy demanded of the editor.
"Won't the town be thunderstruck!"
Bruce turned to the agent, who had sat through the recital, a mere
corroborative presence.
"And this is all true?"
"That is exactly the way it happened," replied Mr. Marcy.
Bruce looked back at the minister.
"But didn't he have anything to say for himself?"
"I can answer that," put in Kennedy. "I had him in here before I sent
him over to the jail. He admits practically every point that Doctor
Sherman has made. The only thing he says for himself is that he never
thought the money Mr. Marcy gave him was intended for a bribe."
Bruce stood up, his face hard and glowering, and his fist crashed
explosively down upon the table.
"Of all the damned flimsy defenses that ever a man made, that's the
limit!"
"It certainly won't go down with the people of Westville," commented
the prosecutor. "And I can see the smile of the jury when he produces
that defense in court."
"I should say they would smile!" cried Bruce. "But what was his
motive?"
"That's plain enough," answered the prosecutor. "We both know, Mr.
Bruce, that he has earned hardly anything from the practice of
medicine since we were boys. His salary as superintendent of the
water-works was much less than he has been spending. His property is
mortgaged practically to its full value. Everything has gone on those
experiments of his. It's simply a case of a man being in a tight fix
for money."
Bruce was striding up and down the room, scowling and staring fiercely
at the worn linoleum that carpeted the prosecutor's office.
"I thought you'd take it rather hard," said Kennedy, a little slyly.
"It sort of puts a spoke in that general municipal ownership scheme of
yours--eh?"
Bruce paused belligerently before the prosecutor.
"See here, Kennedy," he snapped out. "Because a man you've banked on
is a crook, does that prove a principle is wrong?"
"Oh, I guess not," Kennedy had to admit.
"Well, suppose you cut out that kind of talk then. But what are you
going to do about the doctor?"
"The grand jury is in session. I'm going straight before it with the
evidence. An hour from now and Doctor West will be indicted."
"And what about to-morrow's show?"
"What do you think we ought to do?"
"What ought we to do!" Again the editor's fist crashed upon the desk.
"The celebration was half in Doctor West's honour. Do we want to meet
and hurrah for the man that sold us out? As for the water-works, it
looks as if, for all we know, he might have bought us a lot of old
junk. Do we want to hold a jubilee over a junk pile? You ask what we
ought to do. God, man, there's only one thing to do, and that's to
call the whole damned performance off!"
"That's my opinion," said the prosecutor. "What do you think, Doctor
Sherman?"
The young minister wiped his pale face.
"It's a most miserable affair. I'm sick because of the part I've been
forced to play--I'm sorry for Doctor West--and I'm particularly sorry
for his daughter--but I do not see that any other course would be
possible."
"I suppose we ought to consult Mr. Blake," said Kennedy.
"He's not in town," returned Bruce. "And we don't need to consult him.
We three are a majority of the committee. The matter has to be settled
at once. And it's settled all right!"
The editor jerked out his watch, glanced at it, then reached for his
hat.
"I'll have this on the street in an hour--and if this town doesn't go
wild, then I don't know Westville!"
He was making for the door, when the newspaper man in him recalled a
new detail of his story. He turned back.
"How about this daughter of Doctor West?" he asked.
The prosecutor looked at the minister.
"Was she coming home for the celebration, do you know?"
"Yes. She wrote Mrs. Sherman she was leaving New York this morning and
would get in here to-morrow on the Limited."
"What's she like?" asked Bruce.
"Haven't you seen her?" asked Kennedy.
"She hasn't been home since I came back to Westville. When I left here
she was a tomboy--mostly legs and freckles."
The prosecutor's lean face crinkled with a smile.
"I guess you'll find she's grown right smart since then. She went to
one of those colleges back East; Vassar, I think it was. She got hold
of some of those new-fangled ideas the women in the East are crazy
over now--about going out in the world for themselves, and----"
"Idiots--all of them!" snapped Bruce.
"After she graduated, she studied law. When she was back home two
years ago she asked me what chance a woman would have to practise law
in Westville. A woman lawyer in Westville--oh, Lord!"
The prosecutor leaned back and laughed at the excruciating humour of
the idea.
"Oh, I know the kind!" Bruce's lips curled with contempt.
"Loud-voiced--aggressive--bony--perfect frights."
"Let me suggest," put in Doctor Sherman, "that Miss West does not
belong in that classification."
"Yes, I guess you're a little wrong about Katherine West," smiled
Kennedy.
Bruce waved his hand peremptorily. "They're all the same! But what's
she doing in New York? Practising law?"
"No. She's working for an organization something like Doctor
Sherman's--The Municipal League, I think she called it."
"Huh!" grunted Bruce. "Well, whatever she's like, it's a pretty mess
she's coming back into!"
With that the editor pulled his hat tightly down upon his forehead and
strode out of the Court House and past the speakers' stand, across
whose front twin flags were being leisurely festooned. Back in his own
office he picked up the story he had finished an hour before. With a
sneer he tore it across and trampled it under foot. Then, jerking a
chair forward to his typewriter, his brow dark, his jaw set, he began
to thump fiercely upon the keys.
CHAPTER III
KATHERINE COMES HOME
Next morning when the Limited slowed down beside the old frame
station--a new one of brick was rising across the tracks--a young
woman descended from a Pullman at the front of the train. She was
lithe and graceful, rather tall and slender, and was dressed with
effective simplicity in a blue tailored suit and a tan straw hat with
a single blue quill. Her face was flushed, and there glowed an
expectant brightness in her brown eyes, as though happiness and
affection were upon the point of bubbling over.
Standing beside her suit-case, she eagerly scanned the figures about
the station. Three or four swagger young drummers had scrambled off
the smoker, and these ambassadors of fashion as many hotel bus drivers
were inviting with importunate hospitality to honour their respective
board and bed. There was the shirt-sleeved figure of Jim Ludlow,
ticket agent and tenor of the Presbyterian choir. And leaning
cross-legged beneath the station eaves, giving the effect of
supporting the low roof, were half a dozen slowly masticating, soberly
contemplative gentlemen--loose-jointed caryatides, whose lank
sculpture forms the sole and invariable ornamentation of the façades
of all Western stations. But nowhere did the young woman's expectant
eyes alight upon the person whom they sought.
The joyous response to welcome, which had plainly trembled at the tips
of her being, subsided, and in disappointment she picked up her bag
and was starting for a street car, when up the long, broad platform
there came hurrying a short-legged little man, with a bloodshot,
watery eye. He paused hesitant at a couple of yards, smiled
tentatively, and the remnant of an old glove fumbled the brim of a
rumpled, semi-bald object that in its distant youth had probably been
a silk hat.
The young woman smiled back and held out her hand.
"How do you do, Mr. Huggins."
"How de do, Miss Katherine," he stammered.
"Have you seen father anywhere?" she asked anxiously.
"No. Your aunt just sent me word I was to meet you and fetch you home.
She couldn't leave Doctor West."
"Is father ill?" she cried.
The old cabman fumbled his ancient headgear.
"No--he ain't--he ain't exactly sick. He's just porely. I guess it's
only--only a bad headache."
He hastily picked up her suit-case and led her past the sidling
admiration of the drummers, those sovereign critics of Western
femininity, to the back of the station where stood a tottering surrey
and a dingy gray nag, far gone in years, that leaned upon its shafts
as though on crutches. Katherine clambered in, and the drooping animal
doddered along a street thickly overhung with the exuberant May-green
of maples.
She gazed with ardent eyes at the familiar frame cottages, in some of
which had lived school and high-school friends, sitting comfortably
back amid their little squares of close-cropped lawn. She liked New
York with that adoptive liking one acquires for the place one chooses
from among all others for the passing of one's life; but her affection
remained warm and steadfast with this old town of her girlhood.
"Oh, but it feels good to be back in Westville again!" she cried to
the cabman.
"I reckon it must. I guess it's all of two years sence you been home."
"Two years, yes. It's going to be a great celebration this afternoon,
isn't it?"
"Yes'm--very big"--and he hastily struck the ancient steed. "Get-ep
there, Jenny!"
Mr. Huggins's mare turned off Station Avenue, and Katharine excitedly
stared ahead beneath the wide-boughed maples for the first glimpse of
her home. At length it came into view--one of those big, square,
old-fashioned wooden houses, built with no perceptible architectural
idea beyond commodious shelter. She had thought her father might
possibly stumble out to greet her, but no one stood waiting at the
paling gate.
She sprang lightly from the carriage as it drew up beside the curb,
and leaving Mr. Huggins to follow with her bag she hurried up the
brick-paved path to the house. As she crossed the porch, a slight,
gray, Quakerish little lady, with a white kerchief folded across her
breast, pushed open the screen door. Her Katherine gathered into her
arms and kissed repeatedly.
"I'm so glad to see you, auntie!" she cried. "How are you?"
"Very well," the old woman answered in a thin, tremulous voice. "How
is thee?"
"Me? Oh, you know nothing's ever wrong with me!" She laughed in her
buoyant young strength. "But you, auntie?" She grew serious. "You look
very tired--and very, very worn and worried. But I suppose it's the
strain of father's headache--poor father! How is he?"
"I--I think he's feeling some better," the old woman faltered. "He's
still lying down."
They had entered the big, airy sitting-room. Katherine's hat and coat
went flying upon the couch.
"Now, before I so much as ask you a question, or tell you a thing,
Aunt Rachel, I'm going up to see dear old father."
She made for the stairway, but her aunt caught her arm in
consternation.
"Wait, Katherine! Thee musn't see him yet."
"Why, what's the matter?" Katherine asked in surprise.
"It--it would be better for him if thee didn't disturb him."
"But, auntie--you know no one can soothe him as I can when he has a
headache!"
"But he's asleep just now. He didn't sleep a minute all night."
"Then of course I'll wait." Katherine turned back. "Has he suffered
much----"
She broke off. Her aunt was gazing at her in wide-eyed, helpless
misery.
"Why--why--what's the matter, auntie?"
Her aunt did not answer her.
"Tell me! What is it? What's wrong?"
Still the old woman did not speak.
"Something has happened to father!" cried Katherine. She clutched her
aunt's thin shoulders. "Has something happened to father?"
The old woman trembled all over, and tears started from her mild eyes.
"Yes," she quavered.
"But what is it?" Katherine asked frantically. "Is he very sick?"
"It's--it's worse than that."
"Please! What is it then?"
"I haven't the heart to tell thee," she said piteously, and she sank
into a chair and covered her face.
Katherine caught her arm and fairly shook her in the intensity of her
demand.
"Tell me! I can't stand this another instant!"
"There--there isn't going to be any celebration."
"No celebration?"
"Yesterday--thy father--was arrested."
"Arrested!"
"And indicted for accepting a bribe."
Katherine shrank back.
"Oh!" she whispered. "Oh!" Then her slender body tensed, and her dark
eyes flashed fire. "Father accept a bribe! It's a lie! A lie!"
"It hardly seems true to me, either."
"It's a lie!" repeated Katherine. "But is he--is he locked up?"
"They let me go his bail."
Again Katherine caught her aunt's arm.
"Come--tell me all about it!"
"Please don't make me. I--I can't."
"But I must know!"
"It's in the newspapers--they're on the centre-table."
Katherine turned to the table and seized a paper. At sight of the
sheet she had picked up, the old woman hurried across to her in
dismay.
"Don't read that _Express_!" she cried, and she sought to draw the
paper from Katherine's hands. "Read the _Clarion_. It's ever so much
kinder."
But Katherine had already seen the headline that ran across the top of
the _Express_. It staggered her. She gasped at the blow, but she held
on to the paper.
"I'll read the worst they have to say," she said.
Her aunt dropped into a chair and covered her eyes to avoid sight of
the girl's suffering. The story, in its elements, was a commonplace to
Katherine; in her work with the Municipal League she had every few
days met with just such a tale as this. But that which is a
commonplace when strangers are involved, becomes a tragedy when loved
ones are its actors. So, as she read the old, old story, Katherine
trembled as with mortal pain.
But sickening as was the story in itself, it was made even more
agonizing to her by the manner of the _Express's_ telling. Bruce's
typewriter had never been more impassioned. The story was in
heavy-faced type, the lines two columns wide; and in a "box" in the
very centre of the first page was an editorial denouncing Doctor West
and demanding for him such severe punishment as would make future
traitors forever fear to sell their city. Article and editorial were
rousing and vivid, brilliant and bitter--as mercilessly stinging as a
salted whip-lash cutting into bare flesh.
Katherine writhed with the pain of it. "Oh!" she cried. "It's brutal!
Brutal! Who could have had the heart to write like that about father?"
"The editor, Arnold Bruce," answered her aunt.
"Oh, he's a brute! If I could tell him to his face----" Her whole
slender being flamed with anger and hatred, and she crushed the paper
in a fierce hand and flung it to the floor.
Then, slowly, her face faded to an ashen gray. She steadied herself on
the back of a chair and stared in desperate, fearful supplication at
the bowed figure of the older woman.
"Auntie?" she breathed.
"Yes?"
"Auntie"--eyes and voice were pleading--"auntie, the--the things--this
paper says--they never happened, did they?"
The old head nodded.
"Oh! oh!" she gasped. She wavered, sank stricken into a chair, and
buried her face in her arms. "Poor father!" she moaned brokenly. "Poor
father!"
There was silence for a moment, then the old woman rose and gently put
a hand upon the quivering young shoulder.
"Don't, dear! Even if it did happen, I can't believe it. Thy
father----"
At that moment, overhead, there was a soft noise, as of feet placed
upon the floor. Katherine sprang up.
"Father!" she breathed. There began a restless, slippered pacing.
"Father!" she repeated, and sprang for the stairway and rapidly ran
up.
At her father's door she paused, hand over her heart. She feared to
enter to her father--feared lest she should find his head bowed in
acknowledged shame. But she summoned her strength and noiselessly
opened the door. It was a large room, a hybrid of bedroom and study,
whose drawn shades had dimmed the brilliant morning into twilight. An
open side door gave a glimpse of glass jars, bellying retorts and
other paraphernalia of the laboratory.
Walking down the room was a tall, stooping, white-haired figure in a
quilted dressing-gown. He reached the end of the room, turned about,
then sighted her in the doorway.
"Katherine!" he cried with quavering joy, and started toward her; but
he came abruptly to a pause, hesitating, accused man that he was, to
make advances.
Her sickening fear was for the instant swept away by a rising flood of
love. She sprang forward and threw her arms about his neck.
"Father!" she sobbed. "Oh, father!"
She felt his tears upon her forehead, felt his body quiver, and felt
his hand gently stroke her back.
"You've heard--then?" he asked, at length.
"Yes--from the papers."
He held her close, but for a moment did not speak.
"It isn't a--a very happy celebration--I've prepared for you."
She could only cry convulsively, "Poor father!"
"You never dreamt," he quavered, "your old father--could do a thing
like this--did you?"
She did not answer. She trembled a moment longer on his shoulder;
then, slowly and with fear, she lifted her head and gazed into his
face. The face was worn--she thrilled with pain to see how sadly worn
it was!--but though tear-wet and working with emotion, it met her look
with steadiness. It was the same simple, kindly, open face that she
had known since childhood.
There was a sudden wild leaping within her. She clutched his
shoulders, and her voice rang out in joyous conviction:
"Father--you are not guilty!"
"You believe in me, then?"
"You are not guilty!" she cried with mounting joy.
He smiled faintly.
"Why, of course not, my child."
"Oh, father!" And again she caught him in a close embrace.
After a moment she leaned back in his arms.
"I'm so happy--so happy! Forgive me, daddy dear, that I could doubt
you even for a minute."
"How could you help it? They say the evidence against me is very
strong."
"I should have believed you innocent against all the evidence in the
world! And I do, and shall--no matter what they may say!"
"Bless you, Katherine!"
"But come--tell me how it all came about. But, first, let's brighten
up the room a little."
So great was her relief that her spirits had risen as though some
positive blessing had befallen her. She crossed lightly to the big bay
window, raised the shades and threw up the sashes. The sunlight
slanted down into the room and lay in a dazzling yellow square upon
the floor. The soft breeze sighed through the two tall pines without
and bore into them the perfumed freshness of the spring.
"There now, isn't that better?" she said, smiling brightly.
"That's just what your home-coming has done for me," he said
gratefully--"let in the sunlight."
"Come, come--don't try to turn the head of your offspring with
flattery! Now, sir, sit down," and she pointed to a chair at his desk,
which stood within the bay window.
"First,"--with his gentle smile--"if I may, I'd like to take a look at
my daughter."
"I suppose a father's wish is a daughter's command," she complained.
"So go ahead."
He moved to the window, so that the light fell full upon her, and for
a long moment gazed into her face. The brow was low and broad. Over
the white temples the heavy dark hair waved softly down, to be
fastened in a simple knot low upon the neck, showing in its full
beauty the rare modelling of her head. The eyes were a rich, warm,
luminous brown, fringed with long lashes, and in them lurked all
manner of fathomless mysteries. The mouth was soft, yet full and
firm--a real mouth, such as Nature bestows upon her real women. It was
a face of freshness and youth and humour, and now was tremulous with a
smiling, tear-wet tenderness.
"I think," said her father, slowly and softly, "that my daughter is
very beautiful."
"There--enough of your blarney!" She flushed with pleasure, and
pressed her fresh cheek against his withered one. "You dear old
father, you!"
She drew him to his desk, which was strewn with a half-finished
manuscript on the typhoid bacillus, and upon which stood a faded
photograph of a young woman, near Katherine's years and made in her
image, dressed in the tight-fitting "basque" of the early eighties.
Westville knew that Doctor West had loved his wife dearly, but the
town had never surmised a tenth of the grief that had closed darkly in
upon him when typhoid fever had carried her away while her young
womanhood was in its freshest bloom.
Katherine pressed him down into his chair at the desk, sat down in one
beside it, and took his hand.
"Now, father, tell me just how things stand."
"You know everything already," said he.
"Not everything. I know the charges of the other side, and I know your
innocence. But I do not know your explanation of the affair."
He ran his free hand through his silver hair, and his face grew
troubled.
"My explanation agrees with what you have read, except that I did not
know I was being bribed."
"H'm!" Her brow wrinkled thoughtfully and she was silent for a moment.
"Suppose we go back to the very beginning, father, and run over the
whole affair. Try to remember. In the early stages of negotiations,
did the agent say anything to you about money?"
He did not speak for a minute or more.
"Now that I think it over, he did say something about its being worth
my while if his filter was accepted."
"That was an overture to bribe you. And what did you say to him?"
"I don't remember. You see, at the time, his offer, if it was one, did
not make any impression on me. I believe I didn't say anything to him
at all."
"But you approved his filter?"
"Yes."
"Mr. Marcy says in the _Express_, and you admit it, that he offered
you a bribe. You approved his filter. On the face of it, speaking
legally, that looks bad, father."
"But how could I honestly keep from approving his filter, when it was
the very best on the market for our water?" demanded Doctor West.
"Then how did you come to accept that money?"
The old man's face cleared.
"I can explain that easily. Some time ago the agent said something
about the Acme Filter Company wishing to make a little donation to our
hospital. I'm one of the directors, you know. So, when he handed me
that envelope, I supposed it was the contribution to the
hospital--perhaps twenty-five or fifty dollars."
"And that is all?"
"That's the whole truth. But when I explained the matter to the
prosecuting attorney, he just smiled."
"I know it's the truth, because you say it." She affectionately patted
the hand that she held. "But, again speaking legally, it wouldn't
sound very plausible to an outsider. But how do you explain the
situation?"
"I think the whole affair must be just a mistake."
"Possibly. But if so, you'll have to be able to prove it." She thought
a space. "Could it be that this is a manufactured charge?"
Doctor West's eyes widened with amazement.
"Why, of course not! You have forgotten that the man who makes the
charge is Mr. Sherman. You surely do not think he would let himself be
involved in anything that he did not believe to be in the highest
degree honourable?"
"I do not know him very well. During the four years he has been here,
I have met him only a few times."
"But you know what your dearest friend thinks of him."
"Yes, I know Elsie considers her husband to be an ecclesiastical Sir
Galahad. And I must admit that he has seemed to me the highest type of
the modern young minister."
"Then you agree with me, that Mr. Sherman is thoroughly honest in this
affair? That his only motive is a sense of public duty?"
"Yes. I cannot conceive of him knowingly doing a wrong."
"That's what has forced me to think it's only just a mistake," said
her father.
"You may be right." She considered the idea. "But what does your
lawyer say?"
His pale cheeks flushed.
"I have no lawyer," he said slowly.
"I see. You were waiting to consult me about whom to retain."
He shook his head.
"Then you have approached some one?"
"I have spoken to Hopkins, and Williams, and Freeman. They all----" He
hesitated.
"Yes?"
"They all said they could not take my case."
"Could not take your case!" she cried. "Why not?"
"They made different excuses. But their excuses were not their real
reason."
"And what was that?"
The old man flushed yet more painfully.
"I guess you do not fully realize the situation, Katherine. I don't
need to tell you that a wave of popular feeling against political
corruption is sweeping across the country. This is the first big case
that has come out in Westville, and the city is stirred up over this
as it hasn't been stirred in years. The way the _Express_----You saw
the _Express_?"
Her hands instinctively clenched.
"It was awful! Awful!"
"The way the _Express_ has handled it has especially--well, you
see----"
"You mean those lawyers are afraid to take the case?"
Doctor West nodded.
Katherine's dark eyes glowed with wrath.
"Did you try any one else?"
"Mr. Green came to see me. But----"
"Of course not! It would kill your case to have a shyster represent
you." She gripped his hand, and her voice rang out: "Father, I'm glad
those men refused you. We're going to get for you the biggest man, the
biggest lawyer, in Westville."
"You mean Mr. Blake?"
"Yes, Mr. Blake."
"I thought of him at first, of course. But I--well, I hesitated to
approach him."
"Hesitated? Why?"
"Well, you see," he stammered, "I remembered about your refusing him,
and I felt----"
"That would never make any difference to him," she cried. "He's too
much of a gentleman. Besides, that was five years ago, and he has
forgotten it."
"Then you think he'll take the case?"
"Of course, he'll take it! He'll take it because he's a big man, and
because you need him, and because he's no coward. And with the biggest
man in Westville on your side, you'll see how public opinion will
right-about face!"
She sprang up, aglow with energy. "I'm going to see him this minute!
With his help, we'll have this matter cleared up before you know it,
and"--smiling lightly--"just you see, daddy, all Westville will be out
there in the front yard, tramping over Aunt Rachel's sweet williams,
begging to be allowed to come and kiss your hand!"
He kissed her own. He rose, and a smile broke through the clouds of
his face.
"You've been home only an hour, and I feel that a thousand years have
been lifted off me."
"That's right--and just keep on feeling a thousand years younger."
She smiled caressingly, and began to twist a finger in a buttonhole of
his coat. "U'm--don't you think, daddy, that such a very young
gentleman as you are, such a regular roaring young blade,
might--u'm--might----"
"Might what, my dear?"
"Might----" She leaned forward and whispered in his ear.
A hand went to his throat.
"Eh, why, is this one----"
"I'm afraid it is, daddy--very!"
"We've been so upset I guess your aunt must have forgotten to put out
a clean one for me."
"And I suppose it never occurred to the profound scientific intellect
that it was possible for one to pull out a drawer and take out a
collar for one's self." She crossed to the bureau and came back with a
clean collar. "Now, sir--up with your chin!" With quick hands she
replaced the offending collar with the fresh one, tied the tie and
gave it a perfecting little pat. "There--that's better! And now I must
be off. I'll send around a few policemen to keep the crowds off Aunt
Rachel's flower-beds."
And pressing on his pale cheek another kiss, and smiling at him from
the door, she hurried out.
CHAPTER IV
DOCTOR WEST'S LAWYER
Katherine's refusal of Harrison Blake's unforeseen proposal, during
the summer she had graduated from Vassar, had, until the present hour,
been the most painful experience of her life.
Ever since that far-away autumn of her fourteenth year when Blake had
led an at-first forlorn crusade against "Blind Charlie" Peck and swept
that apparently unconquerable autocrat and his corrupt machine from
power, she had admired Blake as the ideal public man. He had seemed so
fine, so big already, and loomed so large in promise--it was the fall
following his proposal that he was elected lieutenant-governor--that
it had been a humiliation to her that she, so insignificant, so
unworthy, could not give him that intractable passion, love. But
though he had gone very pale at her stammered answer, he had borne his
disappointment like a gallant gentleman; and in the years since then
he had acquitted himself to perfection in that most difficult of
rôles, the lover who must be content to be mere friend.
Katherine still retained her girlish admiration of Mr. Blake. Despite
his having been so conspicuous at the forefront of public affairs, no
scandal had ever soiled his name. His rectitude, so said people whose
memories ran back a generation, was due mainly to fine qualities
inherited from his mother, for his father had been a good-natured,
hearty, popular politician with no discoverable bias toward
over-scrupulosity. In fact, twenty years ago there had been a great
to-do touching the voting, through a plan of the elder Blake's
devising, of a gang of negroes half a dozen times down in a
river-front ward. But his party had rushed loyally to his rescue, and
had vindicated him by sending him to Congress; and his sudden death on
the day after taking his seat had at the time abashed all accusation,
and had suffused his memory with a romantic afterglow of sentiment.
Blake lived alone with his mother in a house adjoining the Wests',
and a few moments after Katherine had left her father she turned into
the Blakes' yard. The house stood far back in a spacious lawn, shady
with broad maples and aspiring pines, and set here and there with
shrubs and flower-beds and a fountain whose misty spray hung a golden
aureole upon the sunlight. It was quite worthy of Westville's most
distinguished citizen--a big, roomy house of brick, its sterner lines
all softened with cool ivy, and with a wide piazza crossing its entire
front and embracing its two sides.
The hour was that at which Westville arose from its accustomed mid-day
dinner--which was the reason Katherine was calling at Blake's home
instead of going downtown to his office. She was informed that he was
in. Telling the maid she would await him in his library, where she
knew he received all clients who called on business at his home, she
ascended the well-remembered stairway and entered a large, light room
with walls booked to the ceiling.
Despite her declaration to her father that that old love episode
had been long forgotten by Mr. Blake, at this moment it was not
forgotten by her. She could not subdue a fluttering agitation over
the circumstance that she was about to appeal for succour to a man
she had once refused.
She had but a moment to wait. Blake's tall, straight figure entered
and strode rapidly across the room, his right hand outstretched.
"What--you, Katherine! I'm so glad to see you!"
She had risen. "And I to see you, Mr. Blake." For all he had once
vowed himself her lover, she had never overcome her girlhood awe of
him sufficiently to use the more familiar "Harrison."
"I knew you were coming home, but I had not expected to see you so
soon. Please sit down again."
She resumed her soft leather-covered chair, and he took the
swivel chair at his great flat-topped library desk. His manner was
most cordial, but lurking beneath it Katherine sensed a certain
constraint--due perhaps, to their old relationship--perhaps due to
meeting a friend involved in a family disgrace.
Blake was close upon forty, with a dark, strong, handsome face,
penetrating but pleasant eyes, and black hair slightly marked with
gray. He was well dressed but not too well dressed, as became a public
man whose following was largely of the country. His person gave an
immediate impression of a polished but not over-polished gentleman--of
a man who in acquiring a large grace of manner, has lost nothing of
virility and bigness and purpose.
"It seems quite natural," Katherine began, smiling, and trying to
speak lightly, "that each time I come home it is to congratulate you
upon some new honour."
"New honour?" queried he.
"Oh, your name reaches even to New York! We hear that you are spoken
of to succeed Senator Grayson when he retires next year."
"Oh, that!" He smiled--still with some constraint. "I won't try to
make you believe that I'm indifferent about the matter. But I don't
need to tell you that there's many a slip betwixt being 'spoken of'
and actually being chosen."
There was an instant of awkward silence. Then Katherine went straight
to the business of her visit.
"Of course you know about father."
He nodded. "And I do not need to say, Katherine, how very, very sorry
I am."
"I was certain of your sympathy. Things look black on the surface for
him, but I want you to know that he is innocent."
"I am relieved to be assured of that," he said, hesitatingly. "For,
frankly, as you say, things do look black."
She leaned forward and spoke rapidly, her hands tightly clasped.
"I have come to see you, Mr. Blake, because you have always been our
friend--my friend, and a kinder friend than a young girl had any right
to expect--because I know you have the ability to bring out the truth
no matter how dark the circumstantial evidence may seem. I have come,
Mr. Blake, to ask you, to beg you, to be my father's lawyer."
He stared at her, and his face grew pale.
"To be your father's lawyer?" he repeated.
"Yes, yes--to be my father's lawyer."
He turned in his chair and looked out to where the fountain was
flinging its iridescent drapery to the wind. She gazed at his strong,
clean-cut profile in breathless expectation.
"I again assure you he is innocent," she urged pleadingly. "I know you
can clear him."
"You have evidence to prove his innocence?" asked Blake.
"That you can easily uncover."
He slowly swung about. Though with all his powerful will he strove to
control himself, he was profoundly agitated, and he spoke with a very
great effort.
"You have put me in a most embarrassing situation, Katherine."
She caught her breath.
"You mean?"
"I mean that I should like to help you, but--but----"
"Yes? Yes?"
"But I cannot."
"Cannot! You mean--you refuse his case?"
"It pains me, but I must."
She grew as white as death.
"Oh!" she breathed. "Oh!" She gazed at him, lips wide, in utter
dismay.
Suddenly she seized his arm. "But you have not yet thought it
over--you have not considered," she cried rapidly. "I cannot take
no for your answer. I beg you, I implore you, to take the case."
He seemed to be struggling between two desires. A slender, well-knit
hand stretched out and clutched a ruler; his brow was moist; but he
kept silent.
"Mr. Blake, I beg you, I implore you, to reconsider," she feverishly
pursued. "Do you not see what it will mean to my father? If you take
the case, he is as good as cleared!"
His voice came forth low and husky. "It is because it is beyond my
power to clear him that I refuse."
"Beyond your power?"
"Listen, Katherine," he answered. "I am glad you believe your father
innocent. The faith you have is the faith a daughter ought to have. I
do not want to hurt you, but I must tell you the truth--I do not share
your faith."
"You refuse, then, because you think him guilty?"
He inclined his head. "The evidence is conclusive. It is beyond my
power, beyond the power of any lawyer, to clear him."
This sudden failure of the aid she had so confidently counted as
already hers, was a blow that for the moment completely stunned her.
She sank back in her chair and her head dropped down into her hands.
Blake wiped his face with his handkerchief. After a moment, he went on
in an agitated, persuasive voice:
"I do not want you to think, because I refuse, that I am any less
your friend. If I took the case, and did my best, your father would
be convicted just the same. I am going to open my heart to you,
Katherine. I should like very much to be chosen for that senatorship.
Naturally, I do not wish to do any useless thing that will impair
my chances. Now for me, an aspirant for public favour, to champion
against the aroused public the case of a man who has--forgive me the
word--who has betrayed that public, and in the end to lose that case,
as I most certainly should--it would be nothing less than political
suicide. Your father would gain nothing. I would lose--perhaps
everything. Don't you see?"
"I follow your reasons," she said brokenly into her hands, "I do not
blame you--I accept your answer--but I still believe my father
innocent."
"And for that faith, as I told you, I admire and honour you."
She slowly rose. He likewise stood up.
"What are you going to do?" he asked.
"I do not know," she answered dully. "I was so confident of your aid,
that I had thought of no alternative."
"Your father has tried other lawyers?"
"Yes. They have all refused. You can guess their reason."
He was silent for an instant.
"Why not take the case yourself?"
"I take the case!" cried Katherine, amazed.
"Yes. You are a lawyer."
"But I have never handled a case in court! I am not even admitted to
the bar of the state. And, besides, a woman lawyer in Westville----
No, it's quite out of the question."
"I was only suggesting it, you know," he said apologetically.
"Oh, I realized you did not mean it seriously."
Her face grew ashen as her failure came to her afresh. She gazed at
him with a final desperation.
"Then your answer--it is final?"
"I am sorry, but it is final," said he.
Her head dropped.
"Thank you," she said dully. "Good-by." And she started away.
"Wait, Katherine."
She paused, and he came to her side. His features were gray-hued and
were twitching strangely; for an instant she had the wild impression
that his old love for her still lived.
"I am sorry that--that the first time you asked aid of me--I should
fail you. But but----"
"I understand."
"One word more." But he let several moments pass before he spoke it,
and he wet his lips continually. "Remember, I am still your friend.
Though I cannot take the case, I shall be glad, in a private way, to
advise you upon any matters you may care to lay before me."
"You are very good."
"Then you accept?"
"How can I refuse? Thank you."
He accompanied her down the stairway and to the door. Heavy-hearted,
she returned home. This was sad news to bring her father, whom but
half an hour before she had so confidently cheered; and she knew not
in what fresh direction to turn for aid.
She went straight up to her father's room. With him she found a
stranger, who had a vague, far-distant familiarity.
The two men rose.
"This is my daughter," said Doctor West.
The stranger bowed slightly.
"I have heard of Miss West," he said, and in his manner Katherine's
quick instinct read strong preconceived disapprobation.
"And, Katherine," continued her father, "this is Mr. Bruce."
She stopped short.
"Mr. Bruce of the _Express_?"
"Of the _Express_," Bruce calmly repeated.
Her dejected figure grew suddenly tense, and her cheeks glowed with
hot colour. She moved up before the editor and gazed with flashing
eyes into his square-jawed face.
"So you are the man who wrote those brutal things about father?"
He bristled at her hostile tone and manner, and there was a quick
snapping behind the heavy glasses.
"I am the man who wrote those true things about your father," he said
with cold emphasis.
"And after that you dare come into this house!"
"Pardon me, Miss West, but a newspaper man dares go wherever his
business takes him."
She was trembling all over.
"Then let me inform you that you have no business here. Neither my
father nor myself has anything whatever to say to yellow journalists!"
"Katherine! Katherine!" interjected her father.
Bruce bowed, his face a dull red.
"I shall leave, Miss West, just as soon as Doctor West answers my last
question. I called to see if he wished to make any statement, and I
was asking him about his lawyer. He told me he had as yet secured
none, but that you were applying to Mr. Blake."
Doctor West stepped toward her eagerly.
"Yes, Katherine, what did he say? Will he take the case?"
She turned from Bruce, and as she looked into the white, worn face of
her father, the fire of her anger went out.
"He said--he said----"
"Yes--yes?"
She put her arms about him.
"Don't you mind, father dear, what he said."
Doctor West grew yet more pale.
"Then--he said--the same as the others?"
She held him tight.
"Dear daddy!"
"Then--he refused?"
"Yes--but don't you mind it," she tried to say bravely.
Without a sound, the old man's head dropped upon his chest. He held to
Katherine a moment; then he moved waveringly to an old haircloth sofa,
sank down upon it and bowed his face into his hands.
Bruce broke the silence.
"I am to understand, then, that your father has no lawyer?"
Katherine wheeled from the bowed figure, and her anger leaped
instantly to a white heat.
"And why has he no lawyer?" she cried. "Because of the inhuman things
you wrote about him!"
"You forget, Miss West, that I am running a newspaper, and it is my
business to print the news."
"The news, yes; but not a malignant, ferocious distortion of the news!
Look at my father there. Does it not fill your soul with shame to
think of the black injustice you have done him?"
"Mere sentiment! Understand, I do not let conventional sentiment stand
between me and my duty."
"Your duty!" There was a world of scorn in her voice. "And, pray, what
is your duty?"
"Part of it is to establish, and maintain, decent standards of public
service in this town."
"Don't hide behind that hypocritical pretence! I've heard about you. I
know the sort of man you are. You saw a safe chance for a yellow story
for your yellow newspaper, a safe chance to gain prominence by yelping
at the head of the pack. If he had been a rich man, if he had had a
strong political party behind him, would you have dared assail him as
you have? Never! Oh, it was brutal--infamous--cowardly!"
There was an angry fire behind the editor's thick glasses, and his
square chin thrust itself out. He took a step nearer.
"Listen to me!" he commanded in a slow, defiant voice. "Your opinion
is to me a matter of complete indifference. I tell you that a man who
betrays his city is a traitor, and that I would treat an old traitor
exactly as I would treat a young traitor, I tell you that I take it
as a sign of an awakening public conscience when reputable lawyers
refuse to defend a man who has done what your father has done. And,
finally, I predict that, try as you may, you will not be able to find
a decent lawyer who will dare to take his case. And I glory in it, and
consider it the result of my work!" He bowed to her. "And now, Miss
West, I wish you good afternoon."
She stood quivering, gasping, while he crossed to the door. As his
hand fell upon the knob she sprang forward.
"Wait!" she cried. "Wait! He has a lawyer!"
He paused.
"Indeed! And whom?"
"One who is going to make you take back every cowardly word you have
printed!"
"Who is it, Katherine?" It was her father who spoke.
She turned. Doctor West had raised his head, and in his eyes was an
eager, hopeful light. She bent over him and slipped an arm about his
shoulders.
"Father dear," she quavered, "since we can get no one else, will you
take me?"
"Take you?" he exclaimed.
"Because," she quavered on, "whether you will or not, I'm going to
stay in Westville and be your lawyer."
CHAPTER V
KATHERINE PREPARES FOR BATTLE
For a long space after Bruce had gone Katherine sat quiveringly upon
the old haircloth sofa beside her father, holding his hands tightly,
caressingly. Her words tumbled hotly from her lips--words of love of
him--of resentment of the injustice which he suffered--and, fiercest
of all, of wrath against Editor Bruce, who had so ruthlessly, and for
such selfish ends, incited the popular feeling against him. She would
make such a fight as Westville had never seen! She would show those
lawyers who had been reduced to cowards by Bruce's demagogy! She would
bring the town humiliated to her father's feet!
But emotion has not only peaks, but plains, and dark valleys. As she
cooled and her passion descended to a less exalted level, she began to
see the difficulties of, and her unfitness for, the rôle she had so
impulsively accepted. An uneasiness for the future crept upon her. As
she had told Mr. Blake, she had never handled a case in court. True,
she had been a member of the bar for two years, but her duties with
the Municipal League had consisted almost entirely in working up
evidence in cases of municipal corruption for the use of her legal
superiors. An untried lawyer, and a woman lawyer at that--surely a
weak reed for her father to lean upon!
But she had thrown down the gage of battle; she had to fight, since
there was no other champion; and even in this hour of emotion, when
tears were so plenteous and every word was accompanied by a caress,
she began to plan the preliminaries of her struggle.
"I shall write to-night to the league for a leave of absence," she
said. "One of the things I must see to at once is to get admitted to
the state bar. Do you know when your case is to come up?"
"It has been put over to the September term of court."
"That gives me four months."
She was silently thoughtful for a space. "I've got to work hard, hard!
upon your case. As I see it now, I am inclined to agree with you that
the situation has arisen from a misunderstanding--that the agent
thought you expected a bribe, and that you thought the bribe a small
donation to the hospital."
"I'm certain that's how it is," said her father.
"Then the thing to do is to see Doctor Sherman, and if possible the
agent, have them repeat their testimony and try to search out in it
the clue to the mistake. And that I shall see to at once."
Five minutes later Katherine left the house. After walking ten minutes
through the quiet, maple-shaded back streets she reached the Wabash
Avenue Church, whose rather ponderous pile of Bedford stone was the
most ambitious and most frequented place of worship in Westville, and
whose bulk was being added to by a lecture room now rising against its
side.
Katherine went up a gravelled walk toward a cottage that stood
beneath the church's shadow. The house's front was covered with a
wide-spreading rose vine, a tapestry of rich green which June would
gorgeously embroider with sprays of heart-red roses. The cottage
looked what Katherine knew it was, a bower of lovers.
Her ring was answered by a fair, fragile young woman whose eyes were
the colour of faith and loyalty. A faint colour crept into the young
woman's pale cheeks.
"Why--Katherine--why--why--I don't know what you think of us,
but--but----" She could stammer out no more, but stood in the doorway
in distressed uncertainty.
Katherine's answer was to stretch out her arms. "Elsie!" Instantly
the two old friends were in a close embrace.
"I haven't slept, Katherine," sobbed Mrs. Sherman, "for thinking of
what you would think----"
"I think that, whatever has happened, I love you just the same."
"Thank you for saying it, Katherine." Mrs. Sherman gazed at her in
tearful gratitude. "I can't tell you how we have suffered over
this--this affair. Oh, if you only knew!"
It was instinctive with Katherine to soothe the pain of others, though
suffering herself. "I am certain Doctor Sherman acted from the highest
motives," she assured the young wife. "So say no more about it."
They had entered the little sitting-room, hung with soft white muslin
curtains. "But at the same time, Elsie, I cannot believe my father
guilty," Katherine went on. "And though I honour your husband, why,
even the noblest man can be mistaken. My hope of proving my father's
innocence is based on the belief that Doctor Sherman may somehow have
made a mistake. At any rate, I'd like to talk over his evidence with
him."
"He's trying to work on his sermon, though he's too worn to think.
I'll bring him right in."
She passed through a door into the study, and a moment later reëntered
with Doctor Sherman. The present meeting would have been painful to
an ordinary person; doubly so was it to such a hyper-sensitive nature.
The young clergyman stood hesitant just within the doorway, his usual
pallor greatly deepened, his thin fingers intertwisted--in doubt how
to greet Katherine till she stretched out her hand to him.
"I want you to understand, Katherine dear," little Mrs. Sherman put in
quickly, with a look of adoration at her husband, "that Edgar reached
the decision to take the action he did only after days of agony. You
know, Katherine, Doctor West was always as kind to me as another
father, and I loved him almost like one. At first I begged Edgar not
to do anything. Edgar walked the floor for nights--suffering!--oh, how
you suffered, Edgar!"
"Isn't it a little incongruous," said Doctor Sherman, smiling wanly at
her, "for the instrument that struck the blow to complain, in the
presence of the victim, of _his_ suffering?"
"But I want her to know it!" persisted the wife. "She must know it to
do you justice, dear! It seemed at first disloyal--but finally Edgar
decided that his duty to the city----"
"Please say no more, Elsie." Katherine turned to the pale young
minister. "Doctor Sherman, I have not come to utter one single word of
recrimination. I have come merely to ask you to tell me all you know
about the case."
"I shall be glad to do so."
"And could I also talk with Mr. Marcy, the agent?"
"He has left the city, and will not return till the trial."
Katherine was disappointed by this news. Doctor Sherman, though
obviously pained by the task, rehearsed in minutest detail the charges
he had made against Doctor West, which charges he would later have to
repeat upon the witness stand. Also he recounted Mr. Marcy's story.
Katherine scrutinized every point in these two stories for the loose
end, the loop-hole, the flaw, she had thought to find. But flaw there
was none. The stories were perfectly straightforward.
Katherine walked slowly away, still going over and over Doctor
Sherman's testimony. Doctor Sherman was telling the indubitable
truth--yet her father was indubitably innocent. It was a puzzling
case, this her first case--a puzzling, most puzzling case.
When she reached home she was told by her aunt that a gentleman was
waiting to see her. She entered the big, old-fashioned parlour, fresh
and tasteful despite the stiff black walnut that, in the days of her
mother's marriage, had been spread throughout the land as beauty by
the gentlemen who dealt conjointly in furniture and coffins.
From a chair there rose a youthful and somewhat corpulent presence,
with a chubby and very serious pink face that sat in a glossy high
collar as in a cup. He smiled with a blushful but ingratiating
dignity.
"Don't you remember me? I'm Charlie Horn."
"Oh!" And instinctively, as if to identify him by Charlie Horn's
well-remembered strawberry-marks, Katherine glanced at his hands. But
they were clean, and the warts were gone. She looked at him in doubt.
"You can't be Nellie Horn's little brother?"
"I'm not so little," he said, with some resentment. "Since you knew
me," he added a little grandiloquently, "I've graduated from
Bloomington."
"Please pardon me! It was kind of you to call, and so soon."
"Well, you see I came on business. I suppose you have seen this
afternoon's _Express_?"
She instinctively stiffened.
"I have not."
He drew out a copy of the _Express_, opened it, and pointed a plump,
pinkish forefinger at the beginning of an article on the first page.
"You see the _Express_ says you are going to be your father's lawyer."
Katharine read the indicated paragraphs. Her colour heightened. The
statement was blunt and bare, but between the lines she read the
contemptuous disapproval of the "new woman" that a few hours since
Bruce had displayed before her. Again her anger toward Bruce flared
up.
"I am a reporter for the _Clarion_," young Charlie Horn announced,
striving not to appear too proud. "And I've come to interview you."
"Interview me?" she cried in dismay. "What about?"
"Well, you see," said he, with his benign smile, "you're the first
woman lawyer that's ever been in Westville. It's almost a bigger
sensation than your fath--you see, it's a big story."
He drew from his pocket a bunch of copy paper. "I want you to tell me
about how you are going to handle the case. And about what you think a
woman lawyer's prospects are in Westville. And about what you think
will be woman's status in future society. And you might tell me,"
concluded young Charlie Horn, "who your favourite author is, and what
you think of golf. That last will interest our readers, for our
country club is very popular."
It had been the experience of Nellie Horn's brother that the good
people of Westville were quite willing--nay, even had a subdued
eagerness--to discourse about themselves, and whom they had visited
over Sunday, and who was "Sundaying" with them, and what beauties had
impressed them most at Niagara Falls; and so that confident young
ambassador from the _Clarion_ was somewhat dazed when, a moment later,
he found himself standing alone on the West doorstep with a dim sense
of having been politely and decisively wished good afternoon.
But behind him amid the stiff, dark, solemn-visaged furniture
(Calvinists, every chair of them!) he left a person far more dazed
than himself. Charlie Horn's call had brought sharply home to
Katherine a question that, in the press of affairs, she hardly had as
yet considered--how was Westville going to take to a woman lawyer
being in its midst? She realized, with a chill of apprehension, how
profoundly this question concerned her next few months. Dear,
bustling, respectable Westville, she well knew, clung to its own idea
of woman's sphere as to a thing divinely ordered, and to seek to leave
which was scarcely less than rebellion against high God. In
patriarchal days, when heaven's justice had been prompter, such a
disobedient one would suddenly have found herself rebuked into a bit
of saline statuary.
Katherine vividly recalled, when she had announced her intention to
study law, what a raising of hands there was, what a loud regretting
that she had not a mother. But since she had not settled in
Westville, and since she had not been actively practising in New York,
the town had become partially reconciled. But this step of hers was
new, without a precedent. How would Westville take it?
Her brain burned with this and other matters all afternoon, all
evening, and till the dawn began to edge in and crowd the shadows from
her room. But when she met her father at the breakfast table her face
was fresh and smiling.
"Well, how is my client this morning?" she asked gaily. "Do you
realize, daddy, that you are my first really, truly client?"
"And I suppose you'll be charging me something outrageous as a fee!"
"Something like this"--kissing him on the ear. "But how do you feel?"
"Certain that my lawyer will win my case." He smiled. "And how are
you?"
"Brimful of ideas."
"Yes? About the----"
"Yes. And about you. First, answer a few of your counsel's questions.
Have you been doing much at your scientific work of late?"
"The last two months, since the water-works has been practically
completed, I have spent almost my whole time at it."
"And your work was interesting?"
"Very. You see, I think I am on the verge of discovering that the
typhoid bacillus----"
"You'll tell me all about that later. Now the first order of your
attorney is, just as soon as you have finished your coffee and folded
your napkin, back you go to your laboratory."
"But, Katherine, with this affair----"
"This affair, worry and all, has been shifted off upon your eminent
counsel. Work will keep you from worry, so back you go to your darling
germs."
"You're mighty good, dear, but----"
"No argument! You've got to do just what your lawyer tells you. And
now," she added "as I may have to be seeing a lot of people, and as
having people about the house may interrupt your work, I'm going to
take an office."
He stared at her.
"Take an office?"
"Yes. Who knows--I may pick up a few other cases. If I do, I know who
can use the money."
"But open an office in Westville! Why, the people----Won't it be a
little more unpleasant----" He paused doubtfully. "Did you see what
the _Express_ had to say about you?"
She flushed, but smiled sweetly.
"What the _Express_ said is one reason why I'm going to open an
office."
"Yes?"
"I'm not going to let fear of that Mr. Bruce dictate my life. And
since I'm going to be a lawyer, I'm going to be the whole thing. And
what's more, I'm going to act as though I were doing the most ordinary
thing in the world. And if Mr. Bruce and the town want to talk, why,
we'll just let 'em talk!"
"But--but--aren't you afraid?"
"Of course I'm afraid," she answered promptly. "But when I realize
that I'm afraid to do a thing, I'm certain that that is just exactly
the thing for me to do. Oh, don't look so worried, dear"--she leaned
across and kissed him--"for I'm going to be the perfectest, properest,
politest lady that ever scuttled a convention. And nothing is going to
happen to me--nothing at all."
Breakfast finished, Katherine despotically led her father up to his
laboratory. A little later she set out for downtown, looking very
fresh in a blue summer dress that had the rare qualities of simplicity
and grace. Her colour was perhaps a little warmer than was usual, but
she walked along beneath the maples with tranquil mien, seemingly
unconscious of some people she passed, giving others a clear, direct
glance, smiling and speaking to friends and acquaintances in her most
easy manner.
As she turned into Main Street the intelligence that she was coming
seemed in some mysterious way to speed before her. Those exemplars
of male fashion, the dry goods clerks, craned furtively about front
doors. Bare-armed and aproned proprietors of grocery stores and their
hirelings appeared beneath the awnings and displayed an unprecedented
concern in trying to resuscitate, with aid of sprinkling-cans, bunches
of expiring radishes and young onions. Owners of amiable steeds that
dozed beside the curb hurried out of cavernous doors, the fear of
run-away writ large upon their countenances, to see if a buckle was
not loose or a tug perchance unfastened. Behind her, as she passed,
Main Street stood statued in mid-action, strap in motionless hand,
sprinkling-can tilting its entire contents of restorative over a box
of clothes-pins, and gaped and stared. This was epochal for Westville.
Never before had a real, live, practising woman lawyer trod the cement
walk of Main Street.
When Katherine came to Court House Square, she crossed to the south
side, passed the _Express_ Building, and made for the Hollingsworth
Block, whose first floor was occupied by the New York Store's
"glittering array of vast and profuse fashion." Above this alluring
pageant were two floors of offices; and up the narrow stairway leading
thereunto Katherine mounted. She entered a door marked "Hosea
Hollingsworth. Attorney-at-Law. Mortgages. Loans. Farms." In the
room were a table, three chairs, a case of law books, a desk, on
the top of the desk a "plug" hat, so venerable that it looked a very
great-grandsire of hats, and two cuspidors marked with chromatic
evidence that they were not present for ornament alone.
From the desk there rose a man, perhaps seventy, lean, tall,
smooth-shaven, slightly stooped, dressed in a rusty and wrinkled
"Prince Albert" coat, and with a countenance that looked a rank
plagiarism of the mask of Voltaire. In one corner of his thin mouth,
half chewed away, was an unlighted cigar.
"I believe this is Mr. Hollingsworth?" said Katherine. The question
was purely formal, for his lank figure was one of her earliest
memories.
"Yes. Come right in," he returned in a high, nasal voice.
She drew a chair away from the environs of the cuspidors and sat down.
He resumed his place at his desk and peered at her through his
spectacles, and a dry, almost imperceptible smile played among the
fine wrinkles of his leathery face.
"And I believe this is Katherine West--our lady lawyer," he remarked.
"I read in the _Express_ how you----"
Bruce was on her nerves. She could not restrain a sudden flare of
temper. "The editor of that paper is a cad!"
"Well, he ain't exactly what you might call a hand-raised gentleman,"
the old lawyer admitted. "At least, I never heard of his exerting
himself so hard to be polite that he strained any tendons."
"You know him, then?"
"A little. He's my nephew."
"Oh! I remember."
"And we live together," the old man loquaciously drawled on, eying her
closely with a smile that might have been either good-natured or
satirical. "Batch it--with a nigger who saves us work by stealing
things we'd otherwise have to take care of. We scrap most of the time.
I make fun of him, and he gets sore. The trouble with the editor of
the _Express_ is, he had a doting ma. He should have had an almighty
lot of thrashing when a boy, and instead he never tasted beech limb
once. He's suffering from the spared rod."
Katherine had a shrinking from this old man; an aversion which in her
mature years she had had no occasion to examine, but which she had
inherited unanalyzed from her childhood, when old Hosie Hollingsworth
had been the chief scandal of the town--an infidel, who had dared
challenge the creation of the earth in seven days, and yet was not
stricken down by a fiery bolt from heaven! She did not pursue the
subject of Bruce, but went directly to her business.
"I understand that you have an office to rent."
"So I have. Like to see it?"
"That is what I called for."
"Just come along with me."
He rose, and Katherine followed him to the floor above and into a room
furnished much as the one she had just left.
"This office was last used," commented old Hosie, "by a young fellow
who taught school down in Buck Creek Township and got money to study
law with. He tried law for a while." The old man's thin prehensile
lips shifted his cigar to the other side of his mouth. "He's down in
Buck Creek Township teaching school to get money to pay his back
office rent."
"How about the furniture?" asked Katherine.
"That was his. He left it in part payment. You can use it if you want
to."
"But I don't want those things about"--pointing gingerly to a pair of
cuspidors.
"All right. Though I don't see how you expect to run a law office in
Westville without 'em." He bent over and took them in his hands. "I'll
take 'em along. I need a few more, for my business is picking up."
"I suppose I can have possession at once."
"Whenever you please."
Standing with the cuspidors in his two hands the old lawyer looked her
over. He slowly grinned, and a dry cackle came out of his lean throat.
"I was born out there in Buck Creek Township myself," he said. "Folks
all Quakers, same as your ma's and your Aunt Rachel's. I was brought
up on plowing, husking corn and going to meeting. Never smiled till
after I was twenty; wore a halo, size too large, that slipped down and
made my ears stick out. My grandfather's name was Elijah, my father's
Elisha. My father had twelve sons, and beginning with me, Hosea, he
named 'em all in order after the minor prophets. Being brought up in a
houseful of prophets, naturally a lot of the gift of prophecy sort of
got rubbed off on me."
"Well?" said Katherine impatiently, not seeing the pertinence of this
autobiography.
Again he shifted his cigar. "Well, when I prophesy, it's inspired," he
went on. "And you can take it as the word that came unto Hosea, that a
woman lawyer settling in Westville is going to raise the very dickens
in this old town!"
CHAPTER VI
THE LADY LAWYER
When old Hosie had withdrawn with his expectorative plunder, Katherine
sat down at the desk and gazed thoughtfully out of her window, taking
in the tarnished dome of the Court House that rose lustreless above
the elm tops and the heavy-boned farmhorses that stood about the iron
hitch-racks of the Square, stamping and switching their tails in
dozing warfare against the flies.
Once more, she began to go over the case. Having decided to test all
possible theories, she for the moment pigeon-holed the idea of a
mistake, and began to seek for other explanations. For a space she
vacantly watched the workmen tearing down the speakers' stand. But
presently her eyes began to glow, and she sprang up and excitedly
paced the little office.
Perhaps her father had unwittingly and innocently become involved in
some large system of corruption! Perhaps this case was the first
symptom of the existence of some deep-hidden municipal disease!
It seemed possible--very possible. Her two years with the Municipal
League had taught her how common were astute dishonest practices. The
idea filled her. She began to burn with a feverish hope. But from the
first moment she was sufficiently cool-headed to realize that to
follow up the idea she required intimate knowledge of Westville
political conditions.
Here she felt herself greatly handicapped. Owing to her long residence
away from Westville she was practically in ignorance of public
affairs--and she faced the further difficulty of having no one to whom
she could turn for information. Her father she knew could be of little
service; expert though he was in his specialty, he was blind to evil
in men. As for Blake, she did not care to ask aid from him so soon
after his refusal of assistance. And as for others, she felt that all
who could give her information were either hostile to her father or
critical of herself.
For days the idea possessed her mind. She kept it to herself, and, her
suspicious eyes sweeping in all directions, she studied as best she
could to find some evidence or clue to evidence, that would
corroborate her conjecture. In her excited hope, she strove, while she
thought and worked, to be indifferent to what the town might think
about her. But she was well aware that Old Hosie's prophecy was swift
in coming true--that a storm was raging, a storm of her own sex. It
should be explained, however, in justice to them, that they forgot the
fact, or never really knew it, that she had been forced to take her
father's case. To be sure, there was no open insult, no direct attack,
no face-to-face denunciation; but piazzas buzzed indignantly with her
name, and at the meeting of the Ladies' Aid the poor were forgotten,
as at the Missionary Society were the unbibled heathen upon the
foreign shore.
Fragments of her sisters' pronouncements were wafted to Katherine's
ears. "No self-respecting, womanly woman would ever think of wanting
to be a lawyer"--"A forward, brazen, unwomanly young person"--"A
disgrace to the town, a disgrace to our sex"--"Think of the example
she sets to impressionable young girls; they'll want to break away and
do all sorts of unwomanly things"--"Everybody knows her reason for
being a lawyer is only that it gives her a greater chance to be with
the men."
Katherine heard, her mouth hardened, a certain defiance came into her
manner. But she went straight ahead seeking evidence to support her
suspicion.
Every day made her feel more keenly her need of intimate knowledge
about the city's political affairs; then, unexpectedly, and from an
unexpected quarter, an informant stepped out upon her stage. Several
times Old Hosie Hollingsworth had spoken casually when they had
chanced to pass in the building or on the street. One day his lean,
stooped figure appeared in her office and helped itself to a chair.
"I see you haven't exactly made what Charlie Horn, in his dramatic
criticisms, calls an uproarious and unprecedented success," he
remarked, after a few preliminaries.
"I have not been sufficiently interested to notice," was her crisp
response.
"That's right; keep your back up," said he. "I've been agin about
everything that's popular, and for everything that's unpopular, that
ever happened in this town. I've been an 'agin-er' for fifty years.
They'd have tarred and feathered me long ago if there'd been any
leading citizen unstingy enough to have donated the tar. Then, too,
I've had a little money, and going through the needle's eye is easy
business compared to losing the respect of Westville so long as you've
got money--unless, of course," he added, "you're a female lawyer. I
tell you, there's no more fun than stirring up the animals in this old
town. Any one unpopular in Westville is worth being friends with, and
so if you're willing----"
He held out his thin, bony hand. Katherine, with no very marked
enthusiasm, took it. Then her eyes gleamed with a new light; and
obeying an impulse she asked:
"Are you acquainted with political conditions in Westville?"
"Me acquainted with----" He cackled. "Why, I've been setting at my
office window looking down on the political circus of this town ever
since Noah run aground on Mount Ararat."
She leaned forward eagerly.
"Then you know how things stand?"
"To a T."
"Tell me, is there any rotten politics, any graft or corruption going
on?" She flushed. "Of course, I mean except what's charged against my
father."
"When Blind Charlie Peck was in power, there was more graft and
dirty----"
"Not then, but now?" she interrupted.
"Now? Well, of course you know that since Blake run Blind Charlie out
of business ten years ago, Blake has been the big gun in this town."
"Yes, I know."
"Then you must know that in the last ten years Westville has been
text, sermon, and doxology for all the reformers in the state."
"But could not corruption be going on without Mr. Blake knowing it?
Could not Mr. Peck be secretly carrying out some scheme?"
"Blind Charlie? Blind Charlie ain't dead yet, not by a long sight--and
as long as there's a breath in his carcass, that good-natured old
blackguard is likely to be a dangerous customer. But though Charlie's
still the boss of his party, he controls no offices, and has got no
real power. He's as helpless as Satan was after he'd been kicked out
of heaven and before he'd landed that big job he holds on the floor
below. Nowadays, Charlie just sits in his side office over at the
Tippecanoe House playing seven-up from breakfast till bedtime."
"Then you think there's no corrupt politics in Westville?" she asked
in a sinking voice.
"Not an ounce of 'em!" said Old Hosie with decision.
This agreed with the conviction that had been growing upon Katherine
during the last few days. While she had entertained suspicion of there
being corruption, she had several times considered the advisability of
putting a detective on the case. But this idea she now abandoned.
After this talk with the old lawyer, Katherine was forced back again
upon misunderstanding. She went carefully over the records of her
father's department, on file in the Court House, seeking some item
that would cast light upon the puzzle. She went over and over the
indictment, seeking some loose end, some overlooked inconsistency,
that would yield her at least a clue.
For days she kept doggedly at this work, steeling herself against the
disapprobation of the town. But she found nothing. Then, in a flash,
an overlooked point recurred to her. The trouble, so went her theory,
was all due to a confusion of the bribe with the donation to the
hospital. Where was that donation?
Here was a matter that might at last lead to a solution of the
difficulty. Again on fire with hope, she interviewed her father. He
was certain that a donation had been promised, he had thought the
envelope handed him by Mr. Marcy contained the gift--but of the
donation itself he knew no more. She interviewed Doctor Sherman; he
had heard Mr. Marcy refer to a donation but knew nothing about the
matter. She tried to get in communication with Mr. Marcy, only to
learn that he was in England studying some new filtering plants
recently installed in that country. Undiscouraged, she one day stepped
off the train in St. Louis, the home of the Acme Filter, and appeared
in the office of the company.
The general manager, a gentleman who ran to portliness in his figure,
his jewellery and his courtesy, seemed perfectly acquainted with the
case. In exculpation of himself and his company, he said that they
were constantly being held up by every variety of official from a
county commissioner to a mayor, and they were simply forced to give
"presents" in order to do business.
"But my father's defense," put in Katherine, "was that he thought this
'present' was in reality a donation to the hospital. Was anything said
to my father about a donation?"
"I believe there was."
"That corroborates my father!" Katherine exclaimed eagerly. "Would you
make that statement at the trial--or at least give me an affidavit to
that effect?"
"I'll be glad to give you an affidavit. But I should explain that the
'present' and the donation were two distinctly separate affairs."
"Then what became of the donation?" Katherine cried triumphantly.
"It was sent," said the manager.
"Sent?"
"I sent it myself," was the reply.
Katherine left St. Louis more puzzled than before. What had become of
the check, if it had really been sent? Home again, she ransacked her
father's desk with his aid, and in a bottom drawer they found a heap
of long-neglected mail.
Doctor West at first scratched his head in perplexity. "I remember
now," he said. "I never was much of a hand to keep up with my letters,
and for the few days before that celebration I was so excited that I
just threw everything----"
But Katherine had torn open an envelope and was holding in her hands a
fifty dollar check from the Acme Filter Company.
"What was the date of your arrest?" she asked sharply. "The date Mr.
Marcy gave you that money?"
"The fifteenth of May."
"This check is dated the twelfth of May. The envelope shows it was
received in Westville on the thirteenth."
"Well, what of that?"
"Only this," said Katherine slowly, and with a chill at her heart,
"that the prosecution can charge, and we cannot disprove the charge,
that the real donation was already in your possession at the time you
accepted what you say you believed was the donation."
Then, with a rush, a great temptation assailed Katherine--to destroy
this piece of evidence unfavourable to her father which she held in
her hands. For several moments the struggle continued fiercely. But
she had made a vow with herself when she had entered law that she was
going to keep free from the trickery and dishonourable practices so
common in her profession. She was going to be an honest lawyer, or be
no lawyer at all. And so, at length, she laid the check before her
father.
"Just indorse it, and we'll send it in to the hospital," she said.
Afterward it occurred to her that to have destroyed the check would at
the best have helped but little, for the prosecution, if it so
desired, could introduce witnesses to prove that the donation had been
sent. Suspicion of having destroyed or suppressed the check would then
inevitably have rested upon her father.
This discovery of the check was a heavy blow, but Katherine went
doggedly back to the first beginnings; and as the weeks crept slowly
by she continued without remission her desperate search for a clue
which, followed up, would make clear to every one that the whole
affair was merely a mistake. But the only development of the summer
which bore at all upon the case--and that bearing seemed to Katherine
indirect--was that, since early June, the service of the water-works
had steadily been deteriorating. There was frequently a shortage in
the supply, and the filtering plant, the direct cause of Doctor West's
disgrace, had proved so complete a failure that its use had been
discontinued. The water was often murky and unpleasant to the taste.
Moreover, all kinds of other faults began to develop in the plant. The
city complained loudly of the quality of the water and the failure of
the system. It was like one of these new-fangled toys, averred the
street corners, that runs like a miracle while the paint is on it and
then with a whiz and a whir goes all to thunder.
But to this mere by-product of the case Katherine gave little thought.
She had to keep desperately upon the case itself. At times, feeling
herself so alone, making no inch of headway, her spirits sank very low
indeed. What made the case so wearing on the soul was that she was
groping in the dark. She was fighting an invisible enemy, even though
it was no more than a misunderstanding--an enemy whom, strive as she
would, she could not clutch, with whom she could not grapple. Again
and again she prayed for a foe in the open. Had there been a fight, no
matter how bitter, her part would have been far, far easier--for in
fight there is action and excitement and the lifting hope of victory.
It took courage to work as she did, weary week upon weary week, and
discover nothing. It took courage not to slink away at the town's
disapprobation. At times, in the bitterness of her heart, she wished
she were out of it all, and could just rest, and be friends with every
one. In such moods it would creep coldly in upon her that there could
be but one solution to the case--that after all her father must be
guilty. But when she would go home and look into his thoughtful,
unworldy old face, that solution would instantly become impossible;
and she would cast out doubt and despair and renew her determination.
The weeks dragged heavily on--hot and dusty after the first of July,
and so dry that out in the country the caked earth was a fine network
of zigzagging fissures, and the farmers, gazing despondently upon
their shrivelling corn, watched with vain hope for a rescuing cloud to
darken the clear, hard, brilliant heavens. At length the summer burned
to its close; the opening day of the September term of court was close
at hand. But still the case stood just as on the day Katherine had
stepped so joyously from the Limited. The evidence of Sherman was
unshaken. The charges of Bruce had no answer.
One afternoon--her father's case was set for two days later--as
Katherine left her office, desperate, not knowing which way to turn,
her nerves worn fine and thin by the long strain, she saw her father's
name on the front page of the _Express_. She bought a copy. In the
centre of the first page, in a "box" and set in heavy-faced type, was
an editorial in Bruce's most rousing style, trying her father in
advance, declaring him flagrantly guilty, and demanding for him the
law's extremest penalty.
That editorial unloosed her long-collected wrath--wrath that had many
a reason. In Bruce's person Katherine had from the first seen the
summing up, the leader, of the bitterness against her father. All
summer he had continued his sharp attacks, and the virulence of these
had helped keep the town wrought up against Doctor West. Moreover,
Katherine despised Bruce as a powerful, ruthless, demagogic hypocrite.
And to her hostility against him in her father's behalf and to her
contempt for his quack radicalism, was added the bitter implacability
of the woman who feels herself scorned. The town's attitude toward her
she resented. But Bruce she hated, and him she prayed with all her
soul that she might humble.
She crushed the _Express_, flung it from her into the gutter, and
walked home all a-tremble. Her aunt met her in the hall as she was
laying off her hat. A spot burned faintly in either withered cheek of
the old woman.
"Who does thee think is here?" she asked.
"Who?" Katherine repeated mechanically, her wrath too high for
interest in anything else.
"Mr. Bruce. Upstairs with thy father."
"What!" cried Katherine.
Her hat missed the hook and fell to the floor, and she went springing
up the stairway. The next instant she flung open her father's door,
and walked straight up to Bruce, before whom she paused, bosom
heaving, eyes on fire.
"What are you doing here?" she demanded.
His powerful figure rose, and his square-hewn face looked directly
into her own.
"Interviewing your father," he returned with his aggressive calm.
"He was asking me to confess," explained Doctor West.
"Confess?" cried Katherine.
"Just so," replied Bruce. "His guilt is undoubted, so he might as well
confess."
Scorn flamed at him.
"I see! You are trying to get a confession out of him, in advance of
the trial, as a big feature for your terrible paper!"
She moved a pace nearer him. All the suppressed anger, all the hidden
anguish, of the last three months burst up volcanically.
"Oh! oh!" she cried breathlessly. "I never dreamt till I met you that
a man could be so low, so heartless, as to hound an old man as you
have hounded my father--and all for the sake of a yellow newspaper
sensation. But he's a safe man for you to attack. Yes, he's safe--old,
unpopular, helpless!"
Bruce's heavy brows lowered. He did not give back a step before her
ireful figure.
"And because he's old and unpopular I should not attack him, eh?" he
demanded. "Because he's down, I should not hit him? That's your
woman's reasoning, is it? Well, let me tell you," and his gray eyes
flashed, and his voice had a crunching tone--"that I believe when
you've got an enemy of society down, don't, because you pity him, let
him up to go and do the same thing again. While you've got him down,
keep on hitting him till you've got him finished!"
"Like the brute that you are!" she cried. "But, like the coward you
are, you first very carefully choose your 'enemy of society.' You were
careful to choose one who could not hit back!"
"I did not choose your father. He thrust himself upon the town's
attention. And I consider neither his weakness nor his strength. I
consider only the fact that your father has done the city a greater
injury than any man who ever lived in Westville."
"It's a lie! I tell you it's a lie!"
"It's the truth!" he declared harshly, dominantly. "His swindling
Westville by giving us a worthless filtering-plant in return for a
bribe--why, that is the smallest evil he has done the town. Before
that time, Westville was on the verge of making great municipal
advances--on the verge of becoming a model and a leader for the small
cities of the Middle West. And now all that grand development is
ruined--and ruined by that man, your father!" He excitedly jerked a
paper from his pocket and held it out to her. "If you want to see
what he has brought us to, read that editorial in the _Clarion_!"
She fixed him with glittering eyes.
"I have read one cowardly editorial to-day in a Westville paper. That
is enough."
"Read that, I say!" he commanded.
For answer she took the _Clarion_ and tossed it into the waste-basket.
She glared at him, quivering all over, in her hands a convulsive itch
for physical vengeance.
"If I thought that in all your fine talk about the city there was one
single word of sincerity, I might respect you," she said with slow and
scathing contempt. "But your words are the words of a mere poseur--of
a man who twists the truth to fit his desires--of a man who deals in
the ideas that seem to him most profitable--of a man who cares not how
poor, how innocent, is the body he uses as a stepping stone for his
clambering greed and ambition. Oh, I know you--I have watched you--I
have read you. You are a mere self-seeker! You are a demagogue! You
are a liar! And, on top of that, you are a coward!"
Whatever Arnold Bruce was, he was a man with a temper. Fury was
blazing behind his heavy spectacles.
"Go on! I care _that_ for the words of a woman who has so little
taste, so little sense, so little modesty, as to leave the sphere----"
"You boor!" gasped Katharine.
"Perhaps I am. At least I am not afraid to speak the truth straight
out even to a woman. You are all wrong. You are unwomanly. You are
unsexed. Your pretensions as a lawyer are utterly preposterous, as the
trial on Thursday will show you. And the condemnation of the town is
not half as severe a rebuke----"
"Stop!" gasped Katherine. A wild defiance surged up and overmastered
her, her nerves broke, and her hot words tumbled out hysterically.
"You think you are a God-anointed critic of humanity, but you are only
a heartless, conceited cad! Just wait--I'll show you what your
judgment of me is worth! I am going to clear my father! I am going to
make this Westville that condemns me kneel at my feet! and as for
you--you can think what you please! But don't you ever dare to speak
to my father again--don't you ever dare speak to me again--don't you
ever dare enter this house again! Now go! Go! I say. Go! Go! Go!"
His face had grown purple; he seemed to be choking. For a space he
gazed at her. Then without answering he bowed slightly and was gone.
She glared a moment at the door. Then suddenly she collapsed upon the
floor, her head and arms on the old haircloth sofa, and her whole body
shook with silent sobs. Doctor West, first gazing at her a little
helplessly, sat down upon the sofa, and softly stroked her hair. For a
time there were no words--only her convulsive breathing, her choking
sobs.
Presently he said gently:
"I'm sure you'll do everything you said."
"No--that's the trouble," she moaned. "What I said--was--was just a
big bluff. I won't do any--of those things. Your trial is two days
off--and, father, I haven't one bit of evidence--I don't know what
we're going to do--and the jury will have to--oh, father, father, that
man was right; I'm just--just a great big failure!"
Again she shook with sobs. The old man continued to sit beside her,
softly stroking her thick brown hair.
CHAPTER VII
THE MASK FALLS
But presently the sobs subsided, as though shut off by main force, and
Katherine rose to her feet. She wiped her eyes and looked at her
father, a wan smile on her reddened, still tremulous face.
"What a hope-inspiring lawyer you have, father!"
"I would not want a truer," said he loyally.
"We won't have one of these cloud-bursts again, I promise you. But
when you have been under a strain for months, and things are stretched
tighter and tighter, and at last something makes things snap, why you
just can't help--well," she ended, "a man would have done something
else, I suppose, but it might have been just as bad."
"Worse!" avowed her father.
"Anyhow, it's all over. I'll just repair some of the worst ravages of
the storm, and then we'll talk about our programme for the trial."
As she was arranging her hair before her father's mirror, she saw, in
the glass, the old man stoop and take something from the waste-basket.
Turning his back to her, he cautiously examined the object.
She left the mirror and came up behind him.
"What are you looking at, dear?"
He started, and glanced up.
"Oh--er--that editorial Mr. Bruce referred to." He rubbed his head
dazedly. "If that should happen, with me even indirectly the cause of
it--why, Katherine, it really would be pretty bad!" He held out the
_Clarion_. "Perhaps, after all, you had better read it."
She took the paper. The _Clarion_ had from the first opposed the
city's owning the water-works, and the editorial declared that the
present situation gave the paper, and all those who had held a similar
opinion, their long-awaited triumph and vindication. "This failure is
only what invariably happens whenever a city tries municipal
ownership," declared the editorial. "The situation has grown so
unbearably acute that the city's only hope of good water lies in the
sale of the system to some private concern, which will give us that
superior service which is always afforded by private capital.
Westville is upon the eve of a city election, and we most emphatically
urge upon both parties that they make the chief plank of their
platforms the immediate sale of our utterly discredited water-works
to some private company."
The editorial did not stir Katherine as it had appeared to stir Bruce,
nor even in the milder degree it had stirred Doctor West. She was
interested in the water-works only in so far as it concerned her
father, and the _Clarion's_ proposal had no apparent bearing on his
guilt or innocence.
She laid the _Clarion_ on the table, without comment, and proceeded to
discuss the coming trial. The only course she had to suggest was that
they plead for a postponement on the ground that they needed more time
in which to prepare their defense. If that plea were denied, then
before them seemed certain conviction. On that plea, then, they
decided to place all their hope.
When this matter had been talked out Doctor West took the _Clarion_
from the table and again read the editorial with troubled face, while
Katherine walked to and fro across the floor, her mind all on the
trial.
"If the town does sell, it will be too bad!" he sighed.
"I suppose so," said Katherine mechanically.
"It has reached me that people are saying that the system isn't worth
anything like what we paid for it."
"Is that so?" she asked absently.
Doctor West drew himself up and his faded cheeks flushed indignantly.
"No, it is not so. I don't know what's wrong, but it's the very best
system of its size in the Middle West!"
She paused.
"Forgive me--I wasn't paying any attention to what I was saying. I'm
sure it is."
She resumed her pacing.
"But if they sell out to some company," Doctor West continued, "the
company will probably get it for a third, or less, of what it is
actually worth."
"So, if some corporation has been secretly wanting to buy it,"
commented Katherine, "things could not have worked out better for the
corporation if they had been planned."
She came to a sudden pause, and stood gazing at her father, her lips
slowly parting.
"It could not have worked out better for the corporation if it had
been planned," she repeated.
"No," said Doctor West.
She picked up the _Clarion_, quickly read the editorial, and laid the
paper aside.
"Father!" Her voice was a low, startled cry.
"Yes?"
She moved slowly toward him, in her face a breathless look, and caught
his shoulders with tense hands.
"_Perhaps it was planned!_"
"What?"
Her voice rang out more loudly:
"_Perhaps it was planned!_"
"But Katherine--what do you mean?"
"Let me think. Let me think." She began feverishly to pace the room.
"Oh, why did I not think of this before!" she cried to herself. "I
thought of graft--political corruption--everything else. But it never
occurred to me that there might be a plan, a subtle, deep-laid plan,
to steal the water-works!"
Doctor West watched her rather dazedly as she went up and down the
floor, her brows knit, her lips moving in self-communion. Her
connection with the Municipal League in New York had given her an
intimate knowledge of the devious means by which public service
corporations sometimes gain their end. Her mind flashed over all the
situation's possibilities.
Suddenly she paused before her father, face flushed, triumph in her
eyes.
"Father, _it was planned!_"
"Eh?" said he.
"Father," she demanded excitedly, "do you know what the great public
service corporations are doing now?" Her words rushed on, not waiting
for an answer. "They have got hold of almost all the valuable public
utilities in the great cities, and now they are turning to a fresh
field--the small cities. Westville is a rich chance in a small way. It
has only thirty thousand inhabitants now. But it is growing. Some day
it will have fifty thousand--a hundred thousand."
"That's what people say."
"If a private company could get hold of the water-works, the system
would not only be richly profitable at once, but it would be worth a
fortune as the city grows. Now if a company, a clever company, wanted
to buy in the water-works, what would be their first move?"
"To make an offer, I suppose."
"Never! Their first step would be to try to make the people want to
sell. And how would they try to make the people want to sell?"
"Why--why----"
"By making the water-works fail!" Her excitement was mounting; she
caught his shoulders. "Fail so badly that the people would be
disgusted, just as they now are, and willing to sell at any price.
And now, father--and now, father--" he could feel her quivering all
over--"listen to me! We're coming to the point! How would they make
the water-works fail?"
He could only blink at her.
"They'd make it fail by removing from office, and so disgracing
him that everything he had done would be discredited, the one
incorruptible man whose care and knowledge had made it a success!
Don't you see, father? Don't you see?"
"Bless me," said the old man, "if I know what you're talking about!"
"With you out of the way, whom they knew they could not corrupt, they
could buy under officials to attend to the details of making the water
bad and the plant itself a failure--just exactly what has been done.
You are not the real victim. You are just an obstruction--something
that they had to get out of the way. The real victim is Westville!
It's a plan to rob the city!"
His gray eyes were catching the light that blazed from hers.
"I begin to see," he said. "It hardly seems possible people would do
such things. But perhaps you're right. What are you going to do?"
"Fight!"
"Fight?" He looked admiringly at her glowing figure. "But if there is
a strong company behind all this, for you to fight it alone--it will
be an awful big fight!"
"I don't care how big the fight is!" she cried exultantly. "What has
almost broken my heart till now is that there has been no one to
fight!"
A shadow fell on the old man's face.
"But after all, Katherine, it is all only a guess."
"Of course it is only a guess!" she cried. "But I have tested every
other possible solution. This is the only one left, and it fits every
known circumstance of the case. It is only a guess--but I'll stake my
life on its being the right guess!" Her voice rose. "Oh, father, we're
on the right track at last! We're going to clear you! Don't you ever
doubt that. We're going to clear you!"
There was no resisting the ringing confidence in her voice, the fire
of her enthusiasm.
"Katherine!" he cried, and opened his arms.
She rushed into them. "We're going to clear you, father! And, oh,
won't it be fine! Won't it be fine!"
For a space they held each other close, then they parted.
"What are you going to do first?" he asked.
"Try to find the person, or corporation, behind the scheme."
"And how will you do that?"
"First, I shall talk it over with Mr. Blake. You know he told me to
come to him if I ever wished his advice. He knows the situation
here--he has the interests of Westville at heart--and I know he will
help us. I'm not going to lose a second, so I'm off to see him now."
She rushed downstairs. But she did have to lose a second, and many of
them, for when she called up Mr. Blake's office on the telephone, the
answer came back that Mr. Blake was in the capital and would not
return till the following day on the one forty-five. It occurred to
Katherine to advise with old Hosie Hollingsworth, for during the long
summer her blind, childish shrinking had changed to warm liking of the
dry old lawyer; and she had discovered, too, that the heresies it had
been his delight to utter a generation before--and on which he still
prided himself--were now a part of the belief of many an orthodox
divine.
But she decided against conferring with Old Hosie. Her adviser and
leader must be a man more actively in the current of modern affairs.
No, Blake was her great hope, and precious and few as were the hours
before the trial, there was nothing for it but to wait for his return.
She went up to her room, and her excited mind, now half inspired, went
feverishly over the situation and all who were in any wise concerned
in it. She thought of the fifty dollar check from the Acme Filter
Company. With her new viewpoint she now understood the whole
bewildering business of that check. The company, or at least one of
its officers, was somehow in on the deal, and there had been some
careful scheming behind the sending of that fifty dollars. The
company had been confronted with two obvious difficulties. First, it
had to make certain that the check would not be received until after
the two thousand dollars was in the hands of her father. Second, the
date of the check and the date of the Westville postmark must be
earlier than the day the two thousand dollars was delivered--else
Doctor West could produce check and envelope to prove that the check
had not arrived until after he had already accepted what he thought
was the donation, and thus perhaps ruin the whole scheme. What had
been done, Katherine now clearly perceived, was that some one, most
probably an assistant of her father, had been bought over to look out
for the arrival of the letter, to hold it back until the critical day
had passed, and then slip it into her father's neglected mail.
Her mind raced on to further matters, further persons, connected with
the situation. When she came to Bruce her hands clenched the arms of
her wicker rocking chair. In a flash the whole man was plain to her,
and her second great discovery of the day was made.
Bruce was an agent of the hidden corporation!
The motive behind his fierce desire to destroy her father was at last
apparent. To destroy Doctor West was his part in the conspiracy. As
for his rabid advocacy of municipal ownership, and all his fine talk
about the city's betterment, that was mere sham--merely the virtuous
front behind which he could work out his purpose unsuspected. No one
could quote the scripture of civic improvement more loudly than the
civic despoiler. She always had distrusted him. Now she knew him. Many
a time through the night her mind flashed back to him from other
matters and she thrilled with a vengeful joy at the thought of tearing
aside his mask.
It was a long and feverish night to Katherine, and a long and feverish
forenoon. At a quarter to two she was in Blake's office, which was
furnished with just that balance between simplicity and richness
appropriate to a growing great man with a constituency half of the
city and half of the country. She had sat some time at a window
looking down upon the Square, its foliage now a dusty, shrivelled
brown, when Blake came in. He had not been told that she was waiting,
and at sight of her he came to a sudden pause. But the next instant he
had crossed the room and was shaking her hand.
For that first instant Katherine's eyes and mind, which during the
last twenty-four hours had had an almost more than mortal clearness,
had an impression that he was strangely agitated. But the moment over,
the impression was gone.
He placed a chair for her at the corner of his desk and himself sat
down, his dark, strong, handsome face fixed on hers.
"Now, how can I serve you, Katherine?"
There were rings about her eyes, but excitement gave her colour.
"You know that to-morrow is father's trial?"
"Yes. You must have a hard, hard fight before you."
"Perhaps not so hard as you may think." She tried to keep her tugging
excitement in leash.
"I hope not," said he.
"I think it may prove easy--if you will help me."
"Help you?"
"Yes. I have come to ask you that again."
"Well--you see--as I told you----"
"But the situation has changed since I first came to you," she put in
quickly, not quite able to restrain a little laugh. "I have found
something out!"
He started. "You have found--you say----"
"I have found something out!"
She smiled at him happily, triumphantly.
"And that?" said he.
She leaned forward.
"I do not need to tell you, for you know it, that the big corporations
have discovered a new gold mine--or rather, thousands of little gold
mines. That all over the country they have gained control, and are
working to gain control, of the street-car lines, gas works and other
public utilities in the smaller cities."
"Well?"
She spoke excitedly, putting the case more definitely than it really
was, to better the chance of winning his aid.
"Well, I have just discovered that there is a plan on foot, directed
by a hidden some one, to seize the water-works of Westville. I have
discovered that my father is not guilty. He is the victim of a trick
to ruin the water-works and make the people willing to sell. The first
thing to do is to find the man behind the scheme. I want you to help
me find this man."
A greenish pallor had overspread his features.
"And you want me--to find this man?" he repeated.
"Yes. I know you will take this up, simply because of your interest in
the city. But there is another reason--it would help you in your
larger ambition. If you could disclose this scheme, save the city,
become the hero of a great popular gratitude, think how it would help
your senatorial chances!"
He did not at once reply, but sat staring at her.
"Don't you see?" she cried.
"I--I see."
"Why, it would turn your chance for the Senate into a certainty! It
would--but, Mr. Blake, what's the matter?"
"Matter," he repeated, huskily. "Why--why nothing."
She gazed at him with deep concern. "But you look almost sick."
In his eyes there struggled a wild look. Her gaze became fixed upon
his face, so strangely altered. In her present high-wrought state all
her senses were excited to their intensest keenness.
There was a moment of silence--eyes into eyes. Then she stood slowly
up, and one hand reached slowly out and clutched his arm.
"Mr. Blake!" she whispered, in an awed and terrified tone. She
continued to stare into his eyes. "Mr. Blake!" she repeated.
She felt a tensing of his body, as of a man who seeks to master
himself with a mighty effort. He tried to smile, though his greenish
pallor did not leave him.
"It is my turn," he said, "to ask what is the matter with you,
Katherine."
"Mr. Blake!" She loosed her hold upon his arm, and shrank away.
He rose.
"What is the matter?" he repeated. "You seem upset. I suppose it is
the nervous strain of to-morrow's trial."
In her face was stupefied horror.
"It is what--what I have discovered."
"What you call your discovery would be most valuable, if true. But it
is just a dream, Katherine--a crazy, crazy dream."
She still was looking straight into his eyes.
"Mr. Blake, it is true," she said slowly, almost breathlessly. "For I
have found the man behind the plan."
"Indeed! And who?"
"I think you know him, Mr. Blake."
"I?"
"Better than any one else."
His smile had left him.
"Who?"
She continued to stare at him for a moment in silence. Then she slowly
raised her arm and pointed at him.
The silence continued for several moments, each gazing at the other.
He had put one hand upon his desk and was leaning heavily upon it. He
looked like a man sick unto death. But soon a shiver ran through him;
he swallowed, gripped himself in a strong control, and smiled again
his strained, unnatural smile.
"Katherine, Katherine," he tried to say it reprovingly and
indulgently, but there was a quaver in his voice. "You have gone quite
out of your head!"
"It is true!" she cried. "All unintentionally I have followed one of
the oldest of police expedients. I have suddenly confronted the
criminal with his crime, and I have surprised his guilt upon his
face!"
"What you say is absurd. I can explain it only on the theory that you
are quite out of your mind."
"Never before was I so much in it!"
In this moment when she felt that the hidden enemy she had striven so
long to find was at last revealed to her, she felt more of anguish
than of triumph.
"Oh, how could you do such a thing, Mr. Blake?" she burst out. "How
could you do it?"
He shook his head, and tried to smile at her perversity--but the smile
was a wan failure.
"I see--I see!" she cried in her pain. "It is just the old story. A
good man rises to power through being the champion of the people--and,
once in power, the opportunities, the temptation, are too much for
him. But I never--no, never!--thought that such a thing would happen
with you!"
He strove for the injured air of the misjudged old friend.
"Again I must say that I can only explain your charges by supposing
that you are out of your head."
"Here in Westville you believe it is not woman's business to think
about politics," Katherine went on, in her voice of pain. "But I could
not help thinking about them, and watching them. I have lost my faith
in the old parties, but I had kept my faith in some of their leaders.
I believe some of them honest, devoted, indomitable. And of them all,
the one I admired most, ranked highest, was you. And now--and now--oh,
Mr. Blake!--to learn that you----"
"Katherine! Katherine!" And he raised his hands with the manner of
exasperated, yet indulgent, helplessness.
"Mr. Blake, you know you are now only playing a part! And you know
that I know it!" She moved up to him eagerly. "Listen to me," she
pleaded rapidly. "You have only started on this, you have not gone too
far to turn back. You have done no real wrong as yet, save to my
father, and I know my father will forgive you. Drop your plan--let my
father be honourably cleared--and everything will be just as before!"
For a space he seemed shaken by her words. She watched him,
breathless, awaiting the outcome of the battle she felt was waging
within him.
"Drop the plan--do!--do!--I beg you!" she cried.
His dark face twitched; a quivering ran through his body. Then by a
mighty effort he partially regained his mastery.
"There is no plan for me to drop," he said huskily.
"You still cling to the part you are playing?"
"I am playing no part; you are all wrong about me," he continued.
"Your charges are so absurd that it would be foolish to deny them.
They are merely the ravings of an hysterical woman."
"And this is your answer?"
"That is my answer."
She gazed at him for a long moment. Then she sighed.
"I'm so sorry!" she said; and she turned away and moved toward the
door.
She gave him a parting look, as he stood pale, quivering, yet
controlled, behind his desk. In this last moment she remembered the
gallant fight this man had made against Blind Charlie Peck; she
remembered that fragrant, far-distant night of June when he had asked
her to marry him; and she felt as though she were gazing for the last
time upon a dear dead face.
"I'm sorry--oh, so sorry!" she said tremulously. "Good-by." And
turning, she walked with bowed head out of his office.
CHAPTER VIII
THE EDITOR OF THE _EXPRESS_
Katherine stumbled down into the dusty, quivering heat of the Square.
She was still awed and dumfounded by her discovery; she could not as
yet realize its full significance and whither it would lead; but her
mind was a ferment of thoughts that were unfinished and questions that
did not await reply.
How had a man once so splendid come to sell his soul for money or
ambition? What would Westville think and do, Westville who worshipped
him, if it but knew the truth? How was she to give battle to an
antagonist, so able in himself, so powerfully supported by the public?
What a strange caprice of fate it was that had given her as the man
she must fight, defeat, or be defeated by, her former idol, her former
lover!
Shaken with emotion, her mind shot through with these fragmentary
thoughts, she turned into a side street. But she had walked beneath
its withered maples no more than a block or two, when her largest
immediate problem, her father's trial on the morrow, thrust itself
into her consciousness, and the pressing need of further action drove
all this spasmodic speculation from her mind. She began to think upon
what she should next do. Almost instantly her mind darted to the man
whom she had definitely connected with the plot against her father,
Arnold Bruce, and she turned back toward the Square, afire with a new
idea.
She had made great advance through suddenly, though unintentionally,
confronting Blake with knowledge of his guilt. Might she not make some
further advance, gain some new clue, by confronting Bruce in similar
manner?
Ten minutes after she had left the office of Harrison Blake, Katherine
entered the _Express_ Building. From the first floor sounded a deep
and continuous thunder; that afternoon's issue was coming from the
press. She lifted her skirts and gingerly mounted the stairway, over
which the _Express's_ "devil" was occasionally seen to make
incantations with the stub of an undisturbing broom.
At the head of the stairway a door stood open. This she entered, and
found herself in the general editorial room, ankle-deep with dirt and
paper. The air of the place told that the day's work was done. In one
corner a telegraph sounder was chattering its tardy world-gossip to
unheeding ears. In the centre at a long table, typewriters before
them, three shirt-sleeved young men sprawled at ease reading the
_Express_, which the "devil" had just brought them from the nether
regions, moist with the black spittle of the beast that there roared
and rumbled.
At sight of her tall, fresh figure, a red spot in her either cheek,
defiance in her brown eyes, Billy Harper, quicker than the rest,
sprang up and crossed the room.
"Miss West, I believe," he said. "Can I do anything for you?"
"I wish to speak with Mr. Bruce," was her cold reply.
"This way," and Billy led her across the wilderness of proofs,
discarded copy and old newspapers, to a door beside the stairway that
led down into the press-room. "Just go right in," he said.
She entered. Bruce, his shirt-sleeves rolled up and his bared
fore-arms grimy, sat glancing through the _Express_, his feet crossed
on his littered desk, a black pipe hanging from one corner of his
mouth. He did not look round but turned another page.
"Well, what's the matter?" he grunted between his teeth.
"I should like a few words with you," said Katherine.
"Eh!" His head twisted about. "Miss West!"
His feet suddenly dropped to the floor, and he stood up and laid the
pipe upon his desk. For the moment he was uncertain how to receive
her, but the bright, hard look in her eyes fixed his attitude.
"Certainly," he said in a brusque, businesslike tone. He placed the
atlas-bottomed chair near his own. "Be seated."
She sat down, and he took his own chair.
"I am at your service," he said.
Her cheeks slowly gathered a higher colour, her eyes gleamed with a
pre-triumphant fire, and she looked straight into his square, rather
massive face. Over Blake she had felt an infinity of regret and pain.
For this man she felt only boundless hatred, and she thrilled with a
vengeful, exultant joy that she was about to unmask him--that later
she might crush him utterly.
"I am at your service," he repeated.
She slowly wet her lips and gathered herself to strike, alert to watch
the effects of her blow.
"I have called, Mr. Bruce," she said with slow distinctness, "to let
you know that I know that a conspiracy is under way to steal the
water-works! And to let you know that I know that you are near its
centre!"
He started.
"What?" he cried.
Her devouring gaze did not lose a change of feature, not so much as
the shifting in the pupil of his eye.
"Oh, I know your plot!" she went on rapidly. "It's every detail! The
first step was to ruin the water-works, so the city would sell and
sell cheap. The first step toward ruining the system was to get my
father out of the way. And so this charge against my father was
trumped up to ruin him. The leader of the whole plot is Mr. Blake; his
right hand man yourself. Oh, I know every detail of your infamous
scheme!"
He stared at her. His lips had slowly parted.
"What--you say that Mr. Blake----"
"Oh, you are trying to play your part of innocence well, but you
cannot deceive me!" she cried with fierce contempt. "Yes, Mr. Blake is
the head of it. I just came from his office. There's not a doubt in
the world of his guilt. He has admitted it. Oh----"
"Admitted it?"
"Yes, admitted it! Oh, it was a fine and easy way to make a
fortune--to dupe the city into selling at a fraction of its value a
business that run privately will pay an immense and ever-growing
profit."
He had stood up and was scratching his bristling hair.
"My God! My God!" he whispered.
She rose.
"And you!" she cried, glaring at him, her voice mounting to a climax
of scorn, "You! Don't walk the room"--he had begun to do so--"but look
me in the face. To think how you have attacked my father, maligned
him, covered him with dishonour! And for what? To help you carry
through a dirty trick to rob the city! Oh, I wish I had the words to
tell you----"
But he had begun again to pace the little room, scratching his head,
his eyes gleaming behind the heavy glasses.
"Listen to me!" she commanded.
"Oh, give me all the hell you want to!" he cried out. "Only don't ask
me to listen to you!"
He paused abruptly before her, and, eyes half-closed, stared
piercingly into her face. As she returned his stare, it began to dawn
upon her that he did not seem much taken aback. At least his guilt
bore no near likeness to that of Mr. Blake.
Suddenly he made a lunge for the door, jerked it open, and his voice
descended the stairway, out-thundering the press.
"Jake! Oh, Jake!"
A lesser roar ascended:
"Yes!"
"Stop the press! Rip open the forms! Get the men at the linotypes! And
be alive down there, every damned soul of you! And you, Billy Harper,
I'll want you here in two minutes!"
He slammed the door, and turned on Katherine. She had looked upon
excitement before, but never such excitement as was flaming in his
face.
"Now give me all the details!" he cried.
She it was that was taken aback.
"I--I don't understand," she said.
"No time to explain now. Looks like I've been all wrong about your
father--perhaps a little wrong about you--and perhaps you've been a
little wrong about me. Let it go at that. Now for the details. Quick!"
"But--but what are you going to do?"
"Going to get out an extra! It's the hottest story that ever came down
the pike! It'll make the _Express_, and"--he seized her hand in his
grimy ones, his eyes blazed, and an exultant laugh leaped from his
deep chest--"and we'll simply rip this old town wide open!"
Katherine stared at him in bewilderment.
"Oh, won't this wake the old town up!" he murmured to himself.
He dropped into his chair, jerked some loose copy paper toward him,
and seized a pencil.
"Now quick! The details!"
"You mean--you are going to print this?" she stammered.
"Didn't I say so!" he answered sharply.
"Then you really had nothing to do with Mr. Blake's----"
"Oh, hell! I beg pardon. But this is no time for explanations. Come,
come"--he rapped his desk with his knuckles--"don't you know what
getting out an extra is? Every second is worth half your lifetime. Out
with the story!"
Katherine sank rather weakly into her chair, beginning to see new
things in this face she had so lately loathed.
"The fact of the matter is," she confessed, "I guess I stated my
information a little more definitely than it really is."
"You mean you haven't the facts?"
"I'm afraid not. Not yet."
"Nothing definite I could hinge a story on?"
She shook her head. "I didn't come prepared for--for things to take
this turn. It would spoil everything to have this made public before I
had my case worked up."
"Then there's no extra!"
He flung down his pencil and sprang up. "Nothing doing, Billy," he
called to Harper, who that instant opened the door; "go on back with
you." He began to walk up and down the little office, scowling, hands
clenched in his trousers' pockets. After a moment he stopped short,
and looked at Katherine half savagely.
"I suppose you don't know what it means to a newspaper man to have a
big story laid in his hands and then suddenly jerked out?"
"I suppose it is something of a disappointment."
"Disappointment!" The word came out half groan, half sneer. "Rot! If
you were waiting in church and the bridegroom didn't show up, if you
were----oh, I can't make you understand the feeling!"
He dropped back into his chair and scratched viciously at the copy
paper with his heavy black pencil. She watched him in a sort of
fascination, till he abruptly looked up. Suspicion glinted behind the
heavy glasses.
"Are you sure, Miss West," he asked slowly "that this whole affair
isn't just a little game?"
"What do you mean?"
"That your whole story is nothing but a hoax? Nothing but a trick to
get out of a tight hole by calling another man a thief?"
Her eyes flashed.
"You mean that I am telling a lie?"
"Oh, you lawyers doubtless have a better-tasting word for it. You
would call it, say, a 'professional expedient.'"
She was still not sufficiently recovered from her astonishment to be
angry. Besides, she felt herself by an unexpected turn put in the
wrong regarding Bruce.
"What I have said to you is the absolute truth," she declared. "Here
is the situation--believe me or not, just as you please. I ask you,
for the moment, to accept the proposition that my father is the victim
of a plot to steal the water-works, and then see how everything fits
in with that theory. And bear in mind, as an item worth considering,
my father's long and honourable career--never a dishonouring word
against him till this charge came." And she went on and outlined, more
fully than on yesterday before her father, the reasoning that had led
her to her conclusion. "Now, does not that sound possible?" she
demanded.
He had watched her with keen, half-closed eyes.
"H'm. You reason well," he conceded.
"That's a lawyer's business," she retorted. "So much for theory. Now
for facts." And she continued and gave him her experience of half an
hour before with Blake, the editor's boring gaze fixed on her all the
while. "Now I ask you this question: Is it likely that even a poor
water system could fail so quickly and so completely as ours has done,
unless some powerful person was secretly working to make it fail? Do
you not see it never could? We all would have seen it, but we've all
been too busy, too blind, and thought too well of our town, to suspect
such a thing."
His eyes were still boring into her.
"But how about Doctor Sherman?" he asked.
"I believe that Doctor Sherman is an innocent tool of the conspiracy,
just as my father is its innocent victim," she answered promptly.
Bruce sat with the same fixed look, and made no reply.
"I have stated my theory, and I have stated my facts," said Katherine.
"I have no court evidence, but I am going to have it. As I remarked
before, you can believe what I have said, or not believe it. It's all
the same to me." She stood up. "I wish you good afternoon."
He quickly rose.
"Hold on!" he said.
She paused at the door. He strode to and fro across the little office,
scowling with thought. Then he paused at the window and looked out.
"Well?" she demanded.
He wheeled about.
"It sounds plausible."
"Thank you," she said crisply. "I could hardly expect a man who has
been the champion of error, to admit that he has been wrong and accept
the truth. Good afternoon."
Again she reached for the door-knob.
"Wait!" he cried. There was a ring of resentment in his voice, but his
square face that had been grudgingly non-committal was now aglow with
excitement. "Of course you're right!" he exclaimed. "There's a damned
infernal conspiracy! Now what can I do to help?"
"Help?" she asked blankly.
"Help work up the evidence? Help reveal the conspiracy?"
She had not yet quite got her bearings concerning this new Bruce.
"Help? Why should you help? Oh, I see," she said coldly; "it would
make a nice sensational story for your paper."
He flushed at her cutting words, and his square jaw set.
"I suppose I might follow your example of a minute ago and say that I
don't care what you think. But I don't mind telling you a few things,
and giving you a chance to understand me if you want to. I was on a
Chicago paper, and had a big place that was growing bigger. I could
have sold the _Express_ when my uncle left it to me, and stayed there;
but I saw a chance, with a paper of my own, to try out some of my own
ideas, so I came to Westville. My idea of a newspaper is that its
function is to serve the people--make them think--bring them new
ideas--to be ever watching their interests. Of course, I want to make
money--I've got to, or go to smash; but I'd rather run a candy store
than run a sleepy, apologetic, afraid-of-a-mouse, mere money-making
sheet like the _Clarion_, that would never breathe a word against the
devil's fair name so long as he carried a half-inch ad. You called me
a yellow journalist yesterday. Well, if to tell the truth in the
hardest way I know how, to tell it so that it will hit people square
between the eyes and make 'em sit up and look around 'em--if that is
yellow then I'm certainly a yellow journalist, and I thank God
Almighty for inventing the breed!"
As Katherine listened to his snappy, vibrant words, as she looked at
his powerful, dominant figure, and into his determined face with its
flashing eyes, she felt a reluctant warmth creep through her being.
"Perhaps--I may have been mistaken about you," she said.
"Perhaps you may!" he returned grimly. "Perhaps as much as I was about
your father. And, speaking of your father, I don't mind adding
something more. Ever since I took charge of the _Express_, I've been
advocating municipal ownership of every public utility. The
water-works, which were apparently so satisfactory, were a good start;
I used them constantly as a text for working up municipal ownership
sentiment. The franchises of the Westville Traction Company expire
next year, and I had been making a campaign against renewing the
franchises and in favour of the city taking over the system and
running it. Opinion ran high in favour of the scheme. But Doctor
West's seeming dishonesty completely killed the municipal ownership
idea. That was my pet, and if I was bitter toward your father--well, I
couldn't help it. And now," he added rather brusquely, "I've explained
myself to you. To repeat your words, you can believe me or not, just
as you like."
There was no resisting the impression of the man's sincerity.
"I suppose," said Katherine, "that I should apologize for--for the
things I've called you. My only excuse is that your mistake about my
father helped cause my mistake about you."
"And I," returned he, "am not only willing to take back, publicly, in
my paper, what I have said against your father, but am willing to
print your statement about----"
"You must not print a word till I get my evidence," she put in
quickly. "Printing it prematurely might ruin my case."
"Very well. And as for what I have said about you, I take back
everything--except----" He paused; she saw disapprobation in his eyes.
"Except the plain truth I told you that being a lawyer is no work for
a woman."
"You are very dogmatic!" said she hotly.
"I am very right," he returned. "Excuse my saying it, but you appear
to have too many good qualities as a woman to spoil it all by going
out of your sphere and trying----"
"Why--why----" She stood gasping. "Do you know what your uncle told me
about you?"
"Old Hosie?" He shrugged his shoulders. "Hosie's an old fool!"
"He said that the trouble with you was that you had not been thrashed
enough as a boy. And he was right, too!"
She turned quickly to the door, but he stepped before her.
"Don't get mad because of a little truth. Remember, I want to help
you."
"I think," said she, "that we're better suited to fight each other
than to help each other. I'm not so sure I want your help."
"I'm not so sure you can avoid taking it," he retorted. "This isn't
your father's case alone. It's the city's case, too, and I've got a
right to mix in. Now do you want me?"
She looked at him a moment.
"I'll think it over. For the present, good afternoon."
He hesitated, then held out his hand. She hesitated, then took it.
After which, he opened the door for her and bowed her out.
CHAPTER IX
THE PRICE OF A MAN
When, half an hour before, Katherine walked with bowed head out of
Harrison Blake's office, Blake gazed fixedly after her for a moment,
and his face, now that he was private, deepened its sickly, ashen hue.
Then he strode feverishly up and down the room, lips twitching
nervously, hands clinching and unclinching. Then he unlocked a cabinet
against the wall, poured out a drink from a squat, black bottle,
gulped it down, and returned the bottle, forgetting to close the
cabinet. After which he dropped into his chair, gripped his face in
his two hands, and sat at his desk breathing deeply, but otherwise
without motion.
Presently his door opened.
"Mr. Brown is here to see you," announced a voice.
He slowly raised his head, and stared an instant at his stenographer
in dumfounded silence.
"Mr. Brown!" he repeated.
"Yes," said the young woman.
He continued to stare at her in sickly stupefaction.
"Shall I tell him you'll see him later?"
"Show him in," said Blake. "But, no--wait till I ring."
He passed his hand across his moist and pallid face, paced his room
again several times, then touched a button and stood stiffly erect
beside his desk. The next moment the door closed behind a short,
rather chubby man with an egg-shell dome and a circlet of grayish
hair. He had eyes that twinkled with good fellowship and a cheery,
fatherly manner.
"Well, well, Mr. Blake; mighty glad to see you!" he exclaimed as he
crossed the room.
Blake, still pale, but now with tense composure, took the hand of his
visitor.
"This is a surprise, Mr. Brown," said he. "How do you happen to be in
Westville?"
Mr. Brown disposed himself comfortably in the chair that Katherine had
so lately occupied.
"To-morrow's the trial of that Doctor West, isn't it?"
"Yes."
"Well, I thought I'd better be on the ground to see how it came out."
Blake did not respond at once; but, lips very tight together, sat
gazing at the ruddy face of his visitor.
"Everything's going all right, isn't it?" asked Mr. Brown in his
cheery voice.
"About the trial, you mean?" Blake asked with an effort.
"Of course. The letter I had from you yesterday assured me conviction
was certain. Things still stand the same way, I suppose?"
Blake's whole body was taut. His dark eyes were fixed upon Mr. Brown.
"They do not," he said quietly.
"Not stand the same way?" cried Mr. Brown, half rising from his chair.
"Why not?"
"I am afraid," replied Blake with his strained quiet, "that the
prosecution will not make out a case."
"Not make out a case?"
"To-morrow Doctor West is going to be cleared."
"Cleared? Cleared?" Mr. Brown stared. "Now what the devil--see here,
Blake, how's that going to happen?"
Blake's tense figure had leaned forward.
"It's going to happen, Mr. Brown," he burst out, with a flashing of
his dark eyes, "because I'm tired of doing your dirty work, and the
dirty work of the National Electric & Water Company!"
"You mean you're going to see he's cleared?"
"I mean I'm going to see he's cleared!"
"What--you?" ejaculated Mr. Brown, still staring. "Why, only in your
letter yesterday you were all for the plan! What's come over you?"
"If you'd gone through what I've just gone through----" Blake abruptly
checked his passionate reference to his scene with Katherine. "I say
enough when I say that I'm going to see that Doctor West is cleared.
There you have it."
No further word was spoken for a moment. The two men, leaning toward
each other, gazed straight into one another's eyes. Blake's powerful,
handsome face was blazing and defiant. The fatherly kindness had
disappeared from the other, and it was keen and hard.
"So," said Mr. Brown, cuttingly, and with an infinity of contempt, "it
appears that Mr. Harrison Blake is the owner of a white liver."
"You know that's a lie!" Blake fiercely retorted. "You know I've got
as much courage as you and your infernal company put together!"
"Oh, you have, have you? From the way you're turning tail----"
"To turn tail upon a dirty job is no cowardice!"
"But there have been plenty of dirty jobs you haven't run from. You've
put through many a one in the last two or three years on the quiet."
"But never one like this."
"You knew exactly what the job was when you made the bargain with us."
"Yes. And my stomach rose against it even then."
"Then why the devil did you tie up with us?"
"Because your big promises dazzled me! Because you took me up on a
high mountain and showed me the kingdoms of the earth!"
"Well, you then thought the kingdoms were pretty good looking
property."
"Good enough to make me forget the sort of thing I was doing. Good
enough to blind me as to how things might come out. But I see now! And
I'm through with it all!"
The chubby little man's eyes were on fire. But he was too experienced
in his trade to allow much liberty to anger.
"And that's final--that's where you stand?" he asked with comparative
calm.
"That's where I stand!" cried Blake. "I may have got started crooked,
but I'm through with this kind of business now! I'm going back to
clean ways! And you, Mr. Brown, you might as well say good-by!"
But Mr. Brown was an old campaigner. He never abandoned a battle
merely because it apparently seemed lost. He now leaned back in his
chair, slowly crossed his short legs, and thoughtfully regarded
Blake's excited features. His own countenance had changed its aspect;
it had shed its recent hardness, and had not resumed its original
cheeriness. It was eminently a reasonable face.
"Come, let's talk this whole matter over in a calm manner," he began
in a rather soothing tone. "Neither of us wants to be too hasty. There
are a few points I'd like to call your attention to, if you'll let
me."
"Go ahead with your points," said Blake. "But they won't change my
decision."
"First, let's talk about the company," Mr. Brown went on in his mild,
persuasive manner. "Frankly, you've put the company in a hole.
Believing that you would keep your end of the bargain, the company has
invested a lot of money and started a lot of projects. We bought up
practically all the stock of the Westville street car lines, when that
municipal ownership talk drove the price so low, because we expected
to get a new franchise through your smashing this municipal ownership
fallacy. We have counted on big things from the water-works when you
got hold of it for us. And we have plans on foot in several other
cities of the state, and we've been counting on the failure of
municipal ownership in Westville to have a big influence on those
cities and to help us in getting what we want. In one way and another
this deal here means an awful lot to the company. Your failing us at
the last moment means to the company----"
"I understand all that," interrupted Blake.
"Here's a point for you to consider then: Since the company has banked
so much upon your promise, since it will lose so heavily if you
repudiate your word, are you not bound in honour to stand by your
agreement?"
Blake opened his lips, but Mr. Brown raised a hand.
"Don't answer now. I just leave that for you to think upon. So much
for the company. Now for yourself. We promised you if you carried this
deal through--and you know how able we are to keep our promise!--we
promised you Grayson's seat in the Senate. And after that, with your
ability and our support, who knows where you'd stop?" Mr. Brown's
voice became yet more soft and persuasive. "Isn't that a lot to throw
overboard because of a scruple?"
"I can win all that, or part of it, by being loyal to the people,"
Blake replied doggedly, but in a rather unsteady tone.
"Come, come, Mr. Blake," said Brown reprovingly, "you know you're not
talking sense. You know that the only quick and sure way of getting
the big offices is by the help of the corporations. So you realize
what you're losing."
Blake's face had become drawn and pale. He closed his eyes, as though
to shut out the visions of the kingdoms Mr. Brown had conjured up.
"I'm ready to lose it!" he cried.
"All right, then," Mr. Brown went mildly on. "So much for what we
lose, and what you lose. Now for the next point, the action you intend
to take regarding Doctor West. Do you mind telling me just how you
propose to undo what you have done so far?"
"I haven't thought it out yet. But I can do it."
"Of course," pursued Mr. Brown blandly, "you propose to do it so that
you will appear in no way to be involved?"
Blake was thinking of Katherine's accusation. "Of course."
"Just suppose you think about that point for a minute or two."
There was a brief silence. When Mr. Brown next spoke he spoke very
slowly and accompanied each word with a gentle tap of his forefinger
on the desk.
"Can you think of a single way to clear Doctor West without
incriminating yourself?"
Blake gave a start.
"What's that?"
"Can you get Doctor West out of his trouble without showing who got
him into his trouble? Just think that over."
During the moment of silence Blake grew yet more pale.
"I'll kill the case somehow!" he breathed.
"But the case looks very strong against Doctor West. Everybody
believes him guilty. Do you think you can suddenly, within twenty-four
hours, reverse the whole situation, and not run some risk of having
suspicion shift around to you?"
Blake's eyes fell to his desk, and he sat staring whitely at it.
"And there's still another matter," pursued the gentle voice of Mr.
Brown, now grown apologetic. "I wouldn't think of mentioning it, but I
want you to have every consideration before you. I believe I never
told you that the National Electric & Water Company own the majority
stock of the Acme Filter Company."
"No, I didn't know that."
"It was because of that mutual relationship that I was able to help
out your little plan by getting Marcy to do what he did. Now if some
of our directors should feel sore at the way you've thrown us down,
they might take it into their minds to make things unpleasant for
you."
"Unpleasant? How?"
Mr. Brown's fatherly smile had now come back. It was full of concern
for Blake.
"Well, I'd hate, for instance, to see them use their pressure to
drive Mr. Marcy to make a statement."
"Mr. Marcy? A statement?"
"Because," continued Mr. Brown in his tone of fatherly concern, "after
Mr. Marcy had stated what he knows about this case, I'm afraid there
wouldn't be much chance for you to win any high places by being loyal
to the people."
For a moment after this velvet threat Blake held upon Mr. Brown an
open-lipped, ashen face. Then, without a word, he leaned his elbows
upon his desk and buried his face in his hands. For a long space there
was silence in the room. Mr. Brown's eyes, kind no longer, but keenest
of the keen, watched the form before him, timing the right second to
strike again.
At length he recrossed his legs.
"Of course it's up to you to decide, and what you say goes," he went
on in his amiable voice. "But speaking impartially, and as a friend,
it strikes me that you've gone too far in this matter to draw back. It
strikes me that the best and only thing is to go straight ahead."
Blake's head remained bowed in his hands, and he did not speak.
"And, of course," pursued Mr. Brown, "if you should decide in favour
of the original agreement, our promise still stands good--Senate and
all."
Mr. Brown said no more, but sat watching his man. Again there was a
long silence. Then Blake raised his face--and a changed face it was
indeed from that which had fallen into his hands. It bore the marks of
a mighty struggle, but it was hard and resolute--the face of a man who
has cast all hesitancy behind.
"The agreement still stands," he said.
"Then you're ready to go ahead?"
"To the very end," said Blake.
Mr. Brown nodded. "I was sure you'd decide that way," said he.
"I want to thank you for what you've said to bring me around," Blake
continued in his new incisive tone. "But it is only fair to tell you
that this was only a spell--not the first one, in fact--and that I
would have come to my senses anyhow."
"Of course, of course." It was not the policy of Mr. Brown, once the
victory was won, to discuss to whom the victory belonged.
Blake's eyes were keen and penetrating.
"And you say that the things I said a little while back will not
affect your attitude toward me in the future?"
"Those things? Why, they've already passed out of my other ear! Oh,
it's no new experience," he went on with his comforting air of
good-fellowship, "for me to run into one of our political friends when
he's sick with a bad case of conscience. They all have it now and
then, and they all pull out of it. No, don't you worry about the
future. You're O. K. with us."
"Thank you."
"And now, since everything is so pleasantly cleared up," continued Mr.
Brown, "let's go back to my first question. I suppose everything looks
all right for the trial to-morrow?"
Blake hesitated a moment, then told of Katherine's discovery. "But
it's no more than a surmise," he ended.
"Has she guessed any other of the parties implicated?" Mr. Brown asked
anxiously.
"I'm certain she has not."
"Is she likely to raise a row to-morrow?"
"I hardly see how she can."
"All the same, we'd better do something to quiet her," returned Mr.
Brown meaningly.
Blake flashed a quick look at the other.
"See here--I'll not have her touched!"
Mr. Brown's scanty eyebrows lifted.
"Hello! You seem very tender about her!"
Blake looked at him sternly a moment. Then he said stiffly: "I once
asked Miss West to marry me."
"Eh--you don't say!" exclaimed the other, amazed. "That is certainly a
queer situation for you!" He rubbed his naked dome. "And you still
feel----"
"What I feel is my own affair!" Blake cut in sharply.
"Of course, of course!" agreed Mr. Brown quickly. "I beg your pardon!"
Blake ignored the apology.
"It might be well for you not to see me openly again like this. With
Miss West watching me----"
"She might see us together, and suspect things. I understand. Needn't
worry about that. You may not see me again for a year. I'm
here--there--everywhere. But before I go, how do things look for the
election?"
"We'll carry the city easily."
"Who'll you put up for mayor?"
"Probably Kennedy, the prosecuting attorney."
"Is he safe?"
"He'll do what he's told."
"That's good. Is he strong with the people?"
"Fairly so. But the party will carry him through."
"H'm." Mr. Brown was thoughtful for a space. "This is your end of the
game, of course, and I make it a point not to interfere with another
man's work. The only time I've butted in here was when I helped you
about getting Marcy. But still, I hope you don't mind my making a
suggestion."
"Not at all."
"We've got to have the next mayor and council, you know. Simply got
to have them. We don't want to run any risk, however small. If you
think there's one chance in a thousand of Kennedy losing out, suppose
you have yourself nominated."
"Me?" exclaimed Blake.
"It strikes you as a come-down, of course. But you can do it
gracefully--in the interest of the city, and all that, you know. You
can turn it into a popular hit. Then you can resign as soon as our
business is put through."
"There may be something in it," commented Blake.
"It's only a suggestion. Just think it over, and use your own
judgment." He stood up. "Well, I guess that's all we need to say to
one another. The whole situation here is entirely in your hands. Do as
you please, and we ask no questions about how you do it. We're not
interested in methods, only in results."
He clapped Blake heartily upon the shoulder. "And it looks as though
we all were going to get results! Especially you! Why, you, with this
trial successfully over--with the election won--with the goods
delivered----"
He suddenly broke off, for the tail of his eye had sighted Blake's
open cabinet.
"Will you allow me a liberty?"
"Certainly," replied Blake, in the dark as to his visitor's purpose.
Mr. Brown crossed to the cabinet, and returned with the squat, black
bottle and two small glasses. He tilted an inch into each tumbler,
gave one to Blake, and raised the other on high. His face was
illumined with his fatherly smile.
"To our new Senator!" he said.
CHAPTER X
SUNSET AT THE SYCAMORES
When the door had closed behind the pleasant figure of Mr. Brown,
Blake pressed the button upon his desk. His stenographer appeared.
"I have some important matters to consider," he said. "Do not allow me
to be disturbed until Doctor and Mrs. Sherman come with the car."
His privacy thus secured, Blake sat at his desk, staring fixedly
before him. His brow was compressed into wrinkles, his dark face,
still showing a yellowish pallor, was hard and set. He reviewed the
entire situation, and as his consuming ambition contemplated the
glories of success, and the success after that, and the succession of
successes that led up and ever up, his every nerve was afire with an
excruciating, impatient pleasure.
For a space while Katherine had confronted him, and for a space after
she had gone, he had shrunk from this business he was carrying
through. But he had spoken truthfully to Mr. Brown when he had said
that his revulsion was but a temporary feeling, and that of his own
accord he would have come back to his original decision. He had had
such revulsions before, and each time he had swung as surely back to
his purpose as does the disturbed needle to the magnetic pole.
Westville considered Harrison Blake a happy blend of the best of his
father and mother; whereas, in point of fact, his father and his
mother lived in him with their personalities almost intact. There was
his mother, with her idealism and her high sense of honour; and his
father, with his boundless ambition and his lack of principles. In the
earlier years of Blake's manhood his mother's qualities had dominated.
He had sincerely tried to do great work for Westville, and had done
it; and the reputation he had then made, and the gratitude he had then
won, were the seed from which had grown the great esteem with which
Westville now regarded him.
But a few years back he had found that rise, through virtue, was slow
and beset with barriers. His ambition had become impatient. Now that
he was a figure of local power and importance, temptation began to
assail him with offers of rapid elevation if only he would be
complaisant. In this situation, the father in him rose into the
ascendency; he had compromised and yielded, though always managing to
keep his dubious transactions secret. And now at length ambition ruled
him--though as yet not undisturbed, for conscience sometimes rose in
unexpected revolt and gave him many a bitter battle.
When his stenographer told Blake that Doctor and Mrs. Sherman were
waiting at the curb, he descended with something more like his usual
cast of countenance. Elsie and her husband were in the tonneau, and as
Blake crossed the sidewalk to the car she stretched out a nervous hand
and gave him a worn, excited smile.
"It is so good of you to take us out to The Sycamores for over night!"
she exclaimed. "It's such a pleasure--and such a relief!"
She did not need to explain that it was a relief because the motion,
the company, the change of scene, would help crowd from her mind the
dread of to-morrow when her husband would have to take the stand
against Doctor West; she did not need to explain this, because Blake's
eyes read it all in her pale, feverish face.
Blake shook hands with Doctor Sherman, dismissed his chauffeur, and
took the wheel. They spun out of the city and down into the River
Road--the favourite drive with Westville folk--which followed the
stream in broad sweeping curves and ran through arcades of
thick-bodied, bowing willows and sycamores lofty and severe, their
foliage now a drought-crisped brown. After half an hour the car turned
through a stone gateway into a grove of beech and elm and sycamore. At
a comfortable distance apart were perhaps a dozen houses whose outer
walls were slabs of trees with the bark still on. This was The
Sycamores, a little summer resort established by a small group of the
select families of Westville.
Blake stopped the car before one of these houses--"cabins" their
owners called them, though their primitiveness was all in that outer
shell of bark. A rather tall, straight, white-haired old lady, with a
sweet nobility and strength of face, was on the little porch to greet
them. She welcomed Elsie and her husband warmly and graciously. Then
with no relaxation of her natural dignity into emotional effusion, she
embraced her son and kissed him--for to her, as to Westville, he was
the same man as five years before, and to him she had given not only
the love a mother gives her only son, but the love she had formerly
borne her husband who, during his last years, had been to her a bitter
grief. Blake returned the kiss with no less feeling. His love of his
mother was the talk of Westville; it was the one noble sentiment which
he still allowed to sway him with all its original sincerity and
might.
They had tea out upon the porch, with its view of the river twinkling
down the easy hill between the trees. Mrs. Blake, seeing how agitated
Elsie was, and under what a strain was Doctor Sherman, and guessing
the cause, deftly guided the conversation away from to-morrow's trial.
She led the talk around to the lecture room which was being added to
Doctor Sherman's church--a topic of high interest to them all, for she
was a member of the church, Blake was chairman of the building
committee, and Doctor Sherman was treasurer of the committee and
active director of the work. This manoeuvre had but moderate
success. Blake carried his part of the conversation well enough, and
Elsie talked with a feverish interest which was too great a drain upon
her meagre strength. But the stress of Doctor Sherman, which he strove
to conceal, seemed to grow greater rather than decrease.
Presently Blake excused himself and Doctor Sherman, and the two men
strolled down a winding, root-obstructed path toward the river. As
they left the cabin behind them, Blake's manner became cold and hard,
as in his office, and Doctor Sherman's agitation, which he had with
such an effort kept in hand, began to escape his control. Once he
stumbled over the twisted root which a beech thrust across their path
and would have fallen had not Blake put out a swift hand and caught
him. Yet at this neither uttered a word, and in silence they
continued walking on till they reached a retired spot upon the river's
bank.
Here Doctor Sherman sank to a seat upon a mossy, rotting log. Blake,
erect, but leaning lightly against the scaling, mottled body of a
giant sycamore, at first gave no heed to his companion. He gazed
straight ahead down the river, emaciated by the drought till the
bowlders of its bottom protruded through the surface like so many
bones--with the ranks of austere sycamores keeping their stately watch
on either bank--with the sun, blood red in the September haze,
suspended above the river's west-most reach.
Thus the pair remained for several moments. Then Blake looked slowly
about at the minister.
"I brought you down here because there is something I want to tell
you," he said calmly.
"I supposed so; go ahead," responded Doctor Sherman in a choked voice,
his eyes upon the ground.
"You seem somewhat disturbed," remarked Blake in the same cold, even
tone.
"Disturbed!" cried Doctor Sherman. "Disturbed!"
His voice told how preposterously inadequate was the word. He did not
lift his eyes, but sat silent a moment, his white hands crushing one
another, his face bent upon the rotted wood beneath his feet.
"It's that business to-morrow!" he groaned; and at that he suddenly
sprang up and confronted Blake. His fine face was wildly haggard and
was working in convulsive agony. "My God," he burst out, "when I look
back at myself as I was four years ago, and then look at myself as I
am to-day--oh, I'm sick, sick!" A hand gripped the cloth over his
breast. "Why, when I came to Westville I was on fire to serve God with
all my heart and never a compromise! On fire to preach the new gospel
that the way to make people better is to make this an easier world for
people to be better in!"
That passion-shaken figure was not a pleasant thing to look upon.
Blake turned his eyes back to the glistening river and the sun, and
steeled himself.
"Yes, I remember you preached some great sermons in those days," he
commented in his cold voice. "And what happened to you?"
"You know what happened to me!" cried the young minister with his wild
passion. "You know well enough, even if you were not in that group of
prominent members who gave me to understand that I'd either have to
change my sermons or they'd have to change their minister!"
"At least they gave you a choice," returned Blake.
"And I made the wrong choice! I was at the beginning of my career--the
church here seemed a great chance for so young a man--and I did not
want to fail at the very beginning. And so--and so--I compromised!"
"Do you suppose you are the first man that has ever made a
compromise?"
"That compromise was the direct cause of to-morrow!" the young
clergyman went on in his passionate remorse. "That compromise was the
beginning of my fall. After the prominent members took me up, favoured
me, it became easy to blink my eyes at their business methods. And
then it became easy for me to convince myself that it would be all
right for me to gamble in stocks."
"That was your great mistake," said the dry voice of the motionless
figure against the tree. "A minister has no business to fool with the
stock market."
"But what was I to do?" Doctor Sherman cried desperately. "No money
behind me--the salary of a dry goods clerk--my wife up there, whom I
love better than my own life, needing delicacies, attention, a long
stay in Colorado--what other chance, I ask you, did I have of getting
the money?"
"Well, at any rate, you should have kept your fingers off that church
building fund."
"God, don't I realize that! But with the market falling, and all the
little I had about to be swept away, what else was a half frantic man
to do but to try to save himself with any money he could put his hands
upon?"
Blake shrugged his shoulders.
"Well, if luck was against you when that church money was also swept
away, luck was certainly with you when it happened that I was the one
to discover what you had done."
"So I thought, when you offered to replace the money and cover the
whole thing up. But, God, I never dreamed you'd exact such a price in
return!"
He gripped Blake's arm and shook it. His voice was a half-muffled
shriek.
"If you wanted the water-works, if you wanted to do this to Doctor
West, why did you pick on me to bring the accusation? There are men
who would never have minded it--men without conscience and without
character!"
Blake steadfastly kept his steely gaze upon the river.
"I believe I have answered that a number of times," he replied
in his hard, even tone. "I picked you because I needed a man of
character to give the charges weight. A minister, the president of
our reform body--no one else would serve so well. And I picked you
because--pardon me, if in my directness I seem brutal--I picked you
because you were all ready to my hand; you were in a situation where
you dared not refuse me. Also I picked you, instead of a man with no
character to lose, because I knew that you, having a character to lose
and not wanting to lose it, would be less likely than any one else
ever to break down and confess. I hope my answer is sufficiently
explicit."
Doctor Sherman stared at the erect, immobile figure.
"And you still intend," he asked in a dry, husky voice, "you still
intend to force me to go upon the stand to-morrow and commit----"
"I would not use so unpleasant a word if I were you."
"But you are going to force me to do it?"
"I am not going to force you. You referred a few minutes ago to the
time when you had a choice. Well, here is another time when you have a
choice."
"Choice?" cried Doctor Sherman eagerly.
"Yes. You can testify, or not testify, as you please. Only in reaching
your decision," added the dry, emotionless voice, "I suggest that you
do not forget that I have in my possession your signed confession of
that embezzlement."
"And you call that a choice?" cried Doctor Sherman. "When, if I
refuse, you'll expose me, ruin me forever, kill Elsie's love for me!
Do you call that a choice?"
"A choice, certainly. Perhaps you are inclined not to testify. If so,
very well. But before you make your decision I desire to inform you of
one fact. You will remember that I said in the beginning that I
brought you down here to tell you something."
"Yes. What is it?"
"Merely this. That Miss West has discovered that I am behind this
affair."
"What!" Doctor Sherman fell back a step, and his face filled with
sudden terror. "Then--she knows everything?"
"She knows little, but she suspects much. For instance, since she
knows that this is a plot, she is likely to suspect that every person
in any way connected with the affair is guilty of conspiracy."
"Even--even me?"
"Even you."
"Then--you think?"
Blake turned his face sharply about upon Doctor Sherman--the first
time since the beginning of their colloquy. It was his father's
face--his father in one of his most relentless, overriding moods--the
face of a man whom nothing can stop.
"I think," said he slowly, driving each word home, "that the only
chance for people who want to come out of this affair with a clean
name is to stick the thing right through as we planned."
Doctor Sherman did not speak.
"I tell you about Miss West for two reasons. First, in order to let
you know the danger you're in. Second, in order, in case you decided
to testify, that you may be forewarned and be prepared to outface her.
I believe you understand everything now?"
"Yes," was the almost breathless response.
"Then may I be allowed to ask what you are going to do--testify, or
not testify?"
The minister's hands opened and closed. He swallowed with difficulty.
"Testify, or not testify?" Blake insisted.
"Testify," whispered Doctor Sherman.
"Just as you choose," said Blake coldly.
The minister sank back to his seat upon the mossy log, and bowed his
head into his hands. "Oh, my God!" he breathed.
There followed a silence, during which Blake gazed upon the huddled
figure. Then he turned his set face down the glittering, dwindled
stream, and, one shoulder lightly against the sycamore, he watched the
sun there at the river's end sink softly down into its golden slumber.
CHAPTER XI
THE TRIAL
Katherine's first thought, on leaving Bruce's office, was to lay her
discovery before Doctor Sherman. She was certain that with her
new-found knowledge, and with her entirely new point of view, they
could quickly discover wherein he had been duped--for she still held
him to be an unwitting tool--and thus quickly clear up the whole case.
But for reasons already known she failed to find him; and learning
that he had gone away with Blake, she well knew Blake would keep him
out of her reach until the trial was over.
In sharpest disappointment, Katherine went home. With the trial so few
hours away, with all her new discoveries buzzing chaotically in her
head, she felt the need of advising with some one about the situation.
Bruce's offer of assistance recurred to her, and she found herself
analyzing the editor again, just as she had done when she had walked
away from his office. She rebelled against him in her every fibre, yet
at the same time she felt a reluctant liking for him. He was a man
with big dreams, a rough-and-ready idealist, an idealist with sharply
marked limitations, some areas of his mind very broad, some
dogmatically narrow. Opinionated, obstinate, impulsive, of not very
sound judgment, yet dictatorial because supremely certain of his
rightness--courageous, unselfish, sincere--that was the way she now
saw the editor of the _Express_.
But he had sneered at her, sharply criticized her, and she hotly
spurned the thought of asking his aid. Instead of him, she that
evening summoned Old Hosie Hollingsworth to her house, and to the old
lawyer she told everything. Old Hosie was convinced that she was
right, and was astounded.
"And to think that the good folks of this town used to denounce me as
a worshipper of strange gods!" he ejaculated. "Gee, what'll they say
when they learn that the idol they've been wearing out their knee-caps
on has got clay feet that run clear up to his Adam's-apple!"
They decided that it would be a mistake for Katherine to try to use
her new theories and discoveries openly in defence of her father. She
had too little evidence, and any unsupported charges hurled against
Blake would leave that gentleman unharmed and would come whirling
back upon Katherine as a boomerang of popular indignation. She dared
not breathe a word against the city's favourite until she had
incontrovertible proof. Under the circumstances, the best course
seemed for her to ask for a postponement on the morrow to enable her
to work up further evidence.
"Only," warned Hosie, "you must remember that the chances are that
Blake has already slipped the proper word to Judge Kellog, and
there'll be no postponement."
"Then I'll have to depend upon tangling up that Mr. Marcy on the
stand."
"And Doctor Sherman?"
"There'll be no chance of entangling him. He'll tell a straightforward
story. How could he tell any other? Don't you see how he's been
used?--been made spectator to a skilfully laid scheme which he
honestly believes to be a genuine case of bribery?"
At parting Old Hosie held her hand a moment.
"D'you remember the prophecy I made the day you took your office--that
you would raise the dickens in this old town?"
"Yes," said Katherine.
"Well, that's coming true--as sure as plug hats don't grow on fig
trees! Only not in the way I meant then. Not as a freak. But as a
lawyer."
"Thank you." She smiled and slowly shook her head. "But I'm afraid it
won't come true to-morrow."
"Of course a prophecy is no good, unless you do your best."
"Oh, I'm going to do my best," she assured him.
The next morning, on the long awaited day, Katherine set out for the
Court House, throbbing alternately with hope and fear of the outcome.
Mixed with these was a perturbation of a very different sort--an
ever-growing stage-fright. For this last there was good reason. Trials
were a form of recreation as popular in Calloway County as
gladiatorial contests in ancient Rome, and this trial--in the lack of
a sensational murder in the county during the year--was the greatest
of the twelvemonth. Moreover, it was given added interest by the fact
that, for the first time in recorded history, Calloway County was
going to see in action that weirdest product of whirling change, a
woman lawyer.
Hub to hub about the hitch-racks of the Square were jammed buggies,
surries, spring wagons and other country equipages. The court-room was
packed an hour before the trial, and in the corridor were craning,
straining, elbowing folk who had come too late. In the open
windows--the court-room was on the ground floor--were the busts of
eager citizens whose feet were pedestaled on boxes, the sale of which
had been a harvest of small coin to neighbouring grocers; and in the
trees without youths of simian habit clung to advantageous limbs and
strained to get a view of the proceedings. Old Judge Kellog who
usually dozed on his twenty-first vertebra through testimony and
argument--once a young fledgling of a lawyer, sailing aloft in the
empyrean of his eloquence, had been brought tumbling confusedly to
earth by the snoring of the bench--attested to the unusualness of the
occasion by being upright and awake. And Bud White, the clerk, called
the court to order, not with his usual masterpiece of mumbled
unintelligibility, brought to perfection by long years of practice,
but with real words that could have been understood had only the
audience been listening.
But their attention was all fixed upon the counsel for the defence.
Katherine, in a plain white shirt waist and a black sailor, sat at a
table alone with her father. Doctor West was painfully nervous; his
long fingers were constantly twisting among themselves. Katherine was
under an even greater strain. She realized with an intenser keenness
now that the moment for action was at hand, that this was her first
case, that her father's reputation, his happiness, perhaps even his
life, were at stake; and she was well aware that all this theatre of
people, whose eyes she felt burning into her back, regarded her as
the final curiosity of nature. Behind her, with young Harper at his
side, she had caught a glimpse of Arnold Bruce, eying her critically
and sceptically she thought; and in the audience she had glimpsed the
fixed, inscrutable face of Harrison Blake.
But she clung blindly to her determination, and as Bud White sat down,
she forced herself to rise. A deep hush spread through the court-room.
She stood trembling, swallowing, voiceless, a statue of stage-fright,
wildly hating herself for her impotence. For a dizzy, agonizing moment
she saw herself a miserable failure--saw the crowd laughing at her as
they filed out.
A youthful voice, from a balcony seat in an elm tree, floated in
through the open window:
"Speak your piece, little girl, or set down."
There was a titter. She stiffened.
"Your--your Honour," she stammered, "I move a postponement in order to
allow the defence more time to prepare its case."
Judge Kellog fingered his patriarchal beard. Katherine stood hardly
breathing while she waited his momentous words. But his answer was as
Old Hosie had predicted.
"In view of the fact that the defence has already had four months in
which to prepare its case," said he, "I shall have to deny the motion
and order the trial to proceed."
Katherine sat down. The hope of deferment was gone. There remained
only to fight.
A jury was quickly chosen; Katherine felt that her case would stand as
good a chance with any one selection of twelve men as with any other.
Kennedy then stepped forward. With an air that was a blend of his
pretentious--if rather raw-boned--dignity as a coming statesman, of
extreme deference toward Katherine's sex, and of the sense of his
personal belittlement in being pitted against such a legal weakling,
he outlined to the jury what he expected to prove. After which, he
called Mr. Marcy to the stand.
The agent of the filter company gave his evidence with that degree of
shame-facedness proper to the man, turned state's witness, who has
been an accomplice in the dishonourable proceedings he is relating. It
all sounded and looked so true--so very, very true!
When Katherine came to cross-examine him, she gazed at him steadily a
moment. She knew that he was lying, and she knew that he knew that she
knew he was lying. But he met her gaze with precisely the abashed,
guilty air appropriate to his rôle.
What she considered her greatest chance was now before her. Calling up
all her wits, she put to Mr. Marcy questions that held distant, hidden
traps. But when she led him along the devious, unsuspicious path that
conducted to the trap and then suddenly shot at him the question that
should have plunged him into it, he very quietly and nimbly walked
around the pitfall. Again and again she tried to involve him, but ever
with the same result. He was abashed, ready to answer--and always
elusive. At the end she had gained nothing from him, and for a minute
stood looking silently at him in baffled exasperation.
"Have you any further questions to ask the witness?" old Judge Kellog
prompted her, with a gentle impatience.
For a moment, stung by this witness's defeat of her, she had an
impulse to turn about, point her finger at Blake in the audience, and
cry out the truth to the court-room and announce what was her real
line of defence. But she realized the uproar that would follow if she
dared attack Blake without evidence, and she controlled herself.
"That is all, Your Honour," she said.
Mr. Marcy was dismissed. The lean, frock-coated figure of Mr. Kennedy
arose.
"Doctor Sherman," he called.
Doctor Sherman seemed to experience some difficulty in making his way
up to the witness stand. When he faced about and sat down the
difficulty was explained to the crowd. He was plainly a sick man.
Whispers of sympathy ran about the court-room. Every one knew how he
had sacrificed a friend to his sense of civic duty, and everyone knew
what pain that act must have caused a man with such a high-strung
conscience.
With his hands tightly gripping the arms of his chair, his bright and
hollow eyes fastened upon the prosecutor, Doctor Sherman began in a
low voice to deliver his direct testimony. Katherine listened to him
rather mechanically at first, even with a twinge of sympathy for his
obvious distress.
But though her attention was centred here in the court-room, her brain
was subconsciously ranging swiftly over all the details of the case.
Far down in the depths of her mind the question was faintly suggesting
itself, if one witness is a guilty participant in the plot, then why
not possibly the other?--when she saw Doctor Sherman give a quick
glance in the direction where she knew sat Harrison Blake. That glance
brought the question surging up to the surface of her conscious mind,
and she sat bewildered, mentally gasping. She did not see how it could
be, she could not understand his motive--but in the sickly face of
Doctor Sherman, in his strained manner, she now read guilt.
Thrilling with an unexpected hope, Katherine rose and tried to keep
herself before the eyes of Doctor Sherman like an accusing conscience.
But he avoided her gaze, and told his story in every detail just as
when Doctor West had been first accused. When Kennedy turned him over
for cross-examination, Katherine walked up before him and looked him
straight in the eyes a full moment without speaking. He could no
longer avoid her gaze. In his eyes she read something that seemed to
her like mortal terror.
"Doctor Sherman," she said slowly, clearly, "is there nothing you
would like to add to your testimony?"
His words were a long time coming. Katherine's life hung suspended
while she waited his answer.
"Nothing," he said.
"There is no fact, no detail, that you may have omitted in your direct
testimony, that you now desire to supply?"
"Nothing."
She took a step nearer, bent on him a yet more searching gaze, and put
into her voice its all of conscience-stirring power.
"You wish to go on record then, before this court, before this
audience, before the God whom you have appealed to in your oath, as
having told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?"
He averted his eyes and was silent a moment. For that moment Blake,
back in the audience, did not breathe. To the crowd it seemed that
Doctor Sherman was searching his mind for some possible trivial
omission. To Katherine it seemed that he was in the throes of a final
struggle.
"You wish thus to go on record?" she solemnly insisted.
He looked back at her.
"I do," he breathed.
She realized now how desperate was this man's determination, how
tightly his lips were locked. But she had picked up another thread of
this tangled skein, and that made her exult with a new hope. She went
spiritedly at the cross-examination of Doctor Sherman, striving to
break him down. So sharp, so rigid, so searching were her questions,
that there were murmurs in the audience against such treatment of a
sincere, high-minded man of God. But the swiftness and cleverness of
her attack availed her nothing. Doctor Sherman, nerved by last
evening's talk beside the river, made never a slip.
From the moment she reluctantly discharged him she felt that her
chance--her chance for that day, at least--was gone. But she was there
to fight to the end, and she put her only witness, her father, upon
the stand. His defence, that he was the victim of a misunderstanding,
was smiled at by the court-room--and smiled at with apparently good
reason, since Kennedy, in anticipation of the line of defense, had
introduced the check from the Acme Filter Company which Dr. West had
turned over to the hospital board, to prove that the donation from the
filter company had been in Dr. West's hands at the time he had
received the bribe from Mr. Marcy. Dr. West testified that the letter
containing this check had not been opened until many days after his
arrest, and Katharine took the stand and swore that it was she herself
who had opened the envelope. But even while she testified she saw that
she was not believed; and she had to admit within herself that her
father's story appeared absurdly implausible, compared to the
truth-visaged falsehoods of the prosecution.
But when the evidence was all in and the time for argument was come,
Katherine called up her every resource, she remembered that truth was
on her side, and she presented the case clearly and logically, and
ended with a strong and eloquent plea for her father. As she sat down,
there was a profound hush in the court-room.
Her father squeezed her hand. Tears stood in his eyes.
"Whatever happens," he whispered, "I'm proud of my daughter."
Kennedy's address was brief and perfunctory, for the case seemed too
easy to warrant his exertion. Still stimulated by the emotion aroused
by her own speech and the sense of the righteousness of her cause,
Katherine watched the jury go out with a fluttering hope. She still
clung to hope when, after a short absence, the jury filed back in. She
rose and held her breath while they took their seats.
"You have reached a verdict, gentlemen?" asked Judge Kellog.
"We have," answered the foreman.
"What is it?"
"We find the defendant guilty."
Doctor West let out a little moan, and his head fell forward into his
arms. Katherine bent over him and whispered a word of comfort into his
ear; then rose and made a motion for a new trial. Judge Kellog denied
the motion, and haltingly asked Doctor West to step forward to the
bar. Doctor West did so, and the two old men, who had been friends
since childhood, looked at each other for a space. Then in a husky
voice Judge Kellog pronounced sentence: One thousand dollars fine and
six months in the county jail.
It was a light sentence--but enough to blacken an honest name for
life, enough to break a sensitive heart like Doctor West's.
A little later Katherine, holding an arm of her father tightly within
her own, walked with him and fat, good-natured Sheriff Nichols over to
the old brick county jail. And yet a little later, erect, eyes
straight before her, she came down the jail steps and started
homeward.
As she was passing along the Square, immediately before her Harrison
Blake came out of his stairway and started across the sidewalk to his
waiting car. Discretion urged her to
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