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 ofconscience. 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 andcouncil, 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.
Whenthe 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 wasbut 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 managingto 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 sycamoreslofty 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 itsview 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 manœuvre 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 neitheruttered 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 oneanother, 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 themarket 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 readyto 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.
Katherine’sfirst 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 likingfor 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 theExpress.
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 wordagainst 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 toneighbouring 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, regardedher 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 thedevious, 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 ranabout 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 inevery 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 forsome 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 arousedby 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 littlelater, 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 silence; but passion was the stronger. She stepped squarely up before him and flashed him a blazing look.
“Well—and so you think you’ve won!” she cried in a low voice.
His colour changed, but instantly he was master of himself.
“What, Katherine, you still persist in that absurd idea of yesterday.”
“Oh, drop that pretence! We know each other too well for that!” She moved nearer and, trembling from head to foot, her passionate defiance burst all bounds. “You think you have won, don’t you!” she hotly cried. “Well, let me tell you that this affair is not merely a battle that was to-day won and ended! It’s a war—and I have just begun to fight!”
And sweeping quickly past him, she walked on into Main Street and down it through the staring crowds—very erect, a red spot in either cheek, her eyes defiantly meeting every eye.
Onthe following morning Bruce had just finished an editorial on Doctor West’s trial, and was busily thumping out an editorial on the local political situation—the Republican and Democratic conventions were both but a few days off—when, lifting his scowling gaze to his window while searching for the particular word he needed, he saw Katherine passing along the sidewalk across the street. Her face was fresh, her step springy; hers was any but a downcast figure. Forgetting his editorial, he watched her turn the corner of the Square and go up the broad, worn steps of the dingy old county jail.
“Well, what do we think of her?” queried a voice at his elbow.
Bruce turned abruptly.
“Oh, it’s you, Billy. D’you see Blake?”
“Yes.” The young fellow sank loungingly into the atlas-seated chair. “He wouldn’t say anything definite. Said it was up to the convention to pick the candidates. But it’s plainKennedy’s his choice for mayor, and we’ll be playing perfectly safe in predicting Kennedy’s nomination.”
“And Peck?”
“Blind Charlie said it was too early to make any forecasts. In doubt as to whom they’d put forward for mayor.”
“Would Blake say anything about Doctor West’s conviction?”
“Sorry for Doctor West’s sake—but the case was clear—trial fair—a wholesome example to the city—and some more of that line of talk.”
Bruce grunted.
The reporter leisurely lit a cigarette.
“But how about the lady lawyer, eh?” He playfully prodded his superior’s calf with his pointed shoe. “I suppose you’ll fire me off your rotten old sheet for saying it, but I still think she made a damned good showing considering that she had no case—and considering also that she was a woman.” Again he thrust his toe into his chief. “Considering she was a woman—eh, Arn?”
“Shut up, Billy, or Iwillfire you,” growled Bruce.
“Oh, all right,” answered the other cheerfully. “After half a year of the nerve-racking social whirl of this metropolis, I think it would be sort of restful to be back in dear, little, quietChicago. But seriously now, Arn, you’ve got to admit she’s good-looking?”
“Good looks don’t make a lawyer!” retorted Bruce.
“But she’s clever—got ideas—opinions of her own, and strong ones too.”
“Perhaps.”
The reporter blew out a cloud of smoke.
“Arn, I’ve been thinking about a very interesting possibility.”
“Well, make it short, and get in there and write your story!”
“I’ve been thinking,” continued Billy meditatively, “over what an interesting situation it would make if the super-masculine editor of theExpressshould fall in love with the lady law——”
Bruce sprang up.
“Confound you, Billy! If I don’t crack that empty little——”
But Billy, tilted back in his chair, held out his cigarette case imperturbably.
“Take one, Arn. You’ll find them very soothing for the nerves.”
“You impertinent little pup, you!” He grabbed Billy by his long hair, held him a moment—then grinned affectionately and took a cigarette. “You’re the worst ever!” He dropped back into his chair. “Now shut up!”
“All right. But speaking impersonally, andwith the unemotional aloofness of a critic, you’ll have to admit that it would make a good dramatic situation.”
“Blast you!” cried the editor. “Shall I fire you, or chuck you through the window?”
“Inasmuch as our foremost scientists are uniformly agreed that certain unpleasant results may eventuate when the force of gravitation brings a human organism into sudden and severe juxtaposition with a cement sidewalk, I humbly suggest that you fire me. Besides, that act will automatically avenge me, for then your yellow old newspaper will go plum to blazes!”
“For God’s sake, Billy, get out of here and let me work!”
“But, seriously, Arn—I really am serious now”—and all the mischief had gone out of the reporter’s eyes—“that Miss West would have put up a stunning fight if she had had any sort of a case. But she had nothing to fight with. They certainly had the goods on her old man!”
Bruce turned from his machine and regarded the reporter thoughtfully. Then he crossed and closed the door which was slightly ajar, and again fixed his eyes searchingly on young Harper.
“Billy,” he said in a low, impressive voice, “can you keep a big secret?”
At Bruce’s searching, thoughtful gaze a look of humility crept into Billy’s face.
“Oh, I know you’ve got every right to doubt me,” he acknowledged. “I certainly did leak a lot at the mouth in Chicago when I was boozing so much. But you know since you pulled me out of that wild bunch I was drinking my way to hell with and brought me down here, I’ve been screwed tight as a board to the water-wagon!”
“I know it, Billy. I shouldn’t for an instant——”
“And, Arn,” interrupted Billy, putting his arm contritely across the other’s shoulder, “even though I do joke at you a little—simply can’t help it—you know how eternally grateful I am to you! You’re giving me the chance of my life to make a man of myself. People in this town don’t half appreciate you; they don’t know you for what I know you—the best fellow that ever happened!”
“There, there! Cut it out, cut it out!” said Bruce gruffly, gripping the other’s hand.
“That’s always the way,” said Billy, resentfully. “Your only fault is that you are so infernally bull-headed that a fellow can’t even thank you.”
“You’re thanking me the right way when you keep yourself bolted fast to the water-cart. What I started out to tell you, what I want you to keep secret, is this: They put the wrong man in jail yesterday.”
“What!” ejaculated Billy, springing up.
“I tell you this much because I want you to keep your eye on the story. Hell’s likely to break loose there any time, and I want you to be ready to handle it in case I should have to be off the job.”
“Good God, old man!” Billy stared at him. “What’s behind all this? If Doctor West’s the wrong man, then who’s the right one?”
“I can’t tell you any more now.”
“But how did you find this out?”
“I said I couldn’t tell you any more.”
A knowing look came slowly into Billy’s face.
“H’m. So that was what Miss West called here about day before yesterday.”
“Get in there and write your story,” said Bruce shortly, and again sat down before his typewriter.
Billy stood rubbing his head dazedly for a long space, then he slowly moved to the door. He opened it and paused.
“Oh, I say, Arn,” he remarked in an innocent tone.
“Yes?”
“After all,” he drawled, “it would make an interesting dramatic situation, wouldn’t it?”
Bruce whirled about and threw a statesman’s year book, but young Harper was already on the safe side of the door; and the incorrigible Billywas saved from any further acts of reprisal being attempted upon his person by the ringing of Bruce’s telephone.
Bruce picked up the instrument.
“Hello. Who’s this?” he demanded.
“Mr. Peck,” was the answer.
“What! You don’t mean ‘Blind Charlie’?”
“Yes. I called up to see if you could come over to the hotel for a little talk about politics.”
“If you want to talk to me you know where to find me! Good-by!”
“Wait! Wait! What time will you be in?”
“The paper goes to press at two-thirty. Any time after then.”
“I’ll drop around before three.”
Four hours later Bruce was glancing through that afternoon’s paper, damp from the press, when there entered his office a stout, half-bald man of sixty-five, with loose, wrinkled, pouchy skin, drooping nose, and a mouth—stained faintly brown at its corners—whose cunning was not entirely masked by a good-natured smile. One eye had a shrewd and beady brightness; the gray film over the other announced it without sight. This was “Blind Charlie” Peck, the king of Calloway County politics until Blake had hurled him from his throne.
Bruce greeted the fallen monarch curtly and asked him to sit down. Bruce did not resumehis seat, but half leaned against his desk and eyed Blind Charlie with open disfavour.
The old man settled himself and smiled his good-natured smile at the editor.
“Well, Mr. Bruce, this is mighty dry weather we’re having.”
“Yes. What do you want?”
“Well—well—” said the old man, a little taken aback, “you certainly do jump into the middle of things.”
“I’ve found that the quickest way to get there,” retorted Bruce. “You know there’s no use in you and me wasting any words. You know well enough what I think of you.”
“I ought to,” returned Blind Charlie, dryly, but with good humour. “You’ve said it often enough.”
“Well, that there may be no mistake about it, I’ll say it once more. You’re a good-natured, good-hearted, cunning, unprincipled, hardened old rascal of a politician. Now if you don’t want to say what you came here to say, the same route that brings you in here takes you out.”
“Come, come,” said the old man, soothingly. “I think you have said a lot of harder things than were strictly necessary—especially since we both belong to the same party.”
“That’s one reason I’ve said them. You’ve been running the party most of your life—you’restill running it—and see what you’ve made of it. Every decent member is ashamed of it! It stinks all through the state!”
Blind Charlie’s face did not lose its smile of imperturbable good nature. It was a tradition of Calloway County that he had never lost his temper.
“You’re a very young man, Mr. Bruce,” said the old politician, “and young blood loves strong language. But suppose we get away from personalities, and get away from the party’s past and talk about its present and its future.”
“I don’t see that it has any present or future to talk about, with you at the helm.”
“Oh, come now! Granted that my ways haven’t been the best for the party. Granted that you don’t like me. Is that any reason we shouldn’t at least talk things over? Now, I admit we don’t stand the shadow of a ghost’s show this election unless we make some changes. You represent the element in the party that has talked most for changes, and I have come to get your views.”
Bruce studied the loose-skinned, flabby face, wondering what was going on behind that old mask.
“What are your own views?” he demanded shortly.
Blind Charlie had taken out a plug of tobacco and with a jack-knife had cut off a thin slice.This, held between thumb and knife-blade, he now slowly transferred to his mouth.
“Perhaps they’re nearer your own than you think. I see, too, that the old ways won’t serve us now. Blake will put up a good ticket. I hear Kennedy is to be his mayor. The whole ticket will be men who’ll be respectable, but they’ll see that Blake gets what he wants. Isn’t that so?”
Bruce thought suddenly of Blake’s scheme to capture the water-works.
“Very likely,” he admitted.
“Now between ourselves,” the old man went on confidingly, “we know that Blake has been getting what he wants for years—of course in a quiet, moderate way. Did you ever think of this, how the people here call me a ‘boss’ but never think of Blake as one? Blake’s an ‘eminent citizen.’ When the fact is, he’s a stronger, cleverer boss than I ever was. My way is the old way; it’s mostly out of date. Blake’s way is the new way. He’s found out that the best method to get the people is to be clean, or to seem clean. If I wanted a thing I used to go out and grab it. If Blake wants a thing he makes it appear that he’s willing to go to considerable personal trouble to take it in order to do a favour to the city, and the people fall all over themselves to give it to him. He’s got the churches lined up as solid behind himas I used to have the saloons. Now I know we can’t beat Blake with the kind of a ticket our party has been putting up. And I know we can’t beat Blake with a respectable ticket, for between our respectables——”
“Charlie Peck’s respectables!” Bruce interrupted ironically.
“And Blake’s respectables,” the old man continued imperturbably, “the people will choose Blake’s. Are my conclusions right so far?”
“Couldn’t be more right. What next?”
“As I figure it out, our only chance, and that a bare fighting chance, is to put up men who are not only irreproachable, but who are radicals and fighters. We’ve got to do something new, big, sensational, or we’re lost.”
“Well?” said Bruce.
“I was thinking,” said Blind Charlie, “that our best move would be to run you for mayor.”
“Me?” cried Bruce, starting forward.
“Yes. You’ve got ideas. And you’re a fighter.”
Bruce scrutinized the old face, all suspicion.
“See here, Charlie,” he said abruptly, “what the hell’s your game?”
“My game?”
“Oh, come! Don’t expect me to believe in you when you pose as a reformer!”
“See here, Bruce,” said the other a little sharply, “you’ve called me about every dirtyword lying around handy in the Middle West. But you never called me a hypocrite.”
“No.”
“Well, I’m not coming to you now pretending that I’ve been holding a little private revival, and that I’ve been washed in the blood of the Lamb.”
“Then what’s behind this? What’s in it for you?”
“I’ll tell you—though of course I can’t make you believe me if you don’t want to. I’m getting pretty old—I’m sixty-seven. I may not live till another campaign. I’d like to see the party win once more before I go. That’s one thing. Another is, I’ve got it in for Blake, and want to see him licked. I can’t do either in my way. I can possibly do both in your way. Mere personal satisfaction like this would have been mighty little for me to have got out of an election in the old days. But it’s better than nothing at all”—smiling good-naturedly—“even to a cunning, unprincipled, hardened old rascal of a politician.”
“But what’s the string tied to this offer?”
“None. You can name the ticket, write the platform——”
“It would be a radical one!” warned Bruce.
“It would have to be radical. Our only chance is in creating a sensation.”
“And if elected?”
“You shall make every appointment without let or hindrance. I know I’d be a fool to try to bind you in any way.”
Bruce was silent a long time, studying the wrinkled old face.
“Well, what do you say?” queried Blind Charlie.
“Frankly, I don’t like being mixed up with you.”
“But you believe in using existing party machinery, don’t you? You’ve said so in theExpress.”
“Yes. But I also have said that I don’t believe in using it the way you have.”
“Well, here’s your chance to take it and use it your own way.”
“But what show would I stand? Feeling in town is running strong against radical ideas.”
“I know, I know. But you are a fighter, and with your energy you might turn the current. Besides, something big may happen before election.”
That same thought had been pulsing excitedly in Bruce’s brain these last few minutes. If Katherine could only get her evidence!
Bruce moved to the window and looked out so that that keen one eye of Blind Charlie might not perceive the exultation he could no longer keep out of his face. Bruce did not see thetarnished dome of the Court House—nor the grove of broad elms, shrivelled and dusty—nor the enclosing quadrangle of somnolent, drooping farm horses. He was seeing this town shaken as by an explosion. He was seeing cataclysmic battle, with Blind Charlie become a nonentity, Blake completely annihilated, and himself victorious at the front. And, dream of his dreams! he was seeing himself free to reshape Westville upon his own ideals.
“Well, what do you say?” asked Blind Charlie.
Controlling himself, Bruce turned about.
“I accept, upon the conditions you have named. But at the first sign of an attempt to limit those conditions, I throw the whole business overboard.”
“There will be no such attempt, so we can consider the matter settled.” Blind Charlie held out his hand, which Bruce, with some hesitation, accepted. “I congratulate you, I congratulate myself, I congratulate the party. With you as leader, I think we’ve all got a fighting chance to win.”
They discussed details of Bruce’s candidacy, they discussed the convention; and a little later Blind Charlie departed. Bruce, fists deep in trousers pockets, paced up and down his little office, or sat far down in his chair gazing at nothing, in excited, searching thought. Billy Harper and other members of the staff, whocame in to him with questions, were answered absently with monosyllables. At length, when the Court House clock droned the hour of five through the hot, burnt-out air, Bruce washed his hands and brawny fore-arms at the old iron sink in the rear of the reporter’s room, put on his coat, and strode up Main Street. But instead of following his habit and turning off into Station Avenue, where was situated the house in which he and Old Hosie ate and slept and had their quarrels, he continued his way and turned into an avenue beyond—on his face the flush of defiant firmness of the bold man who finds himself doing the exact thing he had sworn that he would never do.
He swung open the gate of the West yard, and with firm step went up to the house and rang the bell. When the screen swung open Katherine herself was in the doorway—looking rather excited, trimly dressed, on her head a little hat wound with a veil.
“May I come in?” he asked shortly.
“Why, certainly,” and she stepped aside.
“I didn’t know.”
He bowed and entered the parlour and stood rather stiffly in the centre of the room.
“My reason for daring to violate your prohibition of three days ago, and enter this house, is that I have something to tell you that may prove to have some bearing upon your father’s case.”
“Please sit down. When I apologized to you I considered the apology as equivalent to removing all signs against trespassing.”
They sat down, and for a moment they gazed at each other, still feeling themselves antagonists, though allies—she smilingly at her ease, he grimly serious.
“Now, please, what is it?” she asked.
Bruce, speaking reservedly at first, told her of Blind Charlie’s offer. As he spoke he warmed up and was quite excited when he ended. “And now,” he cried, “don’t you see how this works in with the fight to clear your father? It’s a great opportunity—haven’t thought out yet just how we can use it—that will depend upon developments, perhaps—but it’s a great opportunity! We’ll sweep Blake completely and utterly from power, reinstate your father in position and honour, and make Westville the finest city of the Middle West!”
But she did not seem to be fired by the torch of his enthusiasm. In fact, there was a thoughtful, questioning look upon her face.
“Well, what do you think of it?” he demanded.
“I have been given to understand,” she said pleasantly, “that it is unwomanly to have opinions upon politics.”
He winced.
“This is hardly the time for sarcasm. What do you think?”
“If you want my frank opinion, I am rather inclined to beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” she replied.
“What do you mean?”
“When a political boss, and a boss notoriously corrupt, offers an office to a good man, I think the good man should be very, very suspicious.”
“You think Peck has some secret corrupt purpose? I’ve been scrutinizing the offer for two hours. I know the ins and outs of the local political situation from A to Z. I know all Peck’s tricks. But I have not found the least trace of a hidden motive.”
“Perhaps you haven’t found it because it’s hidden so shrewdly, so deeply, that it can’t be seen.”
“I haven’t found it because it’s not there to find!” retorted Bruce. “Peck’s motive is just what he told me; I’m convinced he was telling the truth. It’s a plain case, and not an uncommon case, of a politician preferring the chance of victory with a good ticket, to certain defeat with a ticket more to his liking.”
“I judge, then, that you are inclined to accept.”
“I have accepted,” said Bruce.
“I hope it will turn out better than worst suspicion might make us fear.”
“Oh, it will!” he declared. “And mark me,it’s going to turn out a far bigger thing for your father than you seem to realize.”
“I hope that more fervently than do you!”
“I suppose you are going to keep up your fight for your father?”
“I expect to do what I can,” she answered calmly.
“What are you going to do?”
She smiled sweetly, apologetically.
“You forget only one day has passed since the trial. You can hardly expect a woman’s mind to lay new plans as quickly as a man’s.”
Bruce looked at her sharply, as though there might be irony in this; but her face was without guile. She glanced at her watch.
“Pardon me,” he said, noticing this action and standing up. “You have your hat on; you were going out?”
“Yes. And I’m afraid I must ask you to excuse me.” She gave him her hand. “I hope you don’t mind my saying it, but if I were you I’d keep all the eyes I’ve got on Mr. Peck.”
“Oh, I’ll not let him fool me!” he answered confidently.
As he walked out of the yard he was somewhat surprised to see the ancient equipage of Mr. Huggins waiting beside the curb. And he was rather more surprised when a few minutes later, as he neared his home, Mr. Huggins drove past him toward the station, with Katherine in theseat behind him. In response to her possessed little nod he amazedly lifted his hat. “Now what the devil is she up to?” he ejaculated, and stared after her till the old carriage turned in beside the station platform. As he reached his gate the eastbound Limited came roaring into the station. The truth dawned upon him. “By God,” he cried, “if she isn’t going back to New York!”