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.
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.
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?”