Kitobni o'qish: «Tutt and Mr. Tutt»

The Human Element

Although men flatter themselves with their great actions, they are not so often the result of great design as of chance.—LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.

"He says he killed him, and that's all there is about it!" said Tutt to Mr. Tutt. "What are you going to do with a fellow like that?" The junior partner of the celebrated firm of Tutt & Tutt, attorneys and counselors at law, thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his yellow checked breeches and, balancing himself upon the heels of his patent-leather boots, gazed in a distressed, respectfully inquiring manner at his distinguished associate.

"Yes," he repeated plaintively. "He don't make any bones about it at all. 'Sure, I killed him!' says he. 'And I'd kill him again, the –!' I prefer not to quote his exact language. I've just come from the Tombs and had quite a talk with Serafino in the counsel room, with a gum-chewing keeper sitting in the corner watching me for fear I'd slip his prisoner a saw file or a shotgun or a barrel of poison. I'm all in! These murder cases drive me to drink, Mr. Tutt. I don't mind grand larceny, forgery, assault or even manslaughter—but murder gets my goat! And when you have a crazy Italian for a client who says he's glad he did it and would like to do it again—please excuse me! It isn't law; it's suicide!"

He drew out a silk handkerchief ornamented with the colors of the Allies, and wiped his forehead despairingly.

"Oh," remarked Mr. Tutt with entire good nature. "He's glad he did it and he's quite willing to be hanged!"

"That's it in a nutshell!" replied Tutt.

The senior partner of Tutt & Tutt ran his bony fingers through the lank gray locks over his left eye and tilted ceilingward the stogy between his thin lips. Then he leaned back in his antique swivel chair, locked his hands behind his head, elevated his long legs luxuriously, and crossed his feet upon the fourth volume of the American and English Encyclopedia of Law, which lay open upon the desk at Champerty and Maintenance. Even in this inelegant and relaxed posture he somehow managed to maintain the air of picturesque dignity which always made his tall, ungainly figure noticeable in any courtroom. Indubitably Mr. Ephraim Tutt suggested a past generation, the suggestion being accentuated by a slight pedantry of diction a trifle out of character with the rushing age in which he saw fit to practise his time-honored profession. "Cheer up, Tutt," said he, pushing a box of stogies toward his partner with the toe of his congress boot. "Have a weed?"

Since in the office of Tutt & Tutt such an invitation like those of royalty, was equivalent to a command, Tutt acquiesced.

"Thank you, Mr. Tutt," said Tutt, looking about vaguely for a match.

"That conscienceless brat of a Willie steals 'em all," growled Mr. Tutt. "Ring the bell."

Tutt obeyed. He was a short, brisk little man with a pronounced abdominal convexity, and he maintained toward his superior, though but a few years his junior, a mingled attitude of awe, admiration and affection such as a dickey bird might adopt toward a distinguished owl.

This attitude was shared by the entire office force. Inside the ground glass of the outer door Ephraim Tutt was king. To Tutt the opinion of Mr. Tutt upon any subject whatsoever was law, even if the courts might have held to the contrary. To Tutt he was the eternal fount of wisdom, culture and morality. Yet until Mr. Tutt finally elucidated his views Tutt did not hesitate to hold conditional if temporary opinions of his own. Briefly their relations were symbolized by the circumstance that while Tutt always addressed his senior partner as "Mr. Tutt," the latter accosted him simply as "Tutt." In a word there was only one Mr. Tutt in the firm of Tutt & Tutt.

But so far as that went there was only one Tutt. On the theory that a lily cannot be painted, the estate of one seemingly was as dignified as that of the other. At any rate there never was and never had been any confusion or ambiguity arising out of the matter since the day, twenty years before, when Tutt had visited Mr. Tutt's law office in search of employment. Mr. Tutt was just rising into fame as a police-court lawyer. Tutt had only recently been admitted to the bar, having abandoned his native city of Bangor, Maine, for the metropolis.

"And may I ask why you should come to me?" Mr. Tutt had demanded severely from behind the stogy, which even at that early date had been as much a part of his facial anatomy as his long ruminative nose. "Why the devil should you come to me? I am nobody, sir—nobody! In this great city certainly there are thousands far more qualified than I to further your professional and financial advancement."

"Because," answered the inspired Tutt with modesty, "I feel that with you I should be associated with a good name."

That had settled the matter. They bore no relationship to one another, but they were the only Tutts in the city and there seemed to be a certain propriety in their hanging together. Neither had regretted it for a moment, and as the years passed they became indispensable to each other. They were the necessary component parts of a harmonious legal whole. Mr. Tutt was the brains and the voice, while Tutt was the eyes and legs of a combination that at intervals—rare ones, it must be confessed—made the law tremble, sometimes in fear and more often with joy.

At first, speaking figuratively, Tutt merely carried Mr. Tutt's bag—rode on his coat tails, as it were; but as time went on his activity, ingenuity and industry made him indispensable and led to a junior partnership. Tutt prepared the cases for Mr. Tutt to try. Both were well versed in the law if they were not profound lawyers, but as the origin of the firm was humble, their practise was of a miscellaneous character.

"Never turn down a case," was Tutt's motto.

"Our duty as sworn officers of the judicial branch of the Government renders it incumbent upon us to perform whatever services our clients' exigencies demand," was Mr. Tutt's way of putting it.

In the end it amounted to exactly the same thing. As a result, in addition to their own clientele, other members of the bar who found themselves encumbered with matters which for one reason or another they preferred not to handle formed the habit of turning them over to Tutt & Tutt. A never-ending stream of peculiar cases flowed through the office, each leaving behind it some residuum of golden dust, however small. The stately or, as an unkind observer might have put it, the ramshackly form of the senior partner was a constant figure in all the courts, from that of the coroner on the one hand to the appellate tribunals upon the other. It was immaterial to him what the case was about—whether it dealt with the "next eventual estate" or the damages for a dog bite—so long as he was paid and Tutt prepared it. Hence Tutt & Tutt prospered. And as the law, like any other profession requires jacks-of-all-trades, the firm acquired a certain peculiar professional standing of its own, and enjoyed the good will of the bar as a whole.

They had the reputation of being sound lawyers if not overafflicted with a sense of professional dignity, whose word was better than their bond, yet who, faithful to their clients' interests knew no mercy and gave no quarter. They took and pressed cases which other lawyers dared not touch lest they should be defiled—and nobody seemed to think any the less of them for so doing. They raised points that made the refinements of the ancient schoolmen seem blunt in comparison. No respecters of persons, they harried the rich and taunted the powerful, and would have as soon jailed a bishop or a judge as a pickpocket if he deserved it. Between them they knew more kinds of law than most of their professional brethren, and as Mr. Tutt was a bookworm and a seeker after legal and other lore their dusty old library was full of hidden treasures, which on frequent occasions were unearthed to entertain the jury or delight the bench. They were loyal friends, fearsome enemies, high chargers, and maintained their unique position in spite of the fact that at one time or another they had run close to the shadowy line which divides the ethical from that which is not. Yet Mr. Tutt had brought disbarment proceedings against many lawyers in his time and—what is more—had them disbarred.

"Leave old Tutt alone," was held sage advice, and when other lawyers desired to entertain the judiciary they were apt to invite Mr. Tutt to be of the party. And Tutt gloried in the glories of Mr. Tutt.

"That's it!" repeated Tutt as he lit his stogy, which flared up like a burning bush, the cub of a Willie having foraged successfully in the outer office for a match. "He's willing to be hanged or damned or anything else just for the sake of putting a bullet through the other fellow!"

"What was the name of the unfortunate deceased?"

"Tomasso Crocedoro—a barber."

"That is almost a defense in itself," mused Mr. Tutt. "Anyhow, if I've got to defend Angelo for shooting Tomasso you might as well give me a short scenario of the melodrama. By the way, are we retained or assigned by the court?"

"Assigned," chirped Tutt.

"So that all we'll get out of it is about enough to keep me in stogies for a couple of months!"

"And—if he's convicted, as of course he will be—a good chance of losing our reputation as successful trial counsel. Why not beg off?"

"Let me hear the story first," answered Mr. Tutt. "Angelo sounds like a good sport. I have a mild affection for him already."

He reached into the lower compartment of his desk and lifted out a tumbler and a bottle of malt extract, which he placed carefully at his elbow. Then he leaned back again expectantly.

"It is a simple and naive story," began Tutt, seating himself in the chair reserved for paying clients—that is to say, one which did not have the two front legs sawed off an inch or so in order to make lingering uncomfortable. "A plain, unvarnished tale. Our client is one who makes an honest living by blacking shoes near the entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge. He is one of several hundred original Tonys who conduct shoe-shining emporiums."

"Emporia," corrected his partner, pouring out a tumbler of malt extract.

"He formed an attachment for a certain young lady," went on Tutt, undisturbed, "who had previously had some sort of love affair with Crocedoro, as a result of which her social standing had become slightly impaired. In a word Tomasso jilted her. Angelo saw, pitied and loved her, took her for better or for worse, and married her."

"For which," interjected Mr. Tutt, "he is entitled to everyone's respect."

"Quite so!" agreed Tutt. "Now Tomasso, though not willing to marry the girl himself, seems to have resented the idea of having anyone else do so, and accordingly seized every opportunity which presented itself to twit Angelo about the matter."

"Dog in the manger, so to speak," nodded Mr. Tutt.

"He not only jeered at Angelo for marrying Rosalina but he began to hang about his discarded mistress again and scoff at her choice of a husband. But Rosalina gave him the cold shoulder, with the result that he became more and more insulting to Angelo. Finally one day our client made up his mind not to stand it any longer, secured a revolver, sought out Tomasso in his barber shop and put a bullet through his head. Now however much you may sympathize with Angelo as a man and a husband there isn't the slightest doubt that he killed Tomasso with every kind of deliberation and premeditation."

"If the case is as you say," replied Mr. Tutt, replacing the bottle and tumbler within the lower drawer and flicking a stogy ash from his waistcoat, "the honorable justice who handed it to us is no friend of ours."

"He isn't," assented his partner. "It was Babson and he hates Italians. Moreover, he stated in open court that he proposed to try the case himself next Monday and that we must be ready without fail."

"So Babson did that to us!" growled Mr. Tutt. "Just like him. He'll pack the jury and charge our innocent Angelo into the middle of hades."

"And O'Brien is the assistant district attorney in charge of the prosecution," mildly added Tutt. "But what can we do? We're assigned, we've got a guilty client, and we've got to defend him."

"Have you set Bonnie Doon looking up witnesses?" asked Mr. Tutt. "I thought I saw him outside during the forenoon."

"Yes," replied Tutt. "But Bonnie says it's the toughest case he ever had to handle in which to find any witnesses for the defense. There aren't any. Besides, the girl bought the gun and gave it to Angelo the same day."

"How do you know that?" demanded Mr. Tutt, frowning.

"Because she told me so herself," said Tutt. "She's outside if you want to see her."

"I might as well give her what you call 'the once over,'" replied the senior partner.

Tutt retired and presently returned half leading, half pushing a shrinking young Italian woman, shabbily dressed but with the features of one of Raphael's madonnas. She wore no hat and her hands and finger nails were far from clean, but from the folds of her black shawl her neck rose like a column of slightly discolored Carrara marble, upon which her head with its coils of heavy hair was poised with the grace of a sulky empress.

"Come in, my child, and sit down," said Mr. Tutt kindly. "No, not in that one; in that one." He indicated the chair previously occupied by his junior. "You can leave us, Tutt. I want to talk to this young lady alone."

The girl sat sullenly with averted face, showing in her attitude her instinctive feeling that all officers of the law, no matter upon which side they were supposed to be, were one and all engaged in a mysterious conspiracy of which she and her unfortunate Angelo were the victims. A few words from the old lawyer and she began to feel more confidence, however. No one, in fact, could help but realize at first glance Mr. Tutt's warmth of heart. The lines of his sunken cheeks if left to themselves automatically tended to draw together into a whimsical smile, and it required a positive act of will upon his part to adopt the stern and relentless look with which he was wont to glower down upon some unfortunate witness in cross-examination.

Inside Mr. Tutt was a benign and rather mellow old fellow, with a dry sense of humor and a very keen knowledge of his fellow men. He made a good deal of money, but not having any wife or child upon which to lavish it he spent it all either on books or surreptitiously in quixotic gifts to friends or strangers whom he either secretly admired or whom he believed to be in need of money. There were vague traditions in the office of presents of bizarre and quite impossible clothes made to office boys and stenographers; of ex-convicts reoutfitted and sent rejoicing to foreign parts; of tramps gorged to repletion and then pumped dry of their adventures in Mr. Tutt's comfortable, dingy old library; of a fur coat suddenly clapped upon the rounded shoulders of old Scraggs, the antiquated scrivener in the accountant's cage in the outer office, whose alcoholic career, his employer alleged, was marked by a trail of empty rum kegs, each one flying the white flag of surrender.

And yet old Ephraim Tutt could on occasion be cold as chiseled steel, and as hard. Any appeal from a child, a woman or an outcast always met with his ready response; but for the rich, successful and those in power he seemed to entertain a deep and enduring grudge. He would burn the midnight oil with equal zest to block a crooked deal on the part of a wealthy corporation or to devise a means to extricate some no less crooked rascal from the clutches of the law, provided that the rascal seemed the victim of hard luck, inheritance or environment. His weather-beaten conscience was as elastic as his heart. Indeed when under the expansive influence of a sufficient quantity of malt extract or ancient brandy from the cellaret on his library desk he had sometimes been heard to enunciate the theory that there was very little difference between the people in jail and those who were not.

He would work weeks without compensation to argue the case of some guilty rogue before the Court of Appeals, in order, as he said, to "settle the law," when his only real object was to get the miserable fellow out of jail and send him back to his wife and children. He went through life with a twinkling eye and a quizzical smile, and when he did wrong he did it—if such a thing is possible—in a way to make people better. He was a dangerous adversary and judges were afraid of him, not because he ever tricked or deceived them but because of the audacity and novelty of his arguments which left them speechless. He had the assurance that usually comes with age and with a lifelong knowledge of human nature, yet apparently he had always been possessed of it.

Once a judge having assigned him to look out for the interests of a lawyerless prisoner suggested that he take his new client into the adjoining jury room and give him the best advice he could. Mr. Tutt was gone so long that the judge became weary, and to find out what had become of him sent an officer, who found the lawyer reading a newspaper beside an open window, but no sign of the prisoner. In great excitement the officer reported the situation to the judge, who ordered Mr. Tutt to the bar.

"What has become of the prisoner?" demanded His Honor.

"I do not know," replied the lawyer calmly. "The window was open and I suspect that he used it as a means of exit."

"Are you not aware that you are a party to an escape—a crime?" hotly challenged the judge.

"I most respectfully deny the charge," returned Mr. Tutt.

"I told you to take the prisoner into that room and give him the best advice you could."

"I did!" interjected the lawyer.

"Ah!" exclaimed the judge. "You admit it! What advice did you give him?"

"The law does not permit me to state that," answered Mr. Tutt in his most dignified tones. "That is a privileged communication from the inviolate obligation to preserve which only my client can release me—I cannot betray a sacred trust. Yet I might quote Cervantes and remind Your Honor that 'Fortune leaves always some door open to come at a remedy!'"

Now as he gazed at the tear-stained cheeks of the girl-wife whose husband had committed murder in defense of her self-respect, he vowed that so far as he was able he would fight to save him. The more desperate the case the more desperate her need of him—the greater the duty and the greater his honor if successful.

"Believe that I am your friend, my dear!" he assured her. "You and I must work together to set Angelo free."

"It's no use," she returned less defiantly. "He done it. He won't deny it."

"But he is entitled to his defense," urged Mr. Tutt quietly.

"He won't make no defense."

"We must make one for him."

"There ain't none. He just went and killed him."

Mr. Tutt shrugged his shoulders.

"There is always a defense," he answered with conviction. "Anyhow we can't let him be convicted without making an effort. Will they be able to prove where he got the pistol?"

"He didn't get the pistol," retorted the girl with a glint in her black eyes. "I got it. I'd ha' shot him myself if he hadn't. I said I was goin' to, but he wouldn't let me."

"Dear, dear!" sighed Mr. Tutt. "What a case! Both of you trying to see which could get hanged first!"

The inevitable day of Angelo's trial came. Upon the bench the Honorable Mr. Justice Babson glowered down upon the cowering defendant flanked by his distinguished counsel, Tutt & Tutt, and upon the two hundred good and true talesmen who, "all other business laid aside," had been dragged from the comfort of their homes and the important affairs of their various livelihoods to pass upon the merits of the issue duly joined between The People of the State of New York and Angelo Serafino, charged with murder.

One by one as his name was called each took his seat in the witness chair upon the voir dire and perjured himself like a gentleman in order to escape from service, shyly confessing to an ineradicable prejudice against the entire Italian race and this defendant in particular, and to an antipathy against capital punishment which, so each unhesitatingly averred, would render him utterly incapable of satisfactorily performing his functions if selected as a juryman. Hardly one, however, but was routed by the Machiavellian Babson. Hardly one, however ingenious his excuse—whether about to be married or immediately become a father, whether engaged in a business deal involving millions which required his instant and personal attention whether in the last stages of illness or obligated to be present at the bedside of a dying wife—but was browbeaten into helplessness and ordered back to take his place amidst the waiting throng of recalcitrant citizens so disinclined to do their part in elevating that system of trial by jury the failure of which at other times they so loudly condemned.

This trifling preliminary having been concluded, the few jurymen who had managed to wriggle through the judicial sieve were allowed to withdraw, the balance of the calendar was adjourned, those spectators who were standing up were ordered to sit down and those already sitting down were ordered to sit somewhere else, the prisoners in the rear of the room were sent back to the Tombs to await their fate upon some later day, the reporters gathered rapaciously about the table just behind the defendant, a corpulent Ganymede in the person of an aged court officer bore tremblingly an opaque glass of yellow drinking water to the bench, O'Brien the prosecutor blew his nose with a fanfare of trumpets, Mr. Tutt smiled an ingratiating smile which seemed to clasp the whole world to his bosom—and the real battle commenced; a game in which every card in the pack had been stacked against the prisoner by an unscrupulous pair of officials whose only aim was to maintain their record of convictions of "murder in the first" and who laid their plans with ingenuity and carried them out with skill and enthusiasm to habitual success.

They were a grand little pair of convictors, were Babson and O'Brien, and woe unto that man who was brought before them. It was even alleged by the impious that when Babson was in doubt what to do or what O'Brien wanted him to do the latter communicated the information to his conspirator upon the bench by a system of preconcerted signals. But indeed no such system was necessary, for the judge's part in the drama was merely to sustain his colleague's objections and overrule those of his opponent, after which he himself delivered the coup de grace with unerring insight and accuracy. When Babson got through charging a jury the latter had always in fact been instructed in brutal and sneering tones to convict the defendant or forever after to regard themselves as disloyal citizens, oath violators and outcasts though the stenographic record of his remarks would have led the reader thereof to suppose that this same judge was a conscientious, tender-hearted merciful lover of humanity, whose sensitive soul quivered at the mere thought of a prison cell, and who meticulously sought to surround the defendant with every protection the law could interpose against the imputation of guilt.

He was, as Tutt put it, "a dangerous old cuss." O'Brien was even worse. He was a bull-necked, bullet-headed, pugnosed young ruffian with beery eyes, who had an insatiable ambition and a still greater conceit, but who had devised a blundering, innocent, helpless way of conducting himself before a jury that deceived them into believing that his inexperience required their help and his disinterestedness their loyal support. Both of them were apparently fair-minded, honest public servants; both in reality were subtly disingenuous to a degree beyond ordinary comprehension, for years of practise had made them sensitive to every whimsy of emotion and taught them how to play upon the psychology of the jury as the careless zephyr softly draws its melody from the aeolian harp. In a word they were a precious pair of crooks, who for their own petty selfish ends played fast and loose with liberty, life and death.

Both of them hated Mr. Tutt, who had more than once made them ridiculous before the jury and shown them up before the Court of Appeals, and the old lawyer recognized well the fact that these two legal wolves were in revenge planning to tear him and his helpless client to pieces, having first deliberately selected him as a victim and assigned him to officiate at a ceremony which, however just so far as its consummation might be concerned, was nothing less in its conduct than judicial murder. Now they were laughing at him in their sleeves, for Mr. Tutt enjoyed the reputation of never having defended a client who had been convicted of murder, and that spotless reputation was about to be annihilated forever.

Though the defense had thirty peremptory challenges Mr. Tutt well knew that Babson would sustain the prosecutor's objections for bias until the jury box would contain the twelve automata personally selected by O'Brien in advance from what Tutt called "the army of the gibbet." Yet the old war horse outwardly maintained a calm and genial exterior, betraying none of the apprehension which in fact existed beneath his mask of professional composure. The court officer rapped sharply for silence.

"Are you quite ready to proceed with the case?" inquired the judge with a courtesy in which was ill concealed a leer of triumph.

"Yes, Your Honor," responded Mr. Tutt in velvet tones.

"Call the first talesman!"

The fight was on, the professional duel between traditional enemies, in which the stake—a human life—was in truth the thing of least concern, had begun. Yet no casual observer would have suspected the actual significance of what was going on or the part that envy, malice, uncharitableness, greed, selfishness and ambition were playing in it. He would have seen merely a partially filled courtroom flooded with sunshine from high windows, an attentive and dignified judge in a black silk robe sitting upon a dais below which a white-haired clerk drew little slips of paper from a wheel and summoned jurymen to a service which outwardly bore no suggestion of a tragedy.

He would have seen a somewhat unprepossessing assistant district attorney lounging in front of the jury box, taking apparently no great interest in the proceedings, and a worried-looking young Italian sitting at the prisoner's table between a rubicund little man with a round red face and a tall, grave, longish-haired lawyer with a frame not unlike that of Abraham Lincoln, over whose wrinkled face played from time to time the suggestion of a smile. Behind a balustrade were the reporters, scribbling on rough sheets of yellow paper. Then came rows of benches, upon the first of which, as near the jury box as possible, sat Rosalina in a new bombazine dress and wearing a large imitation gold cross furnished for the occasion out of the legal property room of Tutt & Tutt. Occasionally she sobbed softly. The bulk of the spectators consisted of rejected talesmen, witnesses, law clerks, professional court loafers and women seeking emotional sensations which they had not the courage or the means to satisfy otherwise. The courtroom was comparatively quiet, the silence broken only by the droning voice of the clerk and the lazy interplay of question and answer between talesman and lawyer.

Yet beneath the humdrum, casual, almost indifferent manner in which the proceedings seemed to be conducted each side was watching every move made by the other with the tension of a tiger ready to spring upon its prey. Babson and O'Brien were engaged in forcing upon the defense a jury composed entirely of case-hardened convictors, while Tutt & Tutt were fighting desperately to secure one so heterogeneous in character that they could hope for a disagreement.

By recess thirty-seven talesmen had been examined without a foreman having been selected, and Mr. Tutt had exhausted twenty-nine of his thirty challenges, as against three for the prosecution. The court reconvened and a new talesman was called, resembling in appearance a professional hangman who for relaxation leaned toward the execution of Italians. Mr. Tutt examined him for bias and every known form of incompetency, but in vain—then challenged peremptorily. Thirty challenges! He looked on Tutt with slightly raised eyebrows.

"Patrick Henry Walsh—to the witness chair, please, Mr. Walsh!" called the clerk, drawing another slip from the box.

Mr. Walsh rose and came forward heavily, while Tutt & Tutt trembled. He was the one man they were afraid of—an old-timer celebrated as a bulwark of the prosecution, who could always be safely counted upon to uphold the arms of the law, who regarded with reverence all officials connected with the administration of justice, and from whose composition all human emotions had been carefully excluded by the Creator. He was a square-jawed, severe, heavily built person, with a long relentless upper lip, cheeks ruddy from the open air; engaged in the contracting business; and he had a brogue that would have charmed a mavis off a tree. Mr. Tutt looked hopelessly at Tutt.

Babson and O'Brien had won.

Once more Mr. Tutt struggled against his fate. Was Mr. Walsh sure he had no prejudices against Italians or foreigners generally? Quite. Did he know anyone connected with the case? No. Had he any objection to the infliction of capital punishment? None whatever. The defense had exhausted all its challenges. Mr. Tutt turned to the prospective foreman with an endearing smile.

"Mr. Walsh," said he in caressing tones, "you are precisely the type of man in whom I feel the utmost confidence in submitting the fate of my client. I believe that you will make an ideal foreman I hardly need to ask you whether you will accord the defendant the benefit of every reasonable doubt, and if you have such a doubt will acquit him."

Mock Hen and Mock Turtle

"Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet."—BALLAD OF EAST AND WEST.

"But the law of the jungle is jungle law only, and the law of the pack is only for the pack."—OTHER SAYINGS OF SHERE KHAN.

A half turn from the clattering hubbub of Chatham Square and you are in Chinatown, slipping, within ten feet, through an invisible wall, from the glitter of the gin palace and the pawn-shop to the sinister shadows of irregular streets and blind alleys, where yellow men pad swiftly along greasy asphalt beneath windows glinting with ivory, bronze and lacquer; through which float the scents of aloes and of incense and all the subtle suggestion of the East.

No one better than the Chink himself realizes the commercial value of the taboo, the bizarre and the unclean. Nightly the rubber-neck car swinging gayly with lanterns stops before the imitation joss house, the spurious opium joint and tortuous passage to the fake fan-tan and faro game, with a farewell call at Hong Joy Fah's Oriental restaurant and the well-stocked novelty store of Wing, Hen & Co. The visitors see what they expect to see, for the Chinaman always gives his public exactly what it wants.

But a dollar does not show you Chinatown. To some the ivories will always be but crudely carven bone, the jades the potter's sham, the musk and aloes the product of a soap factory, the joss but a cigar-store Indian, and the Oriental dainties of Hong Fah the scrappings of a Yankee grocery store. Yet behind the shoddy tinsel of Doyers and Pell Streets, as behind Alice's looking-glass, there is another Chinatown—a strange, inhuman, Oriental world, not necessarily of trapdoors and stifled screams, but one moved by influences undreamed of in our banal philosophies. Hearken then to the story of the avenging of Wah Sing.

'Tis a tale was undoubtedly true

In the reign of the Emperor Hwang.

In the murky cellar of a Pell Street tenement seventeen Chinamen sat cross-legged in a circle round an octagonal teakwood table. To an Occidental they would have appeared to differ in no detail except that of a varying degree of fatness. An oil lamp flickered before a joss near by, and the place reeked with the odor of starch, sweat, tobacco, rice whisky and the incense that rose ceilingward in thin, shaking columns from two bowls of Tibetan soapstone. An obese Chinaman with a walnutlike countenance in which cunning and melancholy were equally commingled was speaking monotonously through long, rat-tailed mustaches, while the others listened with impassive decorum. It was a special meeting of the Hip Leong Tong, held in their private clubrooms at the Great Shanghai Tea Company, and conducted according to rule.

"Therefore," said Wong Get, "as a matter of honor it is necessary that our brother be avenged and that no chances be taken. A much too long time has already elapsed. I have written the letter and will read it."

He fumbled in his sleeve and drew forth a roll of brown paper covered with heavy Chinese characters unwinding it from a strip of bamboo.

To the Honorable Members of the On Gee Tong:

Whereas it has pleased you to take the life of our beloved friend and relative Wah Sing, it is with greatest courtesy and the utmost regret that we inform you that it is necessary for us likewise to remove one of your esteemed society, and that we shall proceed thereto without delay.

Due warning being thus honorably given I subscribe myself with profound appreciation,

For the Hip Leong Tong,

WONG GET.

He ceased reading and there was a perfunctory grunt of approval from round the circle. Then he turned to the official soothsayer and directed him to ascertain whether the time were propitious. The latter tossed into the air a handful of painted ivory sticks, carefully studied their arrangement when fallen, and nodded gravely.

"The omens are favorable, O honorable one!"

"Then there is nothing left but the choice of our representatives," continued Wong Get. "Pass the fateful box, O Fong Hen."

Fong Hen, a slender young Chinaman, the official slipper, or messenger, of the society, rose and, lifting a lacquered gold box from the table, passed it solemnly to each member.

"This time there will be four," said Wong Get.

Each in turn averted his eyes and removed from the box a small sliver of ivory. At the conclusion of the ceremony the four who had drawn red tokens rose. Wong Get addressed them.

"Mock Hen, Mock Ding, Long Get, Sui Sing—to you it is confided to avenge the murder of our brother Wah Sing. Fail not in your purpose!"

And the four answered unemotionally: "Those to whom it is confided will not fail."

Then pivoting silently upon their heels they passed out of the cellar.

Wong Get glanced round the table.

"If there is no further business the society will disperse after the customary refreshment."

Fong Hen placed thirteen tiny glasses upon the table and filled them with rice whisky scented with aniseed and a dash of powdered ginger. At a signal from Wong Get the thirteen Chinamen lifted the glasses and drank.

"The meeting is adjourned," said he.

Eighty years before, in a Cantonese rabbit warren two yellow men had fought over a white woman, and one had killed the other. They had belonged to different societies, or tongs. The associates of the murdered man had avenged his death by slitting the throat of one of the members of the other organization, and these in turn had retaliated thus establishing a vendetta which became part and parcel of the lives of certain families, as naturally and unavoidably as birth, love and death. As regularly as the solstice they alternated in picking each other off. Branches of the Hip Leong and On Gee tongs sprang up in San Francisco and New York—and the feud was transferred with them to Chatham Square, a feud imposing a sacred obligation rooted in blood, honor and religion upon every member, who rather than fail to carry it out would have knotted a yellow silken cord under his left ear and swung himself gently off a table into eternal sleep.

Young Mock Hen, one of the four avengers, had created a distinct place for himself in Chinatown by making a careful study of New York psychology. He was a good-looking Chink, smooth-faced, tall and supple; he knew very well how to capitalize his attractiveness. By day he attended Columbia University as a special student in applied electricity, keeping a convenient eye meanwhile on three coolies whom he employed to run The College Laundry on Morningside Heights. By night he vicariously operated a chop-suey palace on Seventh Avenue, where congregated the worst elements of the Tenderloin. But his heart was in the gambling den which he maintained in Doyers Street, and where anyone who knew the knock could have a shell of hop for the asking, once Mock had given him the once-over through the little sliding panel.

Mock was a Christian Chinaman. That is to say, purely for business reasons—for what he got out of it and the standing that it gave him—he attended the Rising Star Mission and also frequented Hudson House, the social settlement where Miss Fanny Duryea taught him to play ping-pong and other exciting parlor games, and read to him from books adapted to an American child of ten. He was a great favorite at both places, for he was sweet-tempered and wore an expression of heaven-born innocence. He had even been to church with Miss Duryea, temporarily absenting himself for that purpose of a Sunday morning from the steam-heated flat where—unknown to her, of course—he lived with his white wife, Emma Pratt, a lady of highly miscellaneous antecedents.

Except when engaged in transacting legal or oilier business with the municipal, sociologic or religious world—at which times his vocabulary consisted only of the most rudimentary pidgin—Mock spoke a fluent and even vernacular English learned at night school. Incidentally he was the head of the syndicate which controlled and dispensed the loo, faro, fan-tan and other gambling privileges of Chinatown.

Detective Mooney, of the Second, detailed to make good District Attorney Peckham's boast that there had never been so little trouble with the foreign element since the administration—of which he was an ornament—came into office, saw Quong Lee emerge from his doorway in Doyers Street just before four o'clock the following Thursday and slip silently along under the shadow of the eaves toward Ah Fong's grocery—and instantly sensed something peculiar in the Chink's walk.

"Hello, Quong!" he called, interposing himself. "Where you goin'?"

Quong paused with a deprecating gesture of widely spread open palms.

"'Lo yourself!" replied blandly. "Me go buy li'l' glocery."

Mooney ran his hands over the rotund body, frisking him for a possible forty-four.

"For the love of Mike!" he exclaimed, tearing open Quong's blouse. "What sort of an undershirt is that?" Quong grinned broadly as the detective lifted the suit of double-chain mail which swayed heavily under his blue blouse from his shoulders to his knees.

"So-ho!" continued the plain-clothes man. "Trouble brewin', eh?"

He knew already that something was doing in the tongs from his lobby-gow, Wing Foo.

"Must weigh eighty pounds!" he whistled. "I'd like to see the pill that would go through that!" It was, in fact, a medieval corselet of finest steel mesh, capable of turning an elephant bullet.

"Go'long!" ordered Mooney finally. "I guess you're safe!"

He turned back in the direction of Chatham Square, while Quong resumed his tortoiselike perambulation toward Ah Fong's. Pell and Doyers Streets were deserted save for an Italian woman carrying a baby, and were pervaded by an unnatural and suspicious silence. Most of the shutters on the lower windows were down. Ah Fong's subsequent story of what happened was simple, and briefly to the effect that Quong, having entered his shop and priced various litchi nuts and pickled starfruit, had purchased some powdered lizard and, with the package in his left hand, had opened the door to go out. As he stood there with his right hand upon the knob and facing the afternoon sun four shadows fell aslant the window and a man whom he positively identified as Sui Sing emptied a bag of powder—afterward proved to be red pepper—upon Quong's face; then another, Long Get, made a thrust at him with a knife, the effect of which he did not observe, as almost at the same instant Mock Hen felled him with a blow upon the head with an iron bar, while a fourth, Mock Ding, fired four shots at his crumpling body with a revolver one of which glanced off and fractured a very costly Chien Lung vase and ruined four boxes of mandarin-blossom tea. In his excitement he ducked behind the counter, and when sufficiently revived he crawled forth to find what had once been Quong lying across the threshold, the murderers gone, and the Italian woman prostrate and shrieking with a hip splintered by a stray bullet. On the sidewalk outside the window lay the remnants of the bag of pepper, a knife broken short off at the handle, a heavy bar of soft iron slightly bent, and a partially emptied forty-four-caliber revolver. Quong's suit of mail had effectually protected him from the knife thrust and the revolver shots, but his skull was crushed beyond repair. Thus was the murder of Wah Sing avenged in due and proper form.

Detective Mooney, distant not more than two hundred feet, rushed back to the corner at the sound of the first shot—just in time to catch a side glimpse of Mock Hen as he raced across Pell Street and disappeared into the cellar of the Great Shanghai Tea Company. The Italian woman was filling the air with her outcries, but the detective did not pause in his hurtling pursuit. He was too late, however. The cellar door withstood all his efforts to break it open.

Bull Neck Burke, the wrestler, who tied Zabisko once on the stage of the old Grand Opera House in 1913, had been promenading with Mollie Malone, of the Champagne Girls and Gay Burlesquers Company. Both heard the fusillade and saw Mock—a streak of flying blue—pass within a few feet of them.

"God!" ejaculated Mollie. "Sure as shootin', that's Mock Hen—and he's murdered somebody!"

"It's Mock all right!" agreed Bull Neck. "That puts us in as witnesses or strike me!" And he looked at his watch—four one.

"Here, Burke, put your shoulder to this!" shouted Mooney from the cellar steps. "Now then!"

The two of them threw their combined weight against it, the lock flew open and they fell forward into the darkness. Three doors leading in different directions met the glare of Mooney's match. But the fugitive had a start of at least four minutes, which was three and a half more than he required.

Mock Hen took the left-hand of the three doors and crept along a passage opening into an empty opium parlor back of the Hip Leong clubroom.

Diving beneath one of the bunks he inserted his body between the lower planking at the back and the cellar wall, wormed his way some twelve feet, raised a trap and emerged into a tunnel by means of which and others he eventually reached the end of the block and the rooms of his friend Hong Sue.

Here he changed from the Oriental costume according to Chinese etiquette necessary to the homicide, into a nobby suit of American clothes, put on a false mustache, and walked boldly down Park Row, while just behind him Doyers and Pell Streets swarmed with bluecoats and excited citizenry.

Hudson House, the social settlement presided over by Miss Fanny and affected for business reasons by Mock Hen, was a mile and a half away. But Mock took his time. Twenty-five full minutes elapsed before he leisurely climbed the steps and slipped into the big reading room. There was no one there and Mock deftly turned back the hand of the automatic clock over the platform to three-fifty-five. Then he began to whistle. Presently Miss Fanny entered from the rear room, her face lighting with pleasure at the sight of her pet convert.

"Good afternoon, Mock Hen! You are early to-day."

Mock took her hand and stroked it affectionately.

"I go Fulton Mark' buy li'l' terrapin. Stop in on way to see dear Miss Fan'."

They stood thus for a moment, and while they did so the clock struck four.

"I go now!" said Mock suddenly. "Four o'clock already."

"It's early," answered Miss Fanny. "Won't you stay a little while?"

"I go now," he repeated with resolution. "Good-by li'l' teacher!"

She watched until his lithe figure passed through the door, and presently returned to the back room. Mock waited outside until she had disappeared.

Then he changed back the clock.

"We've got you, you blarsted heathen!" cried Mooney hoarsely as he and two others from the Central Office threw themselves upon Mock Hen on the landing outside the door of his flat. "Look out, Murtha. Pipe that thing under his arm!"

"It's a bloody turtle!" gasped Murtha, shuddering "What's the matter, boys?" inquired Mock. "Leggo my arm, can't yer? What'd yer want, anyway?"

"We want you, you yellow skunk!" retorted Mooney. "Open that door! Lively now!"

"Sure!" answered Mock amiably. "Come on in! What's bitin' yer?"

He unlocked the door and threw it open.

"Take a chair," he invited them. "Have a cigar? You there, Emma?"

Emma Pratt, clad in a wrapper and lying on the big double brass bedstead in the rear room, raised herself on one elbow.

"Yep!" she called through the passage. "Got the bird?"

Mock looked at Murtha, who was carrying the terrapin.

"Sure!" he called back. "Sit down, boys. What'd yer want? Can't yer tell a feller?"

"We want you for croaking Quong Lee!" snapped Mooney. "Where have you been?"

"Fulton Market—and Hudson House. I left here quarter of four. I haven't seen Quong Lee. Where was he killed?"

Mooney laughed sardonically.

"That'll do for you, Mock! Your alibi ain't worth a damn this time. I saw you myself."

"You saw someone else," Mock assured him politely. "I haven't been in Chinatown."

"Say, what yer doin' wit' my Chink?" demanded Emma, appearing in the doorway. "He was sittin' here wit' me all the afternoon, until about just before four I sent him over to Fulton Market to buy a bird. Who's been croaked, eh?"

"Aw, cut it out, Emma!" replied Mooney. "That old stuff won't go here. Your Chink's goin' to the chair. Murtha, look through the place while we put Mock in the wagon. Hell!" he added under his breath. "Won't this make Peckham sick!"

Mr. Ephraim Tutt just finished his morning mail when he was informed that Mr. Wong Get desired an interview. Though the old lawyer did not formally represent the Hip Leong Tong he was frequently retained by its individual members, who held him in high esteem, for they had always found him loyal to their interests and as much a stickler for honor as themselves. Moreover, between him and Wong Get there existed a curious sympathy as if in some previous state of existence Wong Get might have been Mr. Tutt, and Mr. Tutt Wong Get. Perhaps, however, it was merely because both were rather weary, sad and worldly wise.

Wong Get did not come alone. He was accompanied by two other Hip Leongs, the three forming the law committee appointed to retain the best available counsel to defend Mock Hen. In his expansive frock coat and bowler hat Wong might easily have excited mirth had it not been for the extreme dignity of his demeanor. They were there, he stated, to request Mr. Tutt to protect the interests of Mock Hen, and they were prepared to pay a cash retainer and sign a written contract binding themselves to a balance—so much if Mock should be convicted; so much if acquitted; so much if he should die in the course of the trial without having been either convicted or acquitted. It was, said Wong Get gently, a matter of grave importance and they would be glad to give Mr. Tutt time to think it over and decide upon his terms. Suppose, then, that they should return at noon? With this understanding, accordingly, they departed.

"There's no point in skinning a Chink just because he is a Chink," said the junior Tutt when his partner had explained the situation to him. "But it isn't the highest-class practise and they ought to pay well."

"What do you call well?" inquired Mr. Tutt.

"Oh, a thousand dollars down, a couple more if he's convicted, and five altogether if he's acquitted."

"Do you think they can raise that amount of money?"

"I think so," answered Tutt. "It might be a good deal for an individual Chink to cough up on his own account, but this is a coöperative affair. Mock Hen didn't kill Quong Lee to get anything out of it for himself, but to save the face of his society."

"He didn't kill him at all!" declared Mr. Tutt, hardly moving a muscle of his face.

"Well, you know what I mean!" said Tutt.

"He wasn't there," insisted Mr. Tutt. "He was way over in Fulton Market buying a terrapin."

"That is what, if I were district attorney, I should call a Mock Hen with a mockturtle defense!" grunted Tutt.

Mr. Tutt chuckled.

"I shall have to get that off myself at the beginning of the case, or it might convict him," he remarked. "But he wasn't there—unless the jury find that he was."

"In which case he will—or shall—have been there—whatever the verb is," agreed Tutt. "Anyhow they'll tax every laundry and chop-suey palace from the Bronx to the Battery to pay us."

"I'd hate to take our fee in bird's-nest soup, shark's fin, bamboo-shoots salad and ya ko main," mused Mr. Tutt.

"Or in ivory chopsticks, oolong tea, imitation jade, litchi nuts and preserved leeches!" groaned Tutt. "Be sure and get the thousand down; it may be all the cash we'll ever see!"

Promptly at twelve the law committee of the Hip Leong Tong returned to the office of Tutt & Tutt. With them came a venerable Chinaman in native costume, his wrinkled face as inscrutable as that of a snapping turtle. The others took chairs, but this high dignitary preferred to sit upon his heels on the floor, creating something of the impression of an ancient slant-eyed Buddha.

Wong Get translated for his benefit the arrangement proposed by Mr. Tutt, after which there was a long pause while His Eminence remained immovable, without even the flicker of an eyelid. Then he delivered himself in an interminable series of gargles and gurgles, supplemented by a few cough-like hisses, while Wong Get translated with rapid dexterity, running verbally in and out among his words like a carriage dog between the wheels of a vehicle.

It was, declared Buddha, an affair of great moment touching upon and appertaining to the private honor of the Duck, the Wong, the Fong, the Long, the Sui and various other families, both in America and China. The life of one of their members was at stake. Their face required that the proceedings should be as dignified as possible. The price named by Mr. Tutt was quite inadequate.

Mr. Tutt, repressing a smile, passed a box of stogies. What amount, he inquired through Wong Get, would satisfy the face of the Duck family? A somewhat lengthy discussion ensued. Then Buddha rendered his decision.

The honor of the Ducks, Longs and Fongs would not be satisfied unless Mr. Tutt received five thousand dollars down, five more if Mock Hen was convicted, three more if he died before the conclusion of the trial, and twenty thousand if he was acquitted.

Mr. Tutt, assuming an equal impassivity, pondered upon the matter for about an inch of stogy and then informed the committee that the terms were eminently satisfactory. Buddha thereupon removed from the folds of his tunic a gigantic roll of soiled bills of all denominations and carefully counting out five thousand dollars placed it upon the table.

"H'm!" remarked Tutt when he learned of the proceeding. "His face is our fortune!"

"Look here," expostulated District Attorney Peckham in his office to Mr. Tutt a month later. "What's the use of our both wasting a couple of weeks trying a Chinaman who is bound to be convicted? Your time's too valuable for that sort of thing, and so is mine. We've got three white witnesses that saw him do it, and a couple of dozen Chinks besides. He doesn't stand a chance; but just because he is a Chink, and to get the case out of the way, I'll let you plead him to murder in the second degree. What do you say?"

He tried to conceal his anxiety by nervously lighting a cigar. He would have given a year's salary to have Mock Hen safely up the river, even on a conviction for manslaughter in the third, for the newspapers were making his life a burden with their constant references to the seeming inability of the police department and district attorney's office to prevent the recurrence of feud killings in the Chinatown districts. What use was it, they demanded, to maintain the expensive machinery of criminal justice if the tongs went gayly on shooting each other up and incidentally taking the lives of innocent bystanders? Wasn't the law intended to cover Chinamen as much as Italians, Poles, Greeks and niggers? And now that one of these murdering Celestials had been caught red-handed it was up to the D.A. to go to it, convict him, and send him to the chair! They did not express themselves precisely that way, but that was the gist of it. But Peckham knew that it was one thing to catch a Chinaman, even red-handed, and another to convict him. And so did Mr. Tutt.

The old lawyer smiled blandly—after the fashion of the Hip Leong Tong. Of course, he admitted, it would be much simpler to dispose of the case as Mr. Peckham suggested, but his client was insistent upon his innocence and seemed to have an excellent alibi. He regretted, therefore, that he had no choice except to go to trial.

"Then," groaned Peckham, "we may as well take the winter for it. After this there's going to be a closed season on Chinamen in New York City!"

Now though it was true that Mock Hen insisted upon his innocence, he had not insisted upon it to Mr. Tutt, for the latter had not seen him. In fact, the old lawyer, recognizing what the law did not, namely that a system devised for the trial and punishment of Occidentals is totally inadequate to cope with the Oriental, calmly went about his affairs, intrusting to Mr. Bonnie Doon of his office the task of interviewing the witnesses furnished by Wong Get. There was but one issue for the jury to pass upon. Quong Lee was dead and his honorable soul was with his illustrious ancestors. He had died from a single blow upon the head, delivered with an iron bar, there present, to be in evidence, marked "Exhibit A." Mock Hen was alleged to have done the deed. Had he? There would be nothing for Mr. Tutt to do but to cross-examine the witnesses and then call such as could testify to Mock's alibi. So he made no preparation at all and dismissed the case from his mind. He had hardly seen a dozen Chinamen in his life—outside of a laundry.

On the morning set for the trial Mr. Tutt, having been delayed by an accident in the Subway, entered the Criminal Courts Building only a moment or two before the call of the calendar. Somewhat preoccupied, he did not notice the numerous Chinamen who dawdled about the entrance or the half dozen who crowded with him into the elevator, but when Pat the elevator man called, "Second floor!—Part One to your right!—Part Two to the left!" and he stepped out into the marble-floored corridor that ran round the inside of the building, he was confronted with an unusual and somewhat ominous spectacle.

The entire hallway on two sides of the building was lined with Chinamen! They sat there motionless as blue-coated images, faces front, their hands in their laps, their legs crossed beneath them. If anyone appeared in the offing a couple of hundred pairs of glinting eyes shifted automatically and followed him until he disappeared, but otherwise no muscle quivered.

"Say," growled Hogan, Judge Bender's private attendant, who was the first to run the gantlet, "those Chinks are enough to give you the Willies! Their eyes scared me to death, sticking me through the back!"

Even dignified Judge Bender himself as he stalked along the hall, preceded by two police officers, was not immune from a slight feeling of uncanniness, and he instinctively drew his robe round his legs that it might not come into contact with those curious slippers with felt soles that protruded across the marble slabs.

"Eyes right!" They had picked him up the instant he stepped out of the private elevator—the four hundred of them. If he turned and looked they were seemingly not watching him, but if he dropped his glance they swung back in a single moment and focused themselves upon him. And every one of them probably had a gun hidden somewhere in his baggy pants! The judge confessed to not liking these foreign homicide cases. You never could tell what might happen or when somebody was going to get the death sign. There was Judge Deasy—he had the whole front of his house blown clean out by a bomb! That had been a close call! And these Chinks—with their secret oaths and rituals—they'd think nothing at all of jabbing a knife into you. He didn't fancy it at all and, as he hurried along, supremely conscious of the deadly cumulative effect of those beady eyes, he fancied it less and less. What was there to prevent one of them from getting right up in court and putting a bullet through you? He shivered, recalling the recent assassination of a judge upon the bench by a Hindu whom he had sentenced. When he reached his robing room he sent for Captain Phelan.

"See here, captain," he directed sharply, "I want you to keep all those Chinamen out in the corridor; understand?"

"I've got to let some of 'em in, judge," urged Phelan. "You've got to have an interpreter—and there's a Chinese lawyer associated with Tutt & Tutt—and of course Mr. O'Brien has to have a couple of 'em so's he'll know what's going on. Y' see, judge, the On Gee Tong is helping the prosecution against the Hip Leongs, so both sides has to be more or less represented."

"Well, make sure none of 'em is armed," ordered Judge Bender. "I don't like these cases."

Now the judge, being recently elected and unfamiliar with the situation, did not realize that nothing could have been farther from the Oriental mind or intention than an attack upon the officers engaged in the administration of local justice, whom they regarded merely as nuisances. What these Chinamen supremely desired was to be allowed to settle their own affairs in their own historic and traditional way—the way of the revolver, the silken cord, the knife and the iron bar. Once enmeshed in Anglo-Saxon juridical procedure, to be sure, they were not averse to letting it run its course on the bare chance that it might automatically accomplish their revenge. But they distrusted it, being brought up according to a much more effective system—one which when it wanted to punish anybody simply reached out, grabbed him by the pigtail, yanked him to his knees and sliced off his head. This so-called American justice was all talk—words, words, words! From their point of view judges, jurymen and prosecutors were useless pawns in life's game of chess. Perhaps they are! Who knows!

When Judge Bender entered the court room it was, in spite of his injunction, full of blue blouses. A special panel of two hundred talesmen filled the first half dozen rows of benches, the others being occupied by witnesses both Chinese and white, policemen and the miscellaneous human flotsam and jetsam that always manages somehow or other to find its way to a murder trial. Inside the rail O'Brien, the assistant district attorney, was busy in conversation with three cueless Chinamen in American clothes. At the bar sat Mock Hen with Mr. Tutt beside him, flanked by Wong Get, Tutt, Bonnie Doon and Buddha.

The judge beckoned Mr. Tutt and O'Brien to the front of the bench.

"Is there any chance of disposing of this case by a plea?" he inquired.

O'Brien looked expectantly at Mr. Tutt, who shook his head. The judge shrugged his shoulders.

"Well, how long is it going to take?"

"About six weeks," answered the old lawyer quietly.

"What!" ejaculated judge and prosecutor in unison.

"A day or two less, perhaps," affirmed Mr. Tutt, "but, likely as not, considerably longer."

Mr. Tutt vainly tried to grasp the fact that he was in his own native city of New York. Long sleeves covered with red and purple dragons hid his arms and hands, and below the collar a smooth tight surface of silk across his breast made access to his pockets quite impossible. In one of them reposed twenty one-thousand-dollar bills—his fee for securing the acquittal of Mock Hen. Yes, he was in New York!

The monotonous wail of the instruments, the pungency of the incense, the subdued light, the humid breath of the roses carried the thoughts of Mr. Tutt far away. Before him, against the blue misty sunshine, rose the yellow temples of Peking. He could hear the faint tintinnabulation of bells. He was wandering in a garden fragrant with jasmine blossoms and adorned with ancient graven stones and carved gilt statues. The air was sweet. Mr. Tutt was very tired....

"Let him sleep!" nodded Buddha, deftly conveying to his wrinkled lips a delicate morsel of guy yemg dun. "Let him sleep! He has earned his sleep. He has saved our face!"

It was after midnight when Mr. Tutt, heavily laden with princely gifts of ivory and jade and boxes of priceless teas, emerged from the side door of the Shanghai and Hongkong American-Chinese Restaurant. The sky was brilliant with stars and the sidewalks of Doyers and Pell Streets were crowded with pedestrians. Near by a lantern-bedecked rubber-neck wagon was in process of unloading its cargo of seekers after the curious and unwholesome. On either side of him walked Wong Get and Buddha. They had hardly reached the corner when five shots echoed in quick succession above the noise of the traffic and the crowd turned with one accord and rushed in the direction from which he had just come.

Mr. Tutt, startled, stopped and looked back. Courteously also stopped Wong Get and Buddha. A throng was fast gathering in front of the Shanghai and Hongkong Restaurant.

Then Murtha appeared, shouldering his way roughly through the mob. Catching sight of Mr. Tutt, he paused long enough to whisper hoarsely in the lawyer's ear: "Well, they got Mock Hen! Five bullets in him! But if they were going to, why in hell couldn't they have done it three months ago?"

Samuel and Delilah

"And it came to pass, when she pressed him daily with her words, and urged him, so that his soul was vexed unto death; that he told her all his heart, and said unto her, There hath not come a razor upon mine head; … if I be shaven, then my strength will go from me, and I shall become weak and be like any other man."—JUDGES XVI, 16, 17.

"Have you seen '76 Fed.' anywhere, Mr. Tutt?" inquired Tutt, appearing suddenly in the doorway of his partner's office.

Mr. Tutt looked up from Page 364 of the opinion he was perusing in "The United States vs. One Hundred and Thirty-two Packages of Spirituous Liquors and Wines."

"Got it here in front of me," he answered shortly. "What do you want it for?"

Tutt looked over his shoulder.

"That's a grand name for a case, isn't it? 'Packages of Wines!'" he chuckled. "I made a note once of a matter entitled 'United States vs. Forty-three Cases of Frozen Eggs'; and of another called 'United States vs. One Feather Mattress and One Hundred and Fifty Pounds of Butter'—along in 197 Federal Reports, if I remember correctly. And you recall that accident case we had—Bump against the Railroad?"

"You can't tell me anything about names," remarked Mr. Tutt. "I once tried a divorce action. Fuss against Fuss; and another, Love against Love. Do you really want this book?"

"Not if you are using it," replied Tutt. "I just wanted to show an authority to Mr. Sorg, the president of the Fat and Skinny Club. You know our application for a certificate of incorporation was denied yesterday by Justice McAlpin."

"No, I didn't know it," returned Mr. Tutt. "Why?"

"Here's his memorandum in the Law Journal," answered his partner. "Read it for yourself":

Matter of Fat and Skinny Club, Inc. This is an application for approval of a certificate of incorporation as a membership corporation. The stated purposes are to promote and encourage social intercourse and good fellowship and to advance the interests of the community. The name selected is the Fat and Skinny Club. If this be the most appropriate name descriptive of its membership it is better that it remain unincorporated. Application denied.

"Now who says the law isn't the perfection of common sense?" ruminated Mr. Tutt. "Its general principles are magnificent."

"And yet," mused Tutt, "only last week Judge McAlpin granted the petition of one Solomon Swackhamer to change his name to Phillips Brooks Vanderbilt. Is that right? Is that justice? Is it equity? I ask you!—when he turns down the Fat and Skinnies?"

"Oh, yes it is," retorted Mr. Tutt. "When you consider that Mr. Swackhamer could have assumed the appellation of P.B. Vanderbilt or any other name he chose without asking the court's permission at all."

"What!" protested Tutt incredulously.

"That's the law," returned the senior partner. "A man can call himself what he chooses and change his name as often as he likes—so long, of course, as he doesn't do it to defraud. The mere fact that a statute likewise gives him the right to apply to the courts to accomplish the same result makes no difference."

"Of course it might make him feel a little more comfortable about it to do it that way," suggested Tutt. "Do you know, as long as I've practised law in this town I've always assumed that one had to get permission to change one's name."

"You've learned something," said Mr. Tutt suavely. "I hope you will put it to good account. Here's '76 Fed.' Take it out and console the Fat and Skinny Club with it if you can."

Mr. Tutt surrendered the volume without apparent regret and Tutt retired to his own office and to the task of soothing the injured feelings of Mr. Sorg.

A simple-minded little man was Tutt, for all his professional shrewdness and ingenuity. Like many a hero of the battlefield and of the bar, once inside the palings of his own fence he became modest, gentle, even timorous. For Abigail, his wife, had no illusions about him and did not affect to have any. To her neither Tutt nor Mr. Tutt was any such great shakes. Had Tutt dared to let her know of many of the schemes which he devised for the profit or safety of his clients she would have thought less of him still; in fact, she might have parted with him forever. In a sense Mrs. Tutt was an exacting woman. Though she somewhat reluctantly consented to view the hours from nine a.m. to five p.m. in her husband's day as belonging to the law, she emphatically regarded the rest of the twenty-four hours as belonging to her.

The law may be, as Judge Holmes has called it, "a jealous mistress," but in the case of Tutt it was not nearly so jealous as his wife. So Tutt was compelled to walk the straight-and-narrow path whether he liked it or not. On the whole he liked it well enough, but there were times—usually in the spring—when without being conscious of what was the matter with him he mourned his lost youth. For Tutt was only forty-eight and he had had a grandfather who had lived strenuously to upward of twice that age. He was vigorous, sprightly, bright-eyed and as hard as nails, even if somewhat resembling in his contours the late Mr. Pickwick. Mrs. Tutt was tall, spare, capable and sardonic. She made Tutt comfortable, but she no longer appealed to his sense of romance. Still she held him. As the playwright hath said "It isn't good looks they want, but good nature; if a warm welcome won't hold them, cold cream won't."

However, Tutt got neither looks nor cold cream. His welcome, in fact, was warm only if he stayed out too late, and then the later the warmer. His relationship to his wife was prosaic, respectful. In his heart of hearts he occasionally thought of her as exceedingly unattractive. In a word Mrs. Tutt performed her wifely functions in a purely matter-of-fact way. Anything else would have seemed to her unseemly. She dressed in a manner that would have been regarded as conservative even on Beacon Hill. She had no intention of making an old fool of herself or of letting him be one either. When people had been married thirty years they could take some things for granted. Few persons therefore had ever observed Mr. Tutt in the act of caressing Mrs. Tutt; and there were those who said that he never had. Frankly, she was a trifle forbidding: superficially not the sort of person to excite a great deal of sentiment; and occasionally, as we have hinted, in the spring Tutt yearned for a little sentiment.

He did his yearning, however, entirely on the side and within those hours consecrated to the law. In his wife's society he yearned not at all. In her company he carefully kept his thoughts and his language inside the innermost circle of decorum. At home his talk was entirely "Yea, yea," and "Nay, nay," and dealt principally with politics and the feminist movement, in which Abigail was deeply interested.

And by this we do not mean to suggest that at other times or places Tutt was anything but conventionally proper. He was not. He only yearned to be, well knowing that he was deficient in courage if not in everything else.

But habit or no habit, likely or unlikely, Mrs. Tutt had no intention of taking any chances so far as Tutt was concerned. If he did not reach home precisely at six explanations were in order, and if he came in half an hour later he had to demonstrate his integrity beyond a reasonable doubt according to the established rules of evidence.

Perhaps Mrs. Tutt did wisely to hold Tutt thus in leash considering the character of many of the firm's clients. For it was quite impossible to conceal the nature of the practise of Tutt & Tutt; much of which figured flamboyantly in the newspapers. Some women would have taken it for granted under like circumstances that their husbands had acquired a touch at least of the wisdom of the serpent even if they remained quite harmless. Abigail countenanced no thought of any demoralization in her spouse. To her he was like the artist who smears himself and his smock with paint while in his studio, but appears at dinner in spotless linen without even a whiff of benzine about him to suggest his occupation. So Tutt, though hand and glove in his office with the most notorious of the elite of Longacre Square, came home to supper with the naiveté and innocence of a theological student for whom an evening at a picture show is the height of dissipation.

Yet Tutt was no more of a Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde than most of us. Merely, his daily transition was a little more abrupt. And when all is said and done most of the devices invented by his fertile little brain to further the interests of his clients were no more worthy of condemnation than those put forward by far higher-priced and much more celebrated attorneys.

Not that Mrs. Tutt was blind to the dangers to which her husband by virtue of his occupation was exposed. Far from it. Indeed she made it her business to pay periodical visits to the office, ostensibly to see whether or not it was properly cleaned and the windows washed, but in reality—or at least so Tutt suspected—to find out whether the personnel was entirely suitable for a firm of their standing and particularly for a junior partner of his susceptibilities.

But she never discovered anything to give her the slightest cause for alarm. The dramatis personae of the offices of Tutt & Tutt were characteristic of the firm, none of their employees—except Miss Sondheim, the tumultous-haired lady stenographer—and Willie, the office boy, being under forty years of age.

When not engaged in running errands or fussing over his postage-stamp album, Willie spent most of his time teasing old Scraggs, the scrivener, an unsuccessful teetotaler. A faint odor of alcohol emanated from the cage in which he performed his labors and lent an atmosphere of cheerfulness to what might otherwise have seemed to Broadway clients an unsympathetic environment, though there were long annual periods during which he was as sober as a Kansas judge. The winds of March were apt, however, to take hold of him. Perhaps it was the spring in his case also.

The backbone of the establishment was Miss Minerva Wiggin. In every law office there is usually some one person who keeps the shop going. Sometimes it is a man. If so, he is probably a sublimated stenographer or law clerk who, having worked for years to get himself admitted to the bar, finds, after achieving that ambition, that he has neither the ability nor the inclination to brave the struggle for a livelihood by himself. Perchance as a youth he has had visions of himself arguing test cases before the Court of Appeals while the leaders of the bar hung upon his every word, of an office crowded with millionaire clients and servile employees, even as he is servile to the man for whom he labors for a miserly ten dollars a week.

His ambition takes him by the hand and leads him to high places, from which he gazes down into the land of his future prosperity and greatness. The law seems a mysterious, alluring, fascinating profession, combining the romance of the drama with the gratifications of the intellect. He springs to answer his master's bell; he sits up until all hours running down citations and making extracts from opinions; he rushes to court and answers the calendar and sometimes carries the lawyer's brief case and attends him throughout a trial. Three years go by—five—and he finds that he is still doing the same thing. He is now a member of the bar, he has become the managing clerk, he attends to fairly important matters, engages the office force, superintends transfer of title, occasionally argues a motion. Five years more go by and perhaps his salary is raised a trifle more. Then one day he awakes to the realization that his future is to be only that of a trusted servitor.

Perchance he is married and has a baby. The time has come for him to choose whether he will go forth and put his fortune to the test "to win or lose it all" or settle down into the position of faithful legal hired man. He is getting a bit bald, he has had one or two tussles with his bank about accidental overdrafts. The world looks pretty bleak outside and the big machine of the law goes grinding on heartless, inevitable. Who is he to challenge the future? The old job is fairly easy; they can't get on without him, they say; here is where he belongs; he knows his business—give him his thirty-five hundred a year and let him stay!

That is Binks, or Calkins, or Shivers, or any one of those worried gray-haired men who sit in the outer office behind a desk strewn with papers and make sure that no mistakes have been made. To them every doubtful question of practise is referred and they answer instantly—sometimes wrongly, but always instantly. They know the last day for serving the demurrer in Bilbank against Terwilliger and whether or not you can tax a referee's fee as a disbursement in a bill of costs; they are experts on the precise form for orders in matrimonial actions and the rule in regard to filing a summons and complaint in Oneida County; they stand between the members of the firm and disagreeable clients; they hire and discharge the office boys; they do everything from writing a brief for the Supreme Court of the United States down to making the contract with the window cleaners; they are the only lawyers who really know anything and they were once promising young men, who have found out at last that life and the Sunday-school books are very far apart; but they run the works and make the law a gentleman's profession for the rest of us. They are always there. Others come, grow older, go away, but they remain. Many of them drink. All of which would be irrelevant, incompetent and immaterial if this were not a legal story.

Scraggs had been one of these, but he had also been one of those who drank, and now he was merely a bookkeeper. Miss Wiggin reigned in his stead.

A woman and not a man kept Tutt & Tutt on the map. When this sort of thing occurs it is usually because the woman in question is the ablest and very likely also the best person in the outfit, and she assumes the control of affairs by a process of natural selection. Miss Wiggin was the conscience, if Mr. Tutt was the heart, of Tutt & Tutt. Nobody, unless it was Mr. Tutt, knew where she had come from or why she was working if at all in only a semi-respectable law office. Without her something dreadful would have happened to the general morale. Everybody recognized that fact.

Her very appearance gave the place tone—neutralized the faint odor of alcohol from the cage. For in truth she was a fine-looking woman. Had she been costumed by a Fifth Avenue dressmaker and done her coiffure differently she would have been pretty. Because she drew her gray hair straight back from her low forehead and tied it in a knob on the back of her head, wore paper cuffs and a black dress, she looked nearer fifty than forty-one, which she was. Two hundred dollars would have taken twenty years off her apparent age—a year for every ten dollars; but she would not have looked a particle less a lady.

Her duties were ambiguous. She was always the first to arrive at the office and was the only person permitted to open the firm mail outside of its members. She overlooked the books that Scraggs kept and sent out the bills. She kept the key to the cash box and had charge of the safe. She made the entries in the docket and performed most of the duties of a regular managing clerk. She had been admitted to the bar. She checked up the charge accounts and on Saturdays paid off the office force. In addition to all these things she occasionally took a hand at a brief, drew most of the pleadings, and kept track of everything that was done in the various cases.

But her chief function, one which made her invaluable was that of receiving clients who came to the office, and in the first instance ascertaining just what their troubles were; and she was so sympathetic and at the same time so sensible that many a stranger who casually drifted in and would otherwise just as casually have drifted out again remained a permanent fixture in the firm's clientele. Scraggs and William adored her in spite of her being an utter enigma to them. She was quiet but businesslike, of few words but with a latent sense of humor that not infrequently broke through the surface of her gravity, and she proceeded upon the excellent postulate that everyone with whom she came in contact was actuated by the highest sense of honor. She acted as a spiritual tonic to both Mr. Tutt and Tutt—especially to the latter, who was the more in need of it. If they were ever tempted to stray across the line of professional rectitude her simple assumption that the thing couldn't be done usually settled the matter once and for all. On delicate questions Mr. Tutt frankly consulted her. Without her, Tutt & Tutt would have been shysters; with her they were almost respectable. She received a salary of three thousand dollars a year and earned double that amount, for she served where she loved and her first thought was of Tutt & Tutt. If you can get a woman like that to run your law office do not waste any time or consideration upon a man. Her price is indeed above rubies.

Yet even Miss Wiggin could not keep the shadow of the vernal equinox off the simple heart of the junior Tutt. She had seen it coming for several weeks, had scented danger in the way Tutt's childish eye had lingered upon Miss Sondheim's tumultous black hair and in the rather rakish, familiar way he had guided the ladies who came to get divorces out to the elevator. And then there swam into his life the beautiful Mrs. Allison, and for a time Tutt became not only hysterically young again, but—well, you shall see.

Yet, curiously enough, though we are a long way from where this story opened, it all goes back to Phillips Brooks Vanderbilt and the Fat and Skinny Club and the right to call ourselves by what names we please. Moreover, as must be apparent, all that happened occurred beyond Miss Wiggin's sphere of spiritual influence. Yet, had it not, even she could not have harnessed Leviathan or loosed the bands of Orion—to say nothing of counteracting the effect of spring.

When Tutt returned with "76 Fed." after the departure of Mr. Sorg he found his partner smoking the usual stogy and gazing pensively down upon the harbor. The immediate foreground was composed of rectangular roofs of divers colors, mostly reddish, ornamented with eccentrically shaped chimney pots, pent-houses, skylights and water tanks, in addition to various curious whistle-like protuberances from which white wraiths of steam whirled and danced in the gay breeze. Beyond, in the middle distance, a great highway of sparkling jewels led across the waves to the distant faintly green hills of Staten Island. Three tiny aeroplanes wove invisible threads against the blue woof of the sky above the New Jersey shore. It was not a day to practise law at all. It was a day to lie on one's back in the grass and watch the clouds or throw one's weight against the tugging helm of a racing sloop and bite the spindrift blown across her bows—not a day for lawyers but for lovers!

"Here's '76 Fed.'," said Tutt.

"What's become of Sorg?"

"Gone. Mad. Says the whole point of the Fat and Skinny Club is in the name."

"I fancy—from looking at Mr. Sorg—that that is quite true," remarked Mr. Tutt. He paused and reaching down into a lower compartment of his desk, lifted out a tumbler and his bottle of malt extract, which he placed carefully at his elbow and leaned back again contemplatively. "Look here, Tutt," he said. "I want to ask you something. Is there anything the matter with you?"

Tutt regarded him with the air of a small boy caught peeking through a knot hole.

"Why,—no!" he protested lamely. "That is—nothing in particular. I do feel a bit restless—sort of vaguely dissatisfied."

Mr. Tutt nodded sympathetically.

"How old are you, Tutt?"

"Forty-eight."

"And you feel just at present as if life were 'flat, stale and unprofitable?'"

"Why—yes; you might put it that way. The fact is every day seems just like every other day. I don't even get any pleasure out of eating. The very sight of a boiled egg beside my plate at breakfast gives me the willies. I can't eat boiled eggs any more. They sicken me!"

"Exactly!" Mr. Tutt poured out a glass of the malt extract.

"I feel the same way about a lot of things," Tutt hurried on. "Special demurrers, for instance. They bore me horribly. And supplementary proceedings get most frightfully upon my nerves."

"Exactly!" repeated Mr. Tutt.

"What do you mean by 'exactly?'" snapped Tutt.

"You're bored," explained his partner.

"Rather!" agreed Tutt. "Bored to death. Not with anything special, you understand; just everything. I feel as if I'd like to do something devilish."

"When a man feels like that he better go to a doctor," declared Mr. Tutt.

"A doctor!" exclaimed Tutt derisively. "What good would a doctor do me?"

"He might keep you from getting into trouble."

"Oh, you needn't be alarmed. I won't get into any trouble."

"It's the dangerous age," said Mr. Tutt. "I've known a lot of respectable married men to do the most surprising things round fifty."

Tutt looked interested.

"Have you now?" he inquired. "Well, I've no doubt it did some of 'em a world of good. Tell you frankly sometimes I feel as if I'd rather like to take a bit of a fling myself!"

"Your professional experience ought to be enough to warn you of the dangers of that sort of experiment," answered Mr. Tutt gravely. "It's bad enough when it occurs inadvertently, so to speak, but when a man in your condition of life deliberately goes out to invite trouble it's a sad, sad spectacle."

"Do you mean to imply that I'm not able to take care of myself?" demanded Tutt.

"I mean to imply that no man is too wise to be made a fool of by some woman."

"That every Samson has his Delilah?"

"If you want to put it that way—yes."

"And that in the end he'll get his hair cut?"

Mr. Tutt took a sip from the tumbler of malt and relit his stogy.

"What do you know about Samson and Delilah, Tutt?" he challenged.

"Oh, about as much as you do, I guess, Mr. Tutt," answered his partner modestly.

"Well, who cut Samson's hair?" demanded the senior member.

He emptied the dregs of the malt-extract bottle into his glass and holding it to the light examined it critically.

"Delilah, of course!" ejaculated Tutt.

Mr. Tutt shook his head.

"There you go off at half-cock again, Tutt!" he retorted whimsically. "You wrong her. She did no such thing."

"Why, I'll bet you a hundred dollars on it!" cried Tutt excitedly.

"Make it a simple dinner at the Claridge Grill and I'll go you."

"Done!"

There were four books on the desk near Mr. Tutt's right hand—the New York Code of Civil Procedure, an almanac, a Shakesperean concordance and a Bible.

"Look it up for yourself," said Mr. Tutt, waving his arm with a gesture of the utmost impartiality. "That is, if you happen to know in what part of Holy Writ said Delilah is to be found."

Tutt followed the gesture and sat down at the opposite side of the desk.

"There!" he exclaimed, after fumbling over the leaves for several minutes. "What did I tell you? Listen, Mr. Tutt! It's in the sixteenth chapter of Judges: 'And it came to pass, when she pressed him daily with her words, and urged him, so that his soul was vexed unto death; That he told her all his heart, and said unto her, There hath not come a razor upon mine head.' Um—um."

"Read on, Tutt!" ordered Mr. Tutt.

"Um. 'And when Delilah saw that he had told her all his heart, she sent and called for the lords of the Philistines, saying, Come up this once.' Um-um."

"Yes, go on!"

"'And she made him sleep upon her knees; and she called for a man, and she caused him to shave off the seven locks of his head.' Well, I'll be hanged!" exclaimed Tutt. "Now, I would have staked a thousand dollars on it. But look here, you don't win! Delilah did cut Samson's hair—through her agent. 'Qui facit per alium facit per se!'"

"Your point is overruled," said Mr. Tutt. "A barber cut Samson's hair. Let it be a lesson to you never to take anything on hearsay. Always look up your authorities yourself. Moreover"—and he looked severely at Tutt—"the cerebral fluid—like malt extract—tends to become cloudy with age."

"Well, anyhow, I'm no Samson," protested Tutt. "And I haven't met anyone that looked like a Delilah. I guess after the procession of adventuresses that have trailed through this office in the last twenty years I'm reasonably safe."

"No man is safe," meditated Mr. Tutt. "For the reason that no man knows the power of expansion of his heart. He thinks it's reached its limit—and then he finds to his horror or his delight that it hasn't. To put it another way, a man's capacity to love may be likened to a thermometer. At twenty-five or thirty he meets some young person, falls in love with her, thinks his amatory thermometer has reached the boiling-point and accordingly marries her. In point of fact it hasn't—it's only marking summer heat—hasn't even registered the temperature of the blood. Well, he goes merrily on life's way and some fine day another lady breezes by, and this safe and sane citizen, who supposes his capacity for affection was reached in early youth, suddenly discovers to his amazement that his mercury is on the jump and presently that his old thermometer has blown its top off."

"Very interesting, Mr. Tutt," observed Tutt after a moment's silence. "You seem to have made something of a study of these things."

"Only in a business way—only in a business way!" Mr. Tutt assured him. "Now, if you're feeling stale—and we all are apt to get that way this time of year—why don't you take a run down to Atlantic City?"

Now Tutt would have liked to go to Atlantic City could he have gone by himself, but the idea of taking Abigail along robbed the idea of its attraction. She had got more than ever on his nerves of late. But his reply, whatever it might have been, was interrupted by the announcement of Miss Wiggin, who entered at that moment, that a lady wished to see him.

"She asked for Mr. Tutt," explained Minerva.

"But I think her case is more in your line," and she nodded to Tutt.

"Good looking?" inquired Tutt roguishly.

"Very," returned Miss Wiggin. "A blonde."

"Thanks," answered Tutt, smoothing his hair; "I'm on my way."

Now this free, almost vulgar manner of speech was in reality foreign to both Tutt and Miss Wiggin and it was born of the instant, due doubtless to some peculiar juxtaposition of astral bodies in Cupid's horoscope unknown to them, but which none the less had its influence. Strange things happen on the eve of St. Agnes and on Midsummer Night—even in law offices.

Mrs. Allison was sitting by the window in Tutt's office when he came in, and for a full minute he paused upon the threshold while she pretended she did not know that he was there. The deluge of sunlight that fell upon her face betrayed no crack or wrinkle—no flaw of any kind—in the white marble of its perfection. It was indeed a lovely face, classic in the chiseling of its transparent alabaster; and when she turned, her eyes were like misty lakes of blue. Bar none, she was the most beautiful creature—and there had been many—that had ever wandered into the offices of Tutt & Tutt. He sought for a word. "Wonderful"; that was, it, she was "wonderful." His stale spirit soared in ecstasy, and left him tongue-tied. In vulgar parlance he was rattled to death, this commonplace little lawyer who for a score of years had dealt cynically with the loves and lives of the flock of female butterflies who fluttered annually in and out of the office. Throughout that period he had sat unemotionally behind his desk and listened in an aloof, cold, professional manner to the stories of their wrongs as they sobbed or hissed them forth. Wise little lawyer that he was, he had regarded them all as just what they were and nothing else—specimens of the Cecropia. And he had not even patted them upon the shoulder or squeezed their hands when he had bade them good-by—maintaining always an impersonal and dignified demeanor.

The Dog Andrew

"Every dog is entitled to one bite."—UNREPORTED OPINION OF THE APPELLATE DIVISION OF THE NEW YORK SUPREME COURT.

"Now see here!" shouted Mr. Appleboy, coming out of the boathouse, where he was cleaning his morning's catch of perch, as his neighbor Mr. Tunnygate crashed through the hedge and cut across Appleboy's parched lawn to the beach. "See here, Tunnygate, I won't have you trespassing on my place! I've told you so at least a dozen times! Look at the hole you've made in that hedge, now! Why can't you stay in the path?"

His ordinarily good-natured countenance was suffused with anger and perspiration. His irritation with Mr. Tunnygate had reached the point of explosion. Tunnygate was a thankless friend and he was a great cross to Mr. Appleboy. Aforetime the two had been intimate in the fraternal, taciturn intimacy characteristic of fat men, an attraction perhaps akin to that exerted for one another by celestial bodies of great mass, for it is a fact that stout people do gravitate toward one another—and hang or float in placid juxtaposition, perhaps merely as a physical result of their avoirdupois. So Appleboy and Tunnygate had swum into each other's spheres of influence, either blown by the dallying winds of chance or drawn by some mysterious animal magnetism, and, being both addicted to the delights of the soporific sport sanctified by Izaak Walton, had raised unto themselves portable temples upon the shores of Long Island Sound in that part of the geographical limits of the Greater City known as Throggs Neck.

Every morn during the heat of the summer months Appleboy would rouse Tunnygate or conversely Tunnygate would rouse Appleboy, and each in his own wobbly skiff would row out to the spot which seemed most propitious to the piscatorial art. There, under two green umbrellas, like two fat rajahs in their shaking howdahs upon the backs of two white elephants, the friends would sit in solemn equanimity awaiting the evasive cunner, the vagrant perch or cod or the occasional flirtatious eel. They rarely spoke and when they did the edifice of their conversation—their Tower of Babel, so to speak—was monosyllabic. Thus:

"Huh! Ain't had a bite!"

"Huh!"

"Huh!"

Silence for forty minutes. Then: "Huh! Had a bite?"

"Nope!"

"Huh!"

That was generally the sum total of their interchange Yet it satisfied them, for their souls were in harmony. To them it was pregnant of unutterable meanings, of philosophic mysteries more subtle than those of the esoterics, of flowers and poetry, of bird-song and twilight, of all the nuances of softly whispered avowals, of the elusive harmonies of love's half-fainting ecstasy.

"Huh!"

"Huh!"

And then into this Eden—only not by virtue of the excision of any vertebra such as was originally necessary in the case of Adam—burst woman. There was silence no longer. The air was rent with clamor; for both Appleboy and Tunnygate, within a month of one another, took unto themselves wives. Wives after their own image!

For a while things went well enough; it takes ladies a few weeks to find out each other's weak points. But then the new Mrs. Tunnygate unexpectedly yet undeniably began to exhibit the serpent's tooth, the adder's tongue or the cloven hoof—as the reader's literary traditions may lead him to prefer. For no obvious reason at all she conceived a violent hatred of Mrs. Appleboy, a hatred that waxed all the more virulent on account of its object's innocently obstinate refusal to comprehend or recognize it. Indeed Mrs. Tunnygate found it so difficult to rouse Mrs. Appleboy into a state of belligerency sufficiently interesting that she soon transferred her energies to the more worthy task of making Appleboy's life a burden to him.

To this end she devoted herself with a truly Machiavellian ingenuity, devising all sorts of insults irritations and annoyances, and adding to the venom of her tongue the inventive cunning of a Malayan witch doctor. The Appleboys' flower-pots mysteriously fell off the piazza, their thole-pins disappeared, their milk bottles vanished, Mr. Appleboy's fish lines acquired a habit of derangement equaled only by barbed-wire entanglements, and his clams went bad! But these things might have been borne had it not been for the crowning achievement of her malevolence, the invasion of the Appleboys' cherished lawn, upon which they lavished all that anxious tenderness which otherwise they might have devoted to a child.

It was only about twenty feet by twenty, and it was bordered by a hedge of moth-eaten privet, but anyone who has ever attempted to induce a blade of grass to grow upon a sand dune will fully appreciate the deviltry of Mrs. Tunnygate's malignant mind. Already there was a horrid rent where Tunnygate had floundered through at her suggestion in order to save going round the pathetic grass plot which the Appleboys had struggled to create where Nature had obviously intended a floral vacuum. Undoubtedly it had been the sight of Mrs. Appleboy with her small watering pot patiently encouraging the recalcitrant blades that had suggested the malicious thought to Mrs. Tunnygate that maybe the Appleboys didn't own that far up the beach. They didn't—that was the mockery of it. Like many others they had built their porch on their boundary line, and, as Mrs. Tunnygate pointed out, they were claiming to own something that wasn't theirs. So Tunnygate, in daily obedience to his spouse, forced his way through the hedge to the beach, and daily the wrath of the Appleboys grew until they were driven almost to desperation.

Now when the two former friends sat fishing in their skiffs they either contemptuously ignored one another or, if they "Huh-Huhed!" at all the "Huhs!" resembled the angry growls of infuriated beasts. The worst of it was that the Appleboys couldn't properly do anything about it. Tunnygate had, as Mrs. Tunnygate sneeringly pointed out, a perfect legal right to push his way through the hedge and tramp across the lawn, and she didn't propose to allow the Appleboys to gain any rights by proscription, either. Not much!

Therefore, when Mr. Appleboy addressed to Mr. Tunnygate the remarks with which this story opens, the latter insolently replied in words, form or substance that Mr. Appleboy could go to hell. Moreover, as he went by Mr. Appleboy he took pains to kick over a clod of transplanted sea grass, nurtured by Mrs. Appleboy as the darling of her bosom, and designed to give an air of verisimilitude to an otherwise bare and unconvincing surface of sand. Mr. Appleboy almost cried with vexation.

"Oh!" he ejaculated, struggling for words to express the full content of his feeling. "Gosh, but you're—mean!"

He hit it! Curiously enough, that was exactly the word! Tunnygate was mean—and his meanness was second only to that of the fat hippopotama his wife.

Then, without knowing why, for he had no formulated ideas as to the future, and probably only intended to try to scare Tunnygate with vague threats, Appleboy added: "I warn you not to go through that hedge again! Understand—I warn you! And if you do I won't be responsible for the consequences!"

He really didn't mean a thing by the words, and Tunnygate knew it.

"Huh!" retorted the latter contemptuously. "You!"

Mr. Appleboy went inside the shack and banged the door. Mrs. Appleboy was peeling potatoes in the kitchen-living room.

"I can't stand it!" he cried weakly. "He's driving me wild!"

"Poor lamb!" soothed Mrs. Appleboy, peeling an interminable rind. "Ain't that just a sweetie? Look! It's most as long as your arm!"

She held it up dangling between her thumb and fore-finger. Then, with a groan she dropped it at his feet. "I know it's a real burden to you, deary!" she sighed.

Suddenly they both bent forward with startled eyes, hypnotized by the peel upon the floor.

Unmistakably it spelt "dog"! They looked at one another significantly.

"It is a symbol!" breathed Mrs. Appleboy in an awed whisper.

"Whatever it is, it's some grand idea!" exclaimed her husband. "Do you know anybody who's got one? I mean a—a—"

"I know just what you mean," she agreed. "I wonder we never thought of it before! But there wouldn't be any use in getting any dog!"

"Oh, no!" he concurred. "We want a real—dog!"

"One you know about!" she commented.

"The fact is," said he, rubbing his forehead, "if they know about 'em they do something to 'em. It ain't so easy to get the right kind."

"Oh, we'll get one!" she encouraged him. "Now Aunt Eliza up to Livornia used to have one. It made a lot of trouble and they ordered her—the selectmen did—to do away with it. But she only pretended she had—she didn't really—and I think she's got him yet."

"Gee!" said Mr. Appleboy tensely. "What sort was it?"

"A bull!" she replied. "With a big white face."

"That's the kind!" he agreed excitedly. "What was its name?"

"Andrew," she answered.

"That's a queer name for a dog!" he commented "Still, I don't care what his name is, so long as he's the right kind of dog! Why don't you write to Aunt Eliza to-night?"

"Of course Andrew may be dead," she hazarded. "Dogs do die."

"Oh, I guess Andrew isn't dead!" he said hopefully "That tough kind of dog lasts a long time. What will you say to Aunt Eliza?"

Mrs. Appleboy went to the dresser and took a pad and pencil from one of the shelves.

"Oh, something like this," she answered, poising the pencil over the pad in her lap:

"Dear Aunt Eliza: I hope you are quite well. It is sort of lonely living down here on the beach and there are a good many rough characters, so we are looking for a dog for companionship and protection Almost any kind of healthy dog would do and you may be sure he would have a good home. Hoping to see you soon. Your affectionate niece, Bashemath."

"I hope she'll send us Andrew," said Appleboy fervently.

"I guess she will!" nodded Bashemath.

"What on earth is that sign?" wrathfully demanded Mrs. Tunnygate one morning about a week later as she looked across the Appleboys' lawn from her kitchen window. "Can you read it, Herman?"

Herman stopped trying to adjust his collar and went out on the piazza.

"Something about 'dog'," he declared finally.

"Dog!" she exclaimed. "They haven't got a dog!"

"Well," he remarked, "that's what the sign says: 'Beware of the dog'! And there's something above it. Oh! 'No crossing this property. Trespassing forbidden.'"

"What impudence!" avowed Mrs. Tunnygate. "Did you ever know such people! First they try and take land that don't belong to them, and then they go and lie about having a dog. Where are they, anyway?"

"I haven't seen 'em this morning," he answered. "Maybe they've gone away and put up the sign so we won't go over. Think that'll stop us!"

"In that case they've got another think comin'!" she retorted angrily. "I've a good mind to have you go over and tear up the whole place!"

"'N pull up the hedge?" he concurred eagerly. "Good chance!"

Indeed, to Mr. Tunnygate it seemed the supreme opportunity both to distinguish himself in the eyes of his blushing bride and to gratify that perverse instinct inherited from our cave-dwelling ancestors to destroy utterly—in order, perhaps, that they may never seek to avenge themselves upon us—those whom we have wronged. Accordingly Mr. Tunnygate girded himself with his suspenders, and with a gleam of fiendish exultation in his eye stealthily descended from his porch and crossed to the hole in the hedge. No one was in sight except two barefooted searchers after clams a few hundred yards farther up the beach and a man working in a field half a mile away. The bay shimmered in the broiling August sun and from a distant grove came the rattle and wheeze of locusts. Throggs Neck blazed in silence, and utterly silent was the house of Appleboy.

With an air of bravado, but with a slightly accelerated heartbeat, Tunnygate thrust himself through the hole in the hedge and looked scornfully about the Appleboy lawn. A fierce rage worked through his veins. A lawn! What effrontery! What business had these condescending second-raters to presume to improve a perfectly good beach which was satisfactory to other folks? He'd show 'em! He took a step in the direction of the transplanted sea grass. Unexpectedly the door of the Appleboy kitchen opened.

"I warned you!" enunciated Mr. Appleboy with unnatural calmness, which with another background might have struck almost anybody as suspicious.

"Huh!" returned the startled Tunnygate, forced under the circumstances to assume a nonchalance that he did not altogether feel. "You!"

"Well," repeated Mr. Appleboy. "Don't ever say I didn't!"

"Pshaw!" ejaculated Mr. Tunnygate disdainfully.

With premeditation and deliberation, and with undeniable malice aforethought, he kicked the nearest bunch of sea grass several feet in the air. His violence carried his leg high in the air and he partially lost his equilibrium. Simultaneously a white streak shot from beneath the porch and something like a red-hot poker thrust itself savagely into an extremely tender part of his anatomy.

"Ouch! O—o—oh!" he yelled in agony. "Oh!"

"Come here, Andrew!" said Mr. Appleboy mildly. "Good doggy! Come here!"

But Andrew paid no attention. He had firmly affixed himself to the base of Mr. Tunnygate's personality without any intention of being immediately detached. And he had selected that place, taken aim, and discharged himself with an air of confidence and skill begotten of lifelong experience.

"Oh! O—o—oh!" screamed Tunnygate, turning wildly and clawing through the hedge, dragging Andrew after him. "Oh! O—oh!"

Mrs. Tunnygate rushed to the door in time to see her spouse lumbering up the beach with a white object gyrating in the air behind him.

"What's the matter?" she called out languidly. Then perceiving the matter she hastily followed. The Appleboys were standing on their lawn viewing the whole proceeding with ostentatious indifference.

Up the beach fled Tunnygate, his cries becoming fainter and fainter. The two clam diggers watched him curiously, but made no attempt to go to his assistance. The man in the field leaned luxuriously upon his hoe and surrendered himself to unalloyed delight. Tunnygate was now but a white flicker against the distant sand. His wails had a dying fall: "O—o—oh!"

"Well, we warned him!" remarked Mr. Appleboy to Bashemath with a smile in which, however, lurked a slight trace of apprehension.

"We certainly did!" she replied. Then after a moment she added a trifle anxiously: "I wonder what will happen to Andrew!"

Tunnygate did not return. Neither did Andrew. Secluded in their kitchen living-room the Appleboys heard a motor arrive and through a crack in the door saw it carry Mrs. Tunnygate away bedecked as for some momentous ceremonial. At four o'clock, while Appleboy was digging bait, he observed another motor making its wriggly way along the dunes. It was fitted longitudinally with seats, had a wire grating and was marked "N.Y.P.D." Two policemen in uniform sat in front. Instinctively Appleboy realized that the gods had called him. His heart sank among the clams. Slowly he made his way back to the lawn where the wagon had stopped outside the hedge.

"Hey there!" called out the driver. "Is your name Appleboy?"

Appleboy nodded.

"Put your coat on, then, and come along," directed the other. "I've got a warrant for you."

"Warrant?" stammered Appleboy dizzily.

"What's that?" cried Bashemath, appearing at the door. "Warrant for what?"

The officer slowly descended and handed Appleboy a paper.

"For assault," he replied. "I guess you know what for, all right!"

"We haven't assaulted anybody," protested Mrs. Appleboy heatedly. "Andrew—"

"You can explain all that to the judge," retorted the cop. "Meantime put on your duds and climb in. If you don't expect to spend the night at the station you'd better bring along the deed of your house so you can give bail."

"But who's the warrant for?" persisted Mrs. Appleboy.

"For Enoch Appleboy," retorted the cop wearily. "Can't you read?"

"But Enoch didn't do a thing!" she declared. "It was Andrew!"

"Who's Andrew?" inquired the officer of the law mistrustfully.

"Andrew's a dog," she explained.

"Mr. Tutt," announced Tutt, leaning against his senior partner's door jamb with a formal-looking paper in his hand, "I have landed a case that will delight your legal soul."

"Indeed?" queried the elder lawyer. "I have never differentiated between my legal soul and any other I may possess. However, I assume from your remark that we have been retained in a matter presenting some peculiarly absurd, archaic or otherwise interesting doctrine of law?"

"Not directly," responded Tutt. "Though you will doubtless find it entertaining enough, but indirectly—atmospherically so to speak—it touches upon doctrines of jurisprudence, of religion and of philosophy, replete with historic fascination."

"Good!" exclaimed Mr. Tutt, laying down his stogy. "What kind of a case is it?"

"It's a dog case!" said the junior partner, waving the paper. "The dog bit somebody."

"Ah!" exclaimed Mr. Tutt, perceptibly brightening. "Doubtless we shall find a precedent in Oliver Goldsmith's famous elegy:

 
  "And in that town a dog was found,
    As many dogs there be,
  Both mongrel, puppy, whelp, and hound,
    And curs of low degree."
 

"Only," explained Tutt, "in this case, though the man recovered of the bite, the dog refused to die!"

"And so they want to prosecute the dog? It can't be done. An animal hasn't been brought to the bar of justice for several centuries."

"No, no!" interrupted Tutt. "They don't—"

"There was a case," went on Mr. Tutt reminiscently "Let me see—at Sauvigny, I think it was—about 1457, when they tried a sow and three pigs for killing a child. The court assigned a lawyer to defend her, but like many assigned counsel he couldn't think of anything to say in her behalf. As regards the little pigs he did enter the plea that no animus was shown, that they had merely followed the example of their mother, and that at worst they were under age and irresponsible. However, the court found them all guilty, and the sow was publicly hanged in the market place."

"What did they do with the three little pigs?" inquired Tutt with some interest.

"They were pardoned on account of their extreme youth," said Mr. Tutt, "and turned loose again—with a warning."

"I'm glad of that!" sighed Tutt. "Is that a real case?"

"Absolutely," replied his partner. "I've read it in the Sauvigny records."

"I'll be hanged!" exclaimed Tutt. "I never knew that animals were ever held personally responsible."

"Why, of course they were!" said Mr. Tutt. "Why shouldn't they be? If animals have souls why shouldn't they be responsible for their acts?"

"But they haven't any souls!" protested Tutt.

"Haven't they now?" remarked the elder lawyer. "I've seen many an old horse that had a great deal more conscience than his master. And on general principles wouldn't it be far more just and humane to have the law deal with a vicious animal that had injured somebody than to leave its punishment to an irresponsible and arbitrary owner who might be guilty of extreme brutality?"

"If the punishment would do any good—yes!" agreed Tutt.

"Well, who knows?" meditated Mr. Tutt. "I wonder if it ever does any good? But anybody would have to agree that responsibility for one's acts should depend upon the degree of one's intelligence—and from that point of view many of our friends are really much less responsible than sheep."

"Which, as you so sagely point out, would, however be a poor reason for letting their families punish them in case they did wrong. Just think how such a privilege might be abused! If Uncle John didn't behave himself as his nephews thought proper they could simply set upon him and briskly beat him up."

"Yes, of course, the law even to-day recognizes the right to exercise physical discipline within the family. Even homicide is excusable, under "That's a fine relic of barbarism!" remarked Tutt. "But the child soon passes through that dangerous zone and becomes entitled to be tried for his offenses by a jury of his peers; the animal never does."

"Well, an animal couldn't be tried by a jury of his peers, anyhow," said Mr. Tutt.

"I've seen juries that were more like nanny goats than men!" commentated Tutt. "I'd like to see some of our clients tried by juries of geese or woodchucks."

"The field of criminal responsibility is the No Man's Land of the law," mused Mr. Tutt. "Roughly, mental capacity to understand the nature of one's acts is the test, but it is applied arbitrarily in the case of human beings and a mere point of time is taken beyond which, irrespective of his actual intelligence, a man is held accountable for whatever he does. Of course that is theoretically unsound. The more intelligent a person is the more responsible he should be held to be and the higher the quality of conduct demanded of him by his fellows. Yet after twenty-one all are held equally responsible—unless they're actually insane. It isn't equity! In theory no man or animal should be subject to the power of discretionary punishment on the part of another—even his own father or master. I've often wondered what earthly right we have to make the animals work for us—to bind them to slavery when we denounce slavery as a crime. It would horrify us to see a human being put up and sold at auction. Yet we tear the families of animals apart, subject them to lives of toil, and kill them whenever we see fit. We say we do this because their intelligence is limited and they cannot exercise any discrimination in their conduct, that they are always in the zone of irresponsibility and so have no rights. But I've seen animals that were shrewder than men, and men who were vastly less intelligent than animals."

"Right-o!" assented Tutt. "Take Scraggs, for instance. He's no more responsible than a chipmunk."

"Nevertheless, the law has always been consistent," said Mr. Tutt, "and has never discriminated between animals any more than it has between men on the ground of varying degrees of intelligence. They used to try 'em all, big and little, wild and domesticated, mammals and invertebrates."

"Oh, come!" exclaimed Tutt. "I may not know much law, but—"

"Between 1120 and 1740 they prosecuted in France alone no less than ninety-two animals. The last one was a cow."

"A cow hasn't much intelligence," observed Tutt.

"And they tried fleas," added Mr. Tutt.

"They have a lot!" commented his junior partner. "I knew a flea once, who—"

"They had a regular form of procedure," continued Mr. Tutt, brushing the flea aside, "which was adhered to with the utmost technical accuracy. You could try an individual animal, either in person or by proxy, or you could try a whole family, swarm or herd. If a town was infested by rats, for example, they first assigned counsel—an advocate, he was called—and then the defendants were summoned three times publicly to appear. If they didn't show up on the third and last call they were tried in absentia, and if convicted were ordered out of the country before a certain date under penalty of being exorcised."

"What happened if they were exorcised?" asked Tutt curiously.

"It depended a good deal on the local power of Satan," answered the old lawyer dryly. "Sometimes they became even more prolific and destructive than they were before, and sometimes they promptly died. All the leeches were prosecuted at Lausanne in 1451. A few selected representatives were brought into court, tried, convicted and ordered to depart within a fixed period. Maybe they didn't fully grasp their obligations or perhaps were just acting contemptuously, but they didn't depart and so were promptly exorcised. Immediately they began to die off and before long there were none left in the country."

"I know some rats and mice I'd like to have exorcised," mused Tutt.

"At Autun in the fifteenth century the rats won their case," said Mr. Tutt.

"Who got 'em off?" asked Tutt.

"M. Chassensée, the advocate appointed to defend them. They had been a great nuisance and were ordered to appear in court. But none of them turned up. M. Chassensée therefore argued that a default should not be taken because all the rats had been summoned, and some were either so young or so old and decrepit that they needed more time. The court thereupon granted him an extension. However, they didn't arrive on the day set, and this time their lawyer claimed that they were under duress and restrained by bodily fear—of the townspeople's cats. That all these cats, therefore should first be bound over to keep the peace! The court admitted the reasonableness of this, but the townsfolk refused to be responsible for their cats and the judge dismissed the case!"

"What did Chassensée get out of it?" inquired Tutt.

"There is no record of who paid him or what was his fee."

"He was a pretty slick lawyer," observed Tutt. "Did they ever try birds?"

"Oh, yes!" answered Mr. Tutt. "They tried a cock at Basel in 1474—for the crime of laying an egg."

"Why was that a crime?" asked Tutt. "I should call it a tour de force."

"Be that as it may," said his partner, "from a cock's egg is hatched the cockatrice, or basilisk, the glance of whose eye turns the beholder to stone. Therefore they tried the cock, found him guilty and burned him and his egg together at the stake. That is why cocks don't lay eggs now."

"I'm glad to know that," said Tutt. "When did they give up trying animals?"

"Nearly two hundred years ago," answered Mr. Tutt. "But for some time after that they continued to try inanimate objects for causing injury to people. I've heard they tried one of the first locomotives that ran over a man and declared it forfeit to the crown as a deodand."

"I wonder if you couldn't get 'em to try Andrew," hazarded Tutt, "and maybe declare him forfeited to somebody as a deodand."

"Deodand means 'given to God,'" explained Mr. Tutt.

"Well, I'd give Andrew to God—if God would take him," declared Tutt devoutly.

"But who is Andrew?" asked Mr. Tutt.

"Andrew is a dog," said Tutt, "who bit one Tunnygate, and now the Grand Jury have indicted not the dog, as it is clear from your historical disquisition they should have done, but the dog's owner, Mr. Enoch Appleboy."

"What for?"

"Assault in the second degree with a dangerous weapon."

"What was the weapon?" inquired Mr. Tutt simply.

"The dog."

"What are you talking about?" cried Mr. Tutt. "What nonsense!"

"Yes, it is nonsense!" agreed Tutt. "But they've done it all the same. Read it for yourself!" And he handed Mr. Tutt the indictment.

"The Grand Jury of the County of New York by this indictment accuse Enoch Appleboy of the crime of assault in the second degree, committed as follows:

"Said Enoch Appleboy, late of the Borough of Bronx, City and County aforesaid, on the 21st day of July, in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and fifteen, at the Borough and County aforesaid, with force and arms in and upon one Herman Tunnygate, in the peace of the State and People then and there being, feloniously did willfully and wrongfully make an assault in and upon the legs and body of him the said Herman Tunnygate, by means of a certain dangerous weapon, to wit: one dog, of the form, style and breed known as 'bull,' being of the name of 'Andrew,' then and there being within control of the said Enoch Appleboy, which said dog, being of the name of 'Andrew,' the said Enoch Appleboy did then and there feloniously, willfully and wrongfully incite, provoke, and encourage, then and there being, to bite him, the said Herman Tunnygate, by means whereof said dog 'Andrew' did then and there grievously bite the said Herman Tunnygate in and upon the legs and body of him, the said Herman Tunnygate, and the said Enoch Appleboy thus then and there feloniously did willfully and wrongfully cut, tear, lacerate and bruise, and did then and there by the means of the dog 'Andrew' aforesaid feloniously, willfully and wrongfully inflict grievous bodily harm upon the said Herman Tunnygate, against the form of the statute in such case made and provided, and against the peace of the People of the State of New York and their dignity."

"That," asserted Mr. Tutt, wiping his spectacles, "is a document worthy of preservation in the Congressional Library. Who drew it?"

"Don't know," answered Tutt, "but whoever he was he was a humorist!"

"It's no good. There isn't any allegation of scienter in it," affirmed Mr. Tutt.

"What of it? It says he assaulted Tunnygate with a dangerous weapon. You don't have to set forth that he knew it was a dangerous weapon if you assert that he did it willfully. You don't have to allege in an indictment charging an assault with a pistol that the defendant knew it was loaded."

"But a dog is different!" reasoned Mr. Tutt. "A dog is not per se a dangerous weapon. Saying so doesn't make it so, and that part of the indictment is bad on its face—unless, to be sure, it means that he hit him with a dead dog, which it is clear from the context that he didn't. The other part—that he set the dog on him—lacks the allegation that the dog was vicious and that Appleboy knew it; in other words an allegation of scienter. It ought to read that said Enoch Appleboy 'well knowing that said dog Andrew was a dangerous and ferocious animal and would, if incited, provoked and encouraged, bite the legs and body of him the said Herman—did then and there feloniously, willfully and wrongfully incite, provoke and encourage the said Andrew, and so forth.'"

"I get you!" exclaimed Tutt enthusiastically. "Of course an allegation of scienter is necessary! In other words you could demur to the indictment for insufficiency?"

Mr. Tutt nodded.

"But in that case they'd merely go before the Grand Jury and find another—a good one. It's much better to try and knock the case out on the trial once and for all."

"Well, the Appleboys are waiting to see you," said Tutt. "They are in my office. Bonnie Doon got the case for us off his local district leader, who's a member of the same lodge of the Abyssinian Mysteries—Bonnie's been Supreme Exalted Ruler of the Purple Mountain for over a year—and he's pulled in quite a lot of good stuff, not all dog cases either! Appleboy's an Abyssinian too."

Wile Versus Guile

 
For 'tis the sport to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petar.
 

—HAMLET.

It was a mouse by virtue of which Ephraim Tutt had leaped into fame. It is true that other characters famous in song and story—particularly in "Mother Goose"—have similarly owed their celebrity in whole or part to rodents, but there is, it is submitted, no other case of a mouse, as mouse per se, reported in the annals of the law, except Tutt's mouse, from Doomsday Book down to the present time.

Yet it is doubtful whether without his mouse Ephraim Tutt would ever have been heard of at all, and same would equally have been true if when pursued by the chef's gray cat the mouse aforesaid had jumped in another direction. But as luck would have it, said mouse leaped foolishly into an open casserole upon a stove in the kitchen of the Comers Hotel, and Mr. Tutt became in his way a leader of the bar.

It is quite true that the tragic end of the mouse in question has nothing to do with our present narrative except as a side light upon the vagaries of the legal career, but it illustrates how an attorney if he expects to succeed in his profession, must be ready for anything that comes along—even if it be a mouse.

The two Tutts composing the firm of Tutt & Tutt were both, at the time of the mouse case, comparatively young men. Tutt was a native of Bangor, Maine, and numbered among his childhood friends one Newbegin, a commercial wayfarer in the shingle and clapboard line; and as he hoped at some future time to draw Newbegin's will or to incorporate for him some business venture Tutt made a practise of entertaining his prospective client at dinner upon his various visits to the metropolis, first at one New York hostelry and then at another.

Chance led them one night to the Comers, and there amid the imitation palms and imitation French waiters of the imitation French restaurant Tutt invited his friend Newbegin to select what dish he chose from those upon the bill of fare; and Newbegin chose kidney stew. It was at about that moment that the adventure which has been referred to occurred in the hotel kitchen. The gray cat was cheated of its prey, and in due course the casserole containing the stew was borne into the dining room and the dish was served.

Suddenly Mr. Newbegin contorted his mouth and exclaimed:

"Heck! A mouse!"

It was. The head waiter was summoned, the manager, the owner. Guests and garçons crowded about Tutt and Mr. Newbegin to inspect what had so unexpectedly been found. No one could deny that it was, mouse—cooked mouse; and Newbegin had ordered kidney stew. Then Tutt had had his inspiration.

"You shall pay well for this!" he cried, frowning at the distressed proprietor, while Newbegin leaned piteously against a pâpier-maché pillar. "This is an outrage! You shall be held liable in heavy damages for my client's indigestion!"

And thus Tutt & Tutt got their first case out of Newbegin, for under the influence of the eloquence of Mr. Tutt a jury was induced to give him a verdict of one thousand dollars against the Comers Hotel, which the Court of Appeals sustained in the following words, quoting verbatim from the learned brief furnished by Tutt & Tutt, Ephraim Tutt of counsel:

"The only legal question in the case, or so it appears to us, is whether there is such a sale of food to a guest on the part of the proprietor as will sustain a warranty. If we are not in error, however, the law is settled and has been since the reign of Henry the Sixth. In the Ninth Year Book of that Monarch's reign there is a case in which it was held that 'if I go to a tavern to eat, and the taverner gives and sells me meat and it corrupted, whereby I am made very sick, action lies against him without any express warranty, for there is a warranty in law'; and in the time of Henry the Seventh the learned Justice Keilway said, 'No man can justify selling corrupt victual, but an action on the case lies against the seller, whether the victual was warranted to be good or not.' Now, certainly, whether mouse meat be or be not deleterious to health a guest at a hotel who orders a portion of kidney stew has the right to expect, and the hotel keeper impliedly warrants, that such dish will contain no ingredients beyond those ordinarily placed therein."

"A thousand dollars!" exulted Tutt when the verdict was rendered. "Why, anyone would eat mouse for a thousand dollars!"

The Comers Hotel became in due course a client of Tutt & Tutt, and the mouse which made Mr. Tutt famous did not die in vain, for the case became celebrated throughout the length and breadth of the land, to the glory of the firm and a vast improvement in the culinary conditions existing in hotels.

"Come in, Mr. Barrows! Come right in! I haven't seen you for—well, how long is it?" exclaimed Mr. Tutt, extending a long welcoming arm toward a human scarecrow upon the threshold.

"Five years," answered the visitor. "I only got out day before yesterday. Fourteen months off for good behavior."

He coughed and put down carefully beside him a large dress-suit case marked E.V.B., Pottsville, N.Y.

"Well, well!" sighed Mr. Tutt. "So it is. How time flies!"

"Not in Sing Sing!" replied Mr. Barrows ruefully.

"I suppose not. Still, it must feel good to be out!"

Mr. Barrows made no reply but dusted off his felt hat. He was but the shadow of a man, an old man at that, as was attested by his long gray beard, his faded blue eyes, and the thin white hair about his fine domelike forehead.

"I forget what your trouble was about," said Mr. Tutt gently. "Won't you have a stogy?"

Mr. Barrows shook his head.

"I ain't used to it," he answered. "Makes me cough." He gazed about him vaguely.

"Something about bonds, wasn't it?" asked Mr. Tutt.

"Yes," replied Mr. Barrows; "Great Lakes and Canadian Southern."

"Of course! Of course!"

"A wonderful property," murmured Mr. Barrows regretfully. "The bonds were perfectly good. There was a defect in the foreclosure proceedings which made them a permanent underlying security of the reorganized company—under The Northern Pacific R.R. Co. vs. Boyd; you know—but the court refused to hold that way. They never will hold the way you want, will they?" He looked innocently at Mr. Tutt.

"No," agreed the latter with conviction, "they never will!"

"Now those bonds were as good as gold," went on the old man; "and yet they said I had to go to prison. You know all about it. You were my lawyer."

"Yes," assented Mr. Tutt, "I remember all about it now."

Indeed it had all come back to him with the vividness of a landscape seen during a lightning flash—the crowded court, old Doc Barrows upon the witness stand, charged with getting money on the strength of defaulted and outlawed bonds—picked up heaven knows where—pathetically trying to persuade an unsympathetic court that for some reason they were still worth their face value, though the mortgage securing the debt which they represented had long since been foreclosed and the money distributed.

"I'd paid for 'em—actual cash," he rambled on. "Not much, to be sure—but real money. If I got 'em cheap that was my good luck, wasn't it? It was because my brain was sharper than other folks'! I said they had value and I say so now—only nobody will believe it or take the trouble to find out. I learned a lot up there in Sing Sing too," he continued, warming to his subject. "Do you know, sir, there are fortunes lying all about us? Take gold, for instance! There's a fraction of a grain in every ton of sea water. But the big people don't want it taken out because it would depress the standard of exchange. I say it's a conspiracy—and yet they jailed a man for it! There's great mineral deposits all about just waiting for the right man to come along and develop 'em."

His lifted eye rested upon the engraving of Abraham Lincoln over Mr. Tutt's desk. "There was a man!" he exclaimed inconsequently; then stopped and ran his transparent, heavily veined old hand over his forehead. "Where was I? Let me see. Oh, yes—gold. All those great properties could be bought at one time or another for a song. It needed a pioneer! That's what I was—a pioneer to find the gold where other people couldn't find it. That's not any crime; it's a service to humanity! If only they'd have a little faith—instead of locking you up. The judge never looked up the law about those Great Lakes bonds! If he had he'd have found out I was right! I'd looked it up. I studied law once myself."

"I know," said Mr. Tutt, almost moved to tears by the sight of the wreck before him. "You practised up state, didn't you?"

"Yes," responded Doc Barrows eagerly. "And in Chicago too. I'm a member of the Cook County bar. I'll tell you something! If the Supreme Court of Illinois hadn't been wrong in its law I'd be the richest man in the world—in the whole world!" He grabbed Mr. Tutt by the arm and stared hard into his eyes. "Didn't I show you my papers? I own seven feet of water front clean round Lake Michigan all through the city of Chicago I got it for a song from the man who found out the flaw in the original title deed of 1817; he was dying. 'I'll sell my secret to you,' he says, 'because I'm passing on. May it bring you luck!' I looked it all up and it was just as he said. So I got up a corporation—The Chicago Water Front and Terminal Company—and sold bonds to fight my claim in the courts. But all the people who had deeds to my land conspired against me and had me arrested! They sent me to the penitentiary. There's justice for you!"

"That was too bad!" said Mr. Tutt in a soothing voice. "But after all what good would all that money have done you?"

"I don't want money!" affirmed Doc plaintively. "I've never needed money. I know enough secrets to make me rich a dozen times over. Not money but justice is what I want—my legal rights. But I'm tired of fighting against 'em. They've beaten me! Yes, they've beaten me! I'm going to retire. That's why I came in to see you, Mr. Tutt. I never paid you for your services as my attorney. I'm going away. You see my married daughter lost her husband the other day and she wants me to come up and live with her on the farm to keep her from being lonely. Of course it won't be much like life in Wall Street—but I owe her some duty and I'm getting on—I am, Mr. Tutt, I really am!"

He smiled.

"And I haven't seen Louisa for three years—my only daughter. I shall enjoy being with her. She was such a dear little girl! I'll tell you another secret"—his voice dropped to a whisper—"I've found out there's a gold mine on her farm, only she doesn't know it. A rich vein runs right through her cow pasture. We'll be rich! Wouldn't it be fine, Mr. Tutt, to be rich? Then I'm going to pay you in real money for all you've done for me—thousands! But until then I'm going to let you have these—all my securities; my own, you know, every one of them."

He placed the suitcase in front of Mr. Tutt and opened the clasps with his shaking old fingers. It bulged with bonds, and he dumped them forth until they covered the top of the desk.

"These are my jewels!" he said. "There's millions represented here!" He lifted one tenderly and held it to the light, fresh as it came from the engraver's press—a thousand dollar first-mortgage bond of The Chicago Water Front and Terminal Company. "Look at that! Good as gold—if the courts only knew the law."

He took up a yellow package of valueless obligations upon the top of which an old-fashioned locomotive from whose bell-shaped funnel the smoke poured in picturesque black clouds, dragging behind it a chain of funny little passenger coaches, drove furiously along beside a rushing river through fields rich with corn and wheat amid a border of dollar signs.

"The Great Lakes and Canadian Southern," he crooned lovingly. "The child of my heart! The district attorney kept all the rest—as evidence, he claimed, but some day you'll see he'll bring an action against the Lake Shore or the New York Central based on these bonds. Yes, sir! They're all right!"

He pawed them over, picking out favorites here and there and excitedly extolling the merits of the imaginary properties they represented. There were the repudiated bonds of Southern states and municipalities of railroads upon whose tracks no wheel had ever turned; of factories never built except in Doc Barrows' addled brain; of companies which had defaulted and given stock for their worthless obligations; certificates of oil, mining and land companies; deeds to tracts now covered with sky scrapers in Pittsburgh, St. Louis and New York—each and every one of them not worth the paper they were printed on except to some crook who dealt in high finance. But they were exquisitely engraved, quite lovely to look at, and Doc Barrows gloated upon them with scintillating eyes.

"Ain't they beauties?" he sighed. "Some day—yes sir!—some day they'll be worth real money. I paid it for some of 'em. But they're yours—all yours."

He gathered them up with care and returned them to the suitcase, then fastened the clasps and patted the leather cover with his hand.

"They are yours, sir!" he exclaimed dramatically.

"As you say," agreed Mr. Tutt, "there's gold lying round everywhere if we only had sense enough to look for it. But I think you're wise to retire. After all, you have the satisfaction of knowing that your enterprises were sound even if other people disagreed with you."

"If this was 1819 instead of 1919 I'd own Chicago," began Doc, a gleam appearing in his eye. "But they don't want to upset the status quo—that's why I haven't got a fair chance. But they needn't worry! I'd be generous with 'em—give 'em easy terms—long leases and nominal rents."

"But you'll like living with your daughter, I'm sure," said Mr. Tutt. "It will make a new man of you in no time."

"Healthiest spot in northern New York," exclaimed Doc. "Within two miles of a lake—fishing, shooting, outdoor recreation of all kinds, an ideal site for a mammoth summer hotel."

Mr. Tutt rose and laid his arms round old Doc Barrows' shoulders.

"Thank you a thousand times," he said gratefully, "for the securities. I'll be glad to keep them for you in my vault." His lips puckered in a stealthy smile which he tried hard to conceal.

"Louisa may want to repaper the farmhouse some time," he added to himself.

"Oh, they're all yours to keep!" insisted Doc. "I want you to have them!" His voice trembled.

"Well, well!" answered Mr. Tutt. "Leave it that way; but if you ever should want them they'll be here waiting for you."

"I'm no Indian giver!" replied Doc with dignity. "Give, give, give a thing—never take it back again."

He laughed rather childishly. He was evidently embarrassed.

"Could—could you let me have the loan of seventy-five cents?" he asked shyly.

Down below, inside a doorway upon the other side of the street, Sergeant Murtha of the Detective Bureau waited for Doc Barrows to come out and be arrested again. Murtha had known Doc for fifteen years as a harmless old nut who had rarely succeeded in cheating anybody, but who was regarded as generally undesirable by the authorities and sent away every few years in order to keep him out of mischief. There was no danger that the public would accept Doc's version of the nature or value of his securities, but there was always the chance that some of his worthless bonds—those bastard offsprings of his cracked old brain—would find their way into less honest but saner hands. So Doc rattled about from penitentiary to prison and from prison to madhouse and out again, constantly taking appeals and securing writs of habeas corpus, and feeling mildly resentful, but not particularly so, that people should be so interfering with his business. Now as from force of long habit he peered out of the doorway before making his exit; he looked like one of the John Sargent's prophets gone a little madder than usual—a Jeremiah or a Habakkuk.

"Hello, Doc!" called Murtha in hearty, friendly tones. "Hie spy! Come on out!"

"Oh, how d'ye do, captain!" responded Doc. "How are you? I was just interviewing my solicitor."

"Sorry," said Murtha. "The inspector wants to see you."

Doc flinched.

"But they've just let me go!" he protested faintly.

"It's one of those old indictments—Chicago Water Front or something. Anyhow—Here! Hold on to yourself!"

He threw his arms around the old man, who seemed on the point of falling.

"Oh, captain! That's all over! I served time for that out in Illinois!" For some strange reason all the insanity had gone out of his bearing.

"Not in this state," answered Murtha. New pity for this poor old wastrel took hold upon him. "What were you going to do?"

"I was going to retire, captain," said Doc faintly. "My daughter's husband—he owned a farm up in Cayuga County—well, he died and I was planning to go up there and live with her."

"And sting all the boobs?" grinned Murtha not unsympathetically. "How much money have you got?"

"Seventy-five cents."

"How much is the ticket?"

"About nine dollars," quavered Doc. "But I know a man down on Chatham Square who might buy a block of stock in the Last Chance Gold Mining Company; I could get the money that way."

"What's the Last Chance Gold Mining Company?" asked Murtha sharply.

"It's a company I'm going to organize. I'll tell you a secret, Murtha. There's a vein of gold runs right through my daughter Louisa's cow pasture—she doesn't know anything about it—"

"Oh, hell!" exclaimed Murtha. "Come along to the station. I'll let you have the nine bones. And you can put me down for half a million of the underwriting."

That same evening Mr. Tutt was toasting his carpet slippers before the sea-coal fire in his library, sipping a hot toddy and rereading for the eleventh time the "Lives of the Chancellors" when Miranda, who had not yet finished washing the few dishes incident to her master's meager supper, pushed open the door and announced that a lady was calling.

"She said you'd know her sho' enough, Mis' Tutt," grinned Miranda, swinging her dishrag, "'case you and she used to live tergidder when you was a young man."

This scandalous announcement did not have the startling effect upon the respectable Mr. Tutt which might naturally have been anticipated, since he was quite used to Miranda's forms of expression.

"It must be Mrs. Effingham," he remarked, closing the career of Lord Eldon and removing his feet from the fender.

"Dat's who it is!" answered Miranda. "She's downstairs waitin' to come up."

"Well, let her come," directed Mr. Tutt, wondering what his old boarding-house keeper could want of him, for he had not seen Mrs. Effingham for more than fifteen years, at which time she was well provided with husband, three children and a going business. Indeed, it required some mental adjustment on his part to recognize the withered little old lady in widow's weeds and rusty black with a gold star on her sleeve who so timidly, a moment later, followed Miranda into the room.

"I'm afraid you don't recognize me," she said with a pitiful attempt at faded coquetry. "I don't blame you, Mr. Tutt. You don't look a day older yourself. But a great deal has happened to me!"

"I should have recognized you anywhere," he protested gallantly. "Do sit down, Mrs. Effingham won't you? I am delighted to see you. How would you like a glass of toddy? Just to show there's no ill-feeling!"

He forced a glass into her hand and filled it from the teakettle standing on the hearth, while Miranda brought a sofa cushion and tucked it behind the old lady's back.

Mrs. Effingham sighed, tasted the toddy and leaned back deliciously. She was very wrinkled and her hair under the bonnet was startlingly white in contrast with the crepe of her veil, but there were still traces of beauty in her face.

"I've come to you, Mr. Tutt," she explained apologetically, "because I always said that if I ever was in trouble you'd be the one to whom I should go to help me out."

"What greater compliment could I receive?"

"Well, in those days I never thought that time would come," she went on. "You remember my husband—Jim? Jim died two years ago. And little Jimmy—our eldest—he was only fourteen when you boarded with us—he was killed at the Front last July." She paused and felt for her handkerchief, but could not find it. "I still keep the house; but do you know how old I am, Mr. Tutt? I'm seventy-one! And the two older girls got married long ago and I'm all alone except for Jessie, the youngest—and I haven't told her anything about it."

"Yes?" said Mr. Tutt sympathetically. "What haven't you told her about?"

"My trouble. You see, Jessie's not a well girl—she really ought to live out West somewhere, the doctor says—and Jim and I had saved up all these years so that after we were gone she would have something to live on. We saved twelve thousand dollars—and put it into Government bonds."

"You couldn't have anything safer, at any rate," remarked the lawyer. "I think you did exceedingly well."

"Now comes the awful part of it all!" exclaimed Mrs. Effingham, clasping her hands. "I'm afraid it's gone—gone forever. I should have consulted you first before I did it, but it all seemed so fair and above-board that I never thought."

"Have you got rid of your bonds?"

"Yes—no—that is, the bank has them. You see I borrowed ten thousand dollars on them and gave it to Mr. Badger to invest in his oil company for me."

Mr. Tutt groaned inwardly. Badger was the most celebrated of Wall Street's near-financiers.

"Where on earth did you meet Badger?" he demanded.

"Why, he boarded with me—for a long time," she answered. "I've no complaint to make of Mr. Badger. He's a very handsome polite gentleman. And I don't feel altogether right about coming to you and saying anything that might be taken against him—but lately I've heard so many things—"

"Don't worry about Badger!" growled Mr. Tutt. "How did you come to invest in his oil stock?"

"I was there when he got the telegram telling how they had found oil on the property; it came one night at dinner. He was tickled to death. The stock had been selling at three cents a share, and, of course, after the oil was discovered he said it would go right up to ten dollars. But he was real nice about it—he said anybody who had been living there in the house could share his good fortune with him, come in on the ground floor, and have it just the same for three cents. A week later there came a photograph of the gusher and almost all of us decided to buy stock."

At this point in the narrative Mr. Tutt kicked the coal hod violently and uttered a smothered ejaculation.

"Of course I didn't have any ready money," explained Mrs. Effingham, "but I had the bonds—they only paid two per cent and the oil stock was going to pay twenty—and so I took them down to the bank and borrowed ten thousand dollars on them. I had to sign a note and pay five per cent interest. I was making the difference—fifteen hundred dollars every year."

"What has it paid?" demanded Mr. Tutt ironically.

"Twenty per cent," replied Mrs. Effingham. "I get Mr. Badger's check regularly every six months."

"How many times have you got it?"

"Twice."

"Well, why don't you like your investment?" inquired Mr. Tutt blandly. "I'd like something that would pay me twenty per cent a year!"

"Because I'm afraid Mr. Badger isn't quite truthful, and one of the ladies—that old Mrs. Channing; you remember her, don't you—the one with the curls?—she tried to sell her stock and nobody would make a bid on it at all—and when she spoke to Mr. Badger about it he became very angry and swore right in front of her. Then somebody told me that Mr. Badger had been arrested once for something—and—and—Oh, I wish I hadn't given him the money, because if it's lost Jessie won't have anything to live on after I'm dead—and she's too sick to work. What do you think, Mr. Tutt? Do you suppose Mr. Badger would buy the stock back?"

Mr. Tutt smiled grimly.

"Not if I know him! Have you got your stock with you?"

She nodded. Fumbling in her black bag she pulled forth a flaring certificate—of the regulation kind, not even engraved—which evidenced that Sarah Maria Ann Effingham was the legal owner of three hundred and thirty thousand shares of the capital stock of the Great Geyser Texan Petroleum and Llano Estacado Land Company.

Mr. Tutt took it gingerly between his thumb and forefinger. It was signed ALFRED HAYNES BADGER, Pres., and he had an almost irresistible temptation to twist it into a spill and light a stogy with it. But he used a match instead, while Mrs. Effingham watched him apprehensively. Then he handed the stock back to her and poured out another glass of toddy.

"Ever been in Mr. Badger's office?"

"Oh, yes!" she answered. "It's a lovely office. You can see 'way down the harbor—and over to New Jersey. It's real elegant."

"Would you mind going there again? That is, are you on friendly terms with him?"

Already a strange, rather desperate plan was half formulated in his mind.

"Oh, we're perfectly friendly," she smiled. "I generally go down there to get my check."

"Whose check is it—his or the company's?"

"I really don't know," she answered simply. "What difference would it make?"

"Oh, nothing—except that he might claim that he'd loaned you the money."

"Loaned it? To me?"

"Why, yes. One hears of such things."

"But it is my money!" she cried, stiffening.

"You paid that for the stock."

She shook her head helplessly.

"I don't understand these things," she murmured. "If Jim had been alive it wouldn't have happened. He was so careful."

"Husbands have some uses occasionally."

Suddenly she put her hands to her face.

"Oh, Mr. Tutt! Please get the money back from him. If you don't something terrible will happen to Jessie!"

"I'll do my best," he said gently, laying his hand on her fragile shoulder. "But I may not be able to do it—and anyhow I'll need your help."

"What can I do?"

"I want you to go down to Mr. Badger's office to-morrow morning and tell him that you are so much pleased with your investment that you would like to turn all your securities over to him to sell and put the money into the Great Geyser Texan Petroleum and Llano Estacado Land Company."

He rolled out the words with unction.

"But I don't!"

"Oh, yes, you do!" he assured her. "You want to do just what I tell you, don't you?"

"Of course," she answered. "But I thought you didn't like Mr. Badger's oil company."

"Whether I like it or not makes no difference. I want you to say just what I tell you."

"Oh, very well, Mr. Tutt."

"Then you must tell him about the note, and that first it will have to be paid off."

"Yes."

"And then you must hand him a letter which I will dictate to you now."

She flushed slightly, her eyes bright with excitement.

"You're sure it's perfectly honest, Mr. Tutt? I wouldn't want to do anything unfair!"

"Would you be honest with a burglar?"

"But Mr. Badger isn't a burglar!"

"No—he's only about a thousand times worse. He's a robber of widows and orphans. He isn't man enough to take a chance at housebreaking."

"I don't know what you mean," she sighed. "Where shall I write?"

Mr. Tutt cleared a space upon his desk, handed her a pad and dipped a pen in the ink while she took off her gloves.

"Address the note to the bank," he directed.

She did so.

"Now say: 'Kindly deliver to Mr. Badger all the securities I have on deposit with you, whenever he pays my note. Very truly yours, Sarah Maria Ann Effingham.'"

"But I don't want him to have my securities!" she retorted.

"Oh, you won't mind! You'll be lucky to get Mr. Badger to take back your oil stock on any terms. Leave the certificate with me," laughed Mr. Tutt, rubbing his long thin hands together almost gleefully. "And now as it is getting rather late perhaps you will do me the honor of letting me escort you home."

It was midnight before Mr. Tutt went to bed. In the first place he had felt himself so neglectful of Mrs. Effingham that after he had taken her home he had sat there a long time talking over the old lady's affairs and making the acquaintance of the phthisical Jessie, who turned out to be a wistful little creature with great liquid eyes and a delicate transparent skin that foretold only too clearly what was to be her future. There was only one place for her, Mr. Tutt told himself—Arizona; and by the grace of God she should go there, Badger or no Badger!

As the old lawyer walked slowly home with his hands clasped behind his back he pondered upon the seeming mockery and injustice of the law that forced a lonely, half-demented old fellow with the fixed delusion that he was a financier behind prison bars and left free the sharp slick crook who had no bowels or mercies and would snatch away the widow's mite and leave her and her consumptive daughter to die in the poorhouse. Yet such was the case, and there they all were! Could you blame people for being Bolsheviks? And yet old Doc Barrows was as far from a Bolshevik as anyone could well be.

Mr. Tutt passed a restless night, dreaming, when he slept at all, of mines from which poured myriads of pieces of yellow gold, of gushers spouting columns of blood-red oil hundreds of feet into the air, and of old-fashioned locomotives dragging picturesque trains of cars across bright green prairies studded with cacti in the shape of dollar signs. Old Doc Barrows was with him, and from time to time he would lean toward him and whisper "Listen, Mr. Tutt, I'll tell you a secret! There's a vein of gold runs right through my daughter's cow pasture!"

When Willie next morning at half past eight reached the office he found the door already unlocked and Mr. Tutt busy at his desk, up to his elbows in a great mass of bonds and stock certificates.

"Gee!" he exclaimed to Miss Sondheim, the stenographer, when she made her appearance at a quarter past nine. "Just peek in the old man's door if you want to feel rich! Say, he must ha' struck pay dirt! I wonder if we'll all get a raise?"

But all the securities on Mr. Tutt's desk would not have justified even the modest advance of five dollars in Miss Sondheim's salary, and their employer was merely sorting out and making an inventory of Doc Barrows' imaginary wealth. By the time Mrs. Effingham arrived by appointment at ten o'clock he had them all arranged and labeled; and in a special bundle neatly tied with a piece of red tape were what on their face were securities worth upward of seventy thousand dollars. There were ten of the beautiful bonds of the Great Lakes and Canadian Southern Railroad Company with their miniature locomotives and fields of wheat, and ten equally lovely bits of engraving belonging to the long-since defunct Bluff Creek and Iowa Central, ten more superb lithographs issued by the Mohawk and Housatonic in 1867 and paid off in 1882, and a variety of gorgeous chromos of Indians and buffaloes, and of factories and steamships spouting clouds of soft-coal smoke; and on the top of all was a pile of the First Mortgage Gold Six Per Cent obligations of the Chicago Water Front and Terminal Company—all of them fresh and crisp, with that faintly acrid smell which though not agreeable to the nostrils nevertheless delights the banker's soul.

"Ah! Good morning to you, Mrs. Effingham!" Mr. Tutt cried, waving her in when that lady was announced. "You are not the only millionaire, you see! In fact, I've stumbled into a few barrels of securities myself—only I didn't pay anything for them."

"Gracious!" cried Mrs. Effingham, her eyes lighting with astonishment. "Wherever did you get them? And such exquisite pictures! Look at that lamb!"

"It ought to have been a wolf!" muttered Mr. Tutt. "Well, Mrs. Effingham, I've decided to make you a present—just a few pounds of Chicago Water Front and Canadian Southern—those over there in that pile; and now if you say so we'll just go along to your bank."

"Give them to me!" she protested. "What on earth for? You're joking, Mr. Tutt."

"Not a bit of it!" he retorted. "I don't make any pretensions as to the value of my gift, but they're yours for whatever they're worth."

He wrapped them carefully in a piece of paper and returned the balance to Doc Barrows' dress-suit case.

"Aren't you afraid to leave them that way?" she asked, surprised.

"Not at all! Not at all!" he laughed. "You see there are fortunes lying all about us everywhere if we only know where to look. Now the first thing to do is to get your bonds back from the bank."

Mr. Thomas McKeever, the popular loan clerk of the Mustardseed National, was just getting ready for the annual visit of the state bank examiner when Mr. Tutt, followed by Mrs. Effingham, entered the exquisitely furnished boudoir where lady clients were induced by all modern conveniences except manicures and shower baths to become depositors. Mr. Tutt and Mr. McKeever belonged to the same Saturday evening poker game at the Colophon Club, familiarly known as The Bible Class.

"Morning, Tom," said Mr. Tutt. "This is my client, Mrs. Effingham. You hold her note, I believe, for ten thousand dollars secured by some government bonds. She has a use for those bonds and I thought that you might be willing to take my indorsement instead. You know I'm good for the money."

"Why, I guess we can accommodate her, Mr. Tutt!" answered the Chesterfieldian Mr. McKeever. "Certainly we can. Sit down, Mrs. Effingham, while I send for your bonds. See the morning paper?"

Mrs. Effingham blushingly acknowledged that she had not seen the paper. In fact, she was much too excited to see anything.

"Sign here!" said the loan clerk, placing the note before the lawyer.

Mr. Tutt indorsed it in his strange, humpbacked chirography.

"Here are your bonds," said Mr. McKeever, handing Mrs. Effingham a small package in a manila envelope. She took them in a half-frightened way, as if she thought she was doing something wrong.

"And now," said Mr. Tutt, "the lady would like a box in your safe-deposit vaults; a small one—about five dollars a year—will do. She has quite a bundle of securities with her, which I am looking into. Most if not all of them are of little or no value, but I have told her she might just as well leave them as security for what they are worth, in addition to my indorsement. Really it's just a slick game of ours to get the bank to look after them for nothing. Isn't it, Mrs. Effingham?"

"Ye-es!" stammered Mrs. Effingham, not understanding what he was talking about.

"Well," answered Mr. McKeever, "we never refuse collateral. I'll put the bonds with the note—" His eye caught the edges of the bundle. "Great Scott, Tutt! What are you leaving all these bonds here for against that note? There must be nearly a hundred thousand dol—"

"I thought you never refused collateral, Mr. McKeever!" challenged Mr. Tutt sternly.

Twenty minutes later the exquisite blonde that acted as Mr. Badger's financial accomplice learned from Mrs. Effingham's faltering lips that the widow would like to see the great man in regard to further investments.

"How does it look, Mabel?" inquired the financier from behind his massive mahogany desk covered with a six by five sheet of plate glass. "Is it a squeal or a fall?"

"Easy money," answered Mabel with confidence. "She wants to put a mortgage on the farm."

"Keep her about fourteen minutes, tell her the story of my philanthropies, and then shoot her in," directed Badger.

So Mrs. Effingham listened politely while Mabel showed her the photographs of Mr. Badger's home for consumptives out in Tyrone, New Mexico, and of his wife and children, taken on the porch of his summer home at Seabright, New Jersey; and then, exactly fourteen minutes having elapsed, she was shot in.

"Ah! Mrs. Effingham! Delighted! Do be seated!" Mr. Badger's smile was like that of the boa constrictor about to swallow the rabbit.

"About my oil stock," hesitated Mrs. Effingham.

"Well, what about it?" demanded Badger sharply. "Are you dissatisfied with your twenty per cent?"

"Oh, no!" stammered the old lady. "Not at all! I just thought if I could only get the note paid off at the Mustardseed Bank I might ask you to sell the collateral and invest the proceeds in your gusher."

"Oh!" Mr. Badger beamed with pleasure. "Do you really wish to have me dispose of your securities for you?"

He did not regard it as necessary to inquire into the nature of the collateral. If it was satisfactory to the Mustardseed National it must of course exceed considerably the amount of the note.

"Yes," answered Mrs. Effingham timidly; and she handed him the letter dictated by Mr. Tutt.

"Well," replied Mr. Badger thoughtfully, after reading it, "what you ask is rather unusual—quite unusual, I may say, but I think I may be able to attend to the matter for you. Leave it in my hands and think no more about it. How have you been, my dear Mrs. Effingham? You're looking extraordinarily well!"

Mr. McKeever had about concluded his arrangements for welcoming the state bank examiner when the telephone on his desk buzzed, and on taking up the receiver he heard the ingratiating voice of Alfred Haynes Badger.

"Is this the Loan Department of the Mustardseed National?"

"It is," he answered shortly.

"I understand you hold a note of a certain Mrs. Effingham for ten thousand dollars. May I ask if it is secured?"

"Who is this?" snapped McKeever.

"One of her friends," replied Mr. Badger amicably.

"Well, we don't discuss our clients' affairs over the telephone. You had better come in here if you have any inquiries to make."

"But I want to pay the note," expostulated Mr. Badger.

"Oh! Well, anybody can pay the note who wants to."

"And of course in that case you would turn over whatever collateral is on deposit to secure the note?"

"If we were so directed."

"May I ask what collateral there is?"

"I don't know."

"There is some collateral, I suppose?"

"Yes."

"Well, I have an order from Mrs. Effingham directing the bank to turn over whatever securities she has on deposit as collateral, on my payment of the note."

"In that case you'll get 'em," said Mr. McKeever gruffly. "I'll get them out and have 'em ready for you."

"Here is my certified check for ten thousand; dollars," announced Alfred Haynes Badger a few minutes later. "And here is the order from Mrs. Effingham. Now will you kindly turn over to me all the securities?"

Mr. McKeever, knowing something of the reputation of Mr. Badger, first called up the bank which had certified the latter's check, and having ascertained that the certification was genuine he marked Mrs. Effingham's note as paid and then took down from the top of his roll-top desk the bundle of beautifully engraved securities given him by Mr. Tutt. Badger watched him greedily.

"Thank you," he gurgled, stuffing them into his pocket. "Much obliged for your courtesy. Perhaps you would like me to open an account here?"

"Oh, anybody can open an account who wants to," remarked Mr. McKeever dryly, turning away from him to something else.

Mr. Badger fairly flew back to his office. The exquisite blonde had hardly ever before seen him exhibit so much agitation.

"What have you pulled this time?" she inquired dreamily. "Father's daguerreotype and the bracelet of mother's hair?"

"I've grabbed off the whole bag of tricks!" he cried. "Look at 'em! We've not seen so much of the real stuff in six months.

"Ten—twenty—thirty—forty—fifty—By gad!—sixty—seventy!"

"What are they?" asked Mabel curiously. "Some bonds—what?"

"I should say so!" he retorted gaily. "Say, girlie, I'll give you the swellest meal of your young life to-night! Chicago Water Front and Terminal, Great Lakes and Canadian Southern, Mohawk and Housatonic, Bluff Creek and Iowa Central. 'Oh, Mabel!'"

It was at just about this period of the celebration that Mr. Tutt entered the outer office and sent in his name; and as Mr. Badger was at the height of his good humor he condescended to see him.

"I have called," said Mr. Tutt, "in regard to the bonds belonging to my client, Mrs. Effingham. I see you have them on the desk there in front of you. Unfortunately she has changed her mind. She has decided not to have you dispose of her securities."

Mr. Badger's expression instantly became hostile and defiant.

"It's too late!" he replied. "I have paid off her note and I am going to carry out the rest of the arrangement."

"Oh," said Mr. Tutt, "so you are going to sell all her securities and put the proceeds into your bogus oil company—whether she wishes it or not? If you do the district attorney will get after you."

"I stand on my rights," snarled Badger. "Anyhow I can sell enough of the securities to pay myself back my ten thousand dollars."

"And then you'll steal the rest?" inquired Mr. Tutt. "Be careful, my dear sir! Remember there is such a thing as equity, and such a place as Sing Sing."

Badger gave a cynical laugh.

"You're too late, my friend! I've got a written order—a written order—from your client, as you call her. She can't go back on it now. I've got the bonds and I'm going to dispose of them."

"Very well," said Mr. Tutt tolerantly. "You can do as you see fit. But"—and he produced ten genuine one-thousand-dollar bills and exhibited them to Mr. Badger at a safe distance—"I now on behalf of Mrs. Effingham make you a legal tender of the ten thousand dollars you have just paid out to cancel her note, and I demand the return of the securities. Incidentally I beg to inform you that they are not worth the paper they are printed on."

"Indeed!" sneered Badger. "Well, my dear! old friend, you might have saved yourself the trouble of coming round here. You and your client can go straight to hell. You can keep the money; I'll keep the bonds. See?"

Mr. Tutt sighed and shook his head hopelessly.

Then he put the bills back into his pocket and started slowly for the door.

"You absolutely and finally decline to give up the securities?" he asked plaintively.

"Absolutely and finally?" mocked Mr. Badger with a sweeping bow.

"Dear! Dear!" almost moaned Mr. Tutt. "I'd heard of you a great many times but I never realized before what an unscrupulous man you were! Anyhow, I'm glad to have had a look at you. By the way, if you take the trouble to dig through all that junk you'll find the certificate of stock in the Great Jehoshaphat Oil Company you used to flim flam Mrs. Effingham with out of her ten thousand dollars. Maybe you can use it on someone else! Anyhow, she's about two thousand dollars to the good. It isn't every widow who can get twenty per cent and then get her money back in full."

The Hepplewhite Tramp

"No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or disseized or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way harmed—nor will we go upon or send upon him—save by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land."—MAGNA CHARTA, Sec. 39.

"'Somebody has been lying in my bed—and here she is,' cried the Little, Small, Wee Bear, in his little, small, wee voice."—THE THREE BEARS.

One of the nicest men in New York was Mr. John De Puyster Hepplewhite. The chief reason for his niceness was his entire satisfaction with himself and the padded world in which he dwelt, where he was as protected from all shocking, rough or otherwise unpleasant things as a shrinking débutante from the coarse universe of fact. Being thus shielded from every annoyance and irritation by a host of sycophants he lived serenely in an atmosphere of unruffled calm, gazing down benignly and with a certain condescension from the rarefied altitude of his Fifth Avenue windows, pleased with the prospect of life as it appeared to him to be and only slightly conscious of the vileness of his fellow man.

Certainly he was not conscious at all of the existence of the celebrated law firm of Tutt & Tutt. Such vulgar persons were not of his sphere. His own lawyers were gray-headed, dignified, rather smart attorneys who moved only in the best social circles and practised their profession with an air of elegance. When Mr. Hepplewhite needed advice he sent for them and they came, chatted a while in subdued easy accents, and went away—like cheerful undertakers. Nobody ever spoke in loud tones near Mr. Hepplewhite because Mr. Hepplewhite did not like anything loud—not even clothes. He was, as we have said, quite one of the nicest men in New York.

At the moment when Mrs. Witherspoon made her appearance he was sitting in his library reading a copy of "Sainte-Beuve" and waiting for Bibby, the butler, to announce tea. It was eight minutes to five and there was still eight minutes to wait; so Mr. Hepplewhite went on reading "Sainte-Beuve."

Then "Mrs. Witherspoon!" intoned Bibby, and Mr. Hepplewhite rose quickly, adjusted his eye-glass and came punctiliously forward.

"My dear Mrs. Witherspoon!" he exclaimed crisply. "I am really delighted to see you. It was quite charming of you to give me this week-end."

"Adorable of you to ask me Mr. Hepplewhite!" returned the lady. "I've been looking forward to this visit for weeks. What a sweet room? Is that a Corot?"

"Yes—yes!" murmured her host modestly. "Rather nice, I think, eh? I'll show you my few belongings after tea. Now will you go upstairs first or have tea first?"

"Just as you say," beamed Mrs. Witherspoon. "Perhaps I had better run up and take off my veil."

"Whichever you prefer," he replied chivalrously. "Do exactly as you like. Tea will be ready in a couple of minutes."

"Then I think I'll run up."

"Very well. Bibby, show Mrs. Witherspoon—"

"Very good, sir. This way, please, madam. Stockin', fetch Mrs. Witherspoon's bag from the hall."

Mr. Hepplewhite stood rubbing his delicate hands in front of the fire, telling himself what a really great pleasure it was to have Mrs. Witherspoon staying with him over the week-end. He was having a dinner party for her that evening—of forty-eight. All that it had been necessary for him to do to have the party was to tell Mr. Sadducee, his secretary, that he wished to have it and direct him to send the invitations from List Number One and then to tell Bibby the same thing and to order the chef to serve Dinner Number Four—only to have Johannisberger Cabinet instead of Niersteiner.

All these things were highly important to Mr. Hepplewhite, for upon the absolute smoothness with which tea and dinner were served and the accuracy with which his valet selected socks to match his tie his entire happiness, to say nothing of his peace of mind, depended. His daily life consisted of a series of subdued and nicely adjusted social events. They were forecast for months ahead. Nothing was ever done on the spur of the moment at Mr. Hepplewhite's. He could tell to within a couple of seconds just exactly what was going to occur during the balance of the day, the remainder of Mrs. Witherspoon's stay and the rest of the month. It would have upset him very much not to know exactly what was going to happen, for he was a meticulously careful host and being a creature of habit the unexpected was apt to agitate him extremely.

So now as he stood rubbing his hands it was in the absolute certainty that in just a few more seconds one of the footmen would appear between the tapestry portières bearing aloft a silver tray with the tea things, and then Bibby would come in with the paper, and presently Mrs. Witherspoon would come down and she would make tea for him and they would talk about tea, and Aiken, and whether the Abner Fullertons were going to get a domestic or foreign divorce, and how his bridge was these days. It would be very nice, and he rubbed his hands very gently and waited for the Dresden clock to strike five in the subdued and decorous way that it had. But he did not hear it strike.

Instead a shriek rang out from the hall above, followed by yells and feet pounding down the stairs. Mr. Hepplewhite turned cold and something hard rose up in his throat. His sight dimmed. And then Bibby burst in, pale and with protruding eyes.

"There was a man in the guest room!" he gasped. "Stockin's got him. What shall we do?"

At that moment Mrs. Witherspoon followed.

"Oh, Mr. Hepplewhite! Oh, Mr. Hepplewhite!" she gasped, staggering toward him.

Mr. Hepplewhite would have taken her in his arms and attempted to comfort her only it was not done in Mr. Hepplewhite's set unless under extreme provocation. So he pressed an armchair upon her; or, rather, pressed her into an armchair; and leaned against the bookcase feeling very faint. He was extremely agitated.

"S-send for the police! S-s-send for B-burk!" he stuttered. Burk was a husky watchman who also acted as a personal guard for Mr. Hepplewhite.

An alarm began to beat a deafening staccato in the hall outside the library. Bibby rushed gurgling from the room. Several tall men in knee breeches and silk stockings dashed excitedly up and down stairs using expressions such as had never before been heard by Mr. Hepplewhite, and the clanging gong of a police wagon was audible as it clattered up the Avenue.

"Oh, Mr. Hepplewhite," whispered Mrs. Witherspoon, unconsciously seeking his hand. "I never was so frightened in my life!"

Then the gong stopped and the police poured into the house and up the stairs. There were muffled noises and suppressed ejaculations of "Aw, come on there, now! I've got him, Mike! No funny business now, you! Come along quiet!"

The whole house seemed blue with policemen, and Mr. Hepplewhite became aware of a very fat man in a blue cap marked Captain, who removed the cap deferentially and otherwise indicated that he was making obeisance. Behind the fat man stood three other equally fat men, who held between them with grim firmness, by arm, neck and shoulder, a much smaller—in fact, quite a small—man shabby, unkempt, and with a desperate look upon his unshaven face.

"We've got him, all right, Mr. Hepplewhite!" exulted the captain, obviously grateful that God had vouchsafed to deliver the criminal into his and not into other hands. "Shall I take him to the house—or do you want to examine him?"

"I?" ejaculated Mr. Hepplewhite. "Mercy, no! Take him away as quickly as possible!"

"As you say, sir," wheezed the captain. "Come along, boys! Take him over to court and arraign him!"

"Yes, do!" urged Mrs. Witherspoon. "And arraign him as hard as you can; for he really frightened me nearly to death, the terrible man!"

"Leave him to me, ma'am!" adjured the captain "Will you have your butler act as complainant sir?" he asked.

"Why—yes—Bibby will do whatever is proper," agreed Mr. Hepplewhite. "It will not be necessary for me to go to court, will it?"

"Oh, no!" answered the captain. "Mr. Bibby will do all right. I suppose we had better make the charge burglary, sir?"

"I suppose so," replied Mr. Hepplewhite vaguely.

"Get on, boys," ordered the captain. "Good evening, sir. Good evening, ma'am. Step lively, you!"

The blue cloud faded away, bearing with it both Bibby and the burglar. Then the third footman brought the belated tea.

"What a frightful thing to have happen!" grieved Mrs. Witherspoon as she poured out the tea for Mr. Hepplewhite. "You don't take cream, do you?"

"No, thanks," he answered. "I find too much cream hard to digest. I have to be rather careful, you know. By the way, you haven't told me where the burglar was or what he was doing when you went into the room."

"He was in the bed," said Mrs. Witherspoon.

"In the 'Decay of Lying,' Mr. Tutt," said Tutt thoughtfully, as he dropped in for a moment's chat after lunch, "Oscar Wilde says, 'There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture.'"

The senior partner removed his horn-rimmed spectacles and carefully polished the lenses with a bit of chamois, which he produced from his watch pocket, meanwhile resting the muscles of his forehead by elevating his eyebrows until he somewhat resembled an inquiring but good-natured owl.

"That's plain enough," he replied. "The most highly cultivated people are often the most unscrupulous. I go Oscar one better and declare that there is a distinct relationship between crime and progress!"

"You don't say, now!" ejaculated Tutt. "How do you make that out?"

Mr. Tutt readjusted his spectacles and slowly selected a stogy from the bundle in the dusty old cigar box.

"Crime," he announced, "is the violation of the will of the majority as expressed in the statutes. The law is wholly arbitrary and depends upon public opinion. Acts which are crimes in one century or country become virtues in another, and vice versa. Moreover, there is no difference, except one of degree, between infractions of etiquette and of law, each of which expresses the feelings and ideas of society at a given moment. Violations of good taste, manners, morals, illegalities, wrongs, crimes—they are all fundamentally the same thing, the insistence on one's own will in defiance of society as a whole. The man who keeps his hat on in a drawing-room is essentially a criminal because he prefers his own way of doing things to that adopted by his fellows."

"That's all right," answered Tutt. "But how about progress?"

"Why, that is simple," replied his partner. "The man who refuses to bow to habit, tradition, law—who thinks for himself and acts for himself, who evolves new theories, who has the courage of his convictions and stakes his life and liberty upon them—that man is either a statesman, a prophet or a criminal. And in the end he is either hailed as a hero and a liberator or is burned, cast into prison or crucified."

Tutt looked interested.

"Well, now," he returned, helping himself from the box, "I never thought of it, but, of course, it's true. Your proposition is that progress depends on development and development depends on new ideas. If the new idea is contrary to those of society it is probably criminal. If its inventor puts it across, gets away with it, and persuades society that he is right he is a leader in the march of progress. If he fails he goes to jail. Hence the relationship between crime and progress. Why not say that crime is progress?"

"If successful it is," answered Mr. Tutt. "But the moment it is successful it ceases to be crime."

"I get you," nodded Tutt. "Here to-day it is a crime to kill one's grandmother; but I recall reading that among certain savage tribes to do so is regarded as a highly virtuous act. Now if I convince society that to kill one's grandmother is a good thing it ceases to be a crime. Society has progressed. I am a public benefactor."

"And if you don't persuade society you go to the chair," remarked Mr. Tutt laconically.

"To use another illustration," exclaimed Tutt, warming to the subject, "the private ownership of property at the present time is recognized and protected by the law, but if we had a Bolshevik government it might be a crime to refuse to share one's property with others."

"In that case if you took your share of another's property by force, instead of being a thief you would be a Progressive," smiled his partner.

Tutt robbed his forehead.

"Looking at it that way, you know," said he, "makes it seem as if criminals were rather to be admired."

"Well, some of them are, and a great multitude of them certainly were," answered Mr. Tutt. "All the early Christian martyrs were criminals in the sense that they were law-breakers."

"And Martin Luther," suggested Tutt.

"And Garibaldi," added Mr. Tutt.

"And George Washington—maybe?" hazarded the junior partner.

Mr. Tutt shrugged his high shoulders.

"You press the analogy a long way, but—in a sense every successful revolutionist was in the beginning a criminal—as every rebel is and perforce must be," he replied.

"So," said Tutt, "if you're a big enough criminal you cease to be a criminal at all. If you're going to be a crook, don't be a piker—it's too risky. Grab everything in sight. Exterminate a whole nation, if possible. Don't be a common garden highwayman or pirate; be a Napoleon or a Willy Hohenzollern."

"You have the idea," replied Mr. Tutt. "Crime is unsuccessful defiance of the existing order of things. Once rebellion rises to the dignity of revolution murder becomes execution and the murderers become belligerents. Therefore, as all real progress involves a change in or defiance of existing law, those who advocate progress are essentially criminally minded, and if they attempt to secure progress by openly refusing to obey the law they are actual criminals. Then if they prevail, and from being in the minority come into power, they are taken out of jail, banquets are given in their honor, and they are called patriots and heroes. Hence the close connection between crime and progress."

Tutt scratched his chin doubtfully.

"That sounds pretty good," he admitted, "but"—and he shook his head—"there's something the matter with it. It doesn't work except in the case of crimes involving personal rights and liberties. I see your point that all progressives are criminals in the sense that they are 'agin the law' as it is, but—I also see the hole in your argument, which is that the fact that all progressives are criminals doesn't make all criminals progressive. Your proposition is only a half truth."

"You're quite wrong about my theory being a half truth," retorted Mr. Tutt. "It is fundamentally sound. The fellow who steals a razor or a few dollars is regarded as a mean thief, but if he loots a trust company or takes a million he's a financier. The criminal law, I maintain, is administered for the purpose of protecting the strong from the weak, the successful from the unsuccessful the rich from the poor. And, sir"—Mr. Tutt here shook his fist at an imaginary jury—"the man who wears a red necktie in violation of the taste of his community or eats peas with his knife is just as much a criminal as a man who spits on the floor when there's a law against it. Don't you agree with me?"

"I do not!" replied Tutt. "But that makes no difference. Nevertheless what you say about the criminal law being devised to protect the rich from the poor interests me very much—very much indeed But I think there's a flaw in that argument too, isn't there? Your proposition is true only to the extent that the criminal law is invoked to protect property rights—and not life and liberty. Naturally the laws that protect property are chiefly of benefit to those who have it—the rich."

"However that may be," declared Mr. Tutt fiercely, "I claim that the criminal laws are administered, interpreted and construed in favor of the rich as against the liberties of the poor, for the simple reason that the administrators of the criminal law desire to curry favor with the powers that be."

"The moral of which all is," retorted the other, "that the law ought to be very careful about locking up people."

"At any rate those who have violated laws upon which there can be a legitimate difference of opinion," agreed Mr. Tutt.

"That's where we come in," said Tutt. "We make the difference—even if there never was any before."

Mr. Tutt chuckled.

"We perform a dual service to society," he declared. "We prevent the law from making mistakes and so keep it from falling into disrepute, and we show up its weak points and thus enable it to be improved."

"And incidentally we keep many a future statesman and prophet from going to prison," said Tutt. "The name of the last one was Solomon Rabinovitch—and he was charged with stealing a second-hand razor from a colored person described in the papers as one Morris Cohen."

How long this specious philosophic discussion would have continued is problematical had it not been interrupted by the entry of a young gentleman dressed with a somewhat ostentatious elegance, whose wizened face bore an expression at once of vast good nature and of a deep and subtle wisdom.

It was clear that he held an intimate relationship to Tutt & Tutt from the familiar way in which he returned their cordial, if casual, salutations.

"Well, here we are again," remarked Mr. Doon pleasantly, seating himself upon the corner of Mr. Tutt's desk and spinning his bowler hat upon the forefinger of his left hand. "The hospitals are empty. The Tombs is as dry as a bone. Everybody's good and every day'll be Sunday by and by."

"How about that man who stole a razor?" asked Tutt.

"Discharged on the ground that the fact that he had a full beard created a reasonable doubt," replied Doon. "Honestly there's nothing doing in my line—unless you want a tramp case."

"A tramp case!" exclaimed Tutt & Tutt.

"I suppose you'd call it that," he answered blandly. "I don't think he was a burglar. Anyhow he's in the Tombs now, shouting for a lawyer. I listened to him and made a note of the case."

Mr. Tutt pushed over the box of stogies and leaned back attentively.

"You know the Hepplewhite house up on Fifth Avenue—that great stone one with the driveway?"

The Tutts nodded.

"Well, it appears that the prisoner—our prospective client—was snooping round looking for something to eat and found that the butler had left the front door slightly ajar. Filled with a natural curiosity to observe how the other half lived, he thrust his way cautiously in and found himself in the main hall—hung with tapestry and lined with stands of armor. No one was to be seen. Can't you imagine him standing there in his rags—the Weary Willy of the comic supplements—gazing about him at the objets d'art, the old masters, the onyx tables, the statuary—wondering where the pantry was and whether the housekeeper would be more likely to feed him or kick him out?"

"Thank God," concluded Mr. Tutt eloquently, "that in this land of liberty in which we are privileged to dwell no man can be convicted of a crime except by a jury of his peers—a right sacred under our Constitution and inherited from Magna Charta, that foundation stone of English liberty, in which the barons forced King John to declare that 'No freeman shall be taken, or imprisoned, or disseized, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way harmed … save by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.'

"Had I the time I would demonstrate to you the arbitrary character of our laws and the inequality with which they are administered.

"But in this case the chief witness has already admitted the innocence of the defendant. There is nothing more to be said. The prosecution has cried 'Peccavi!' I leave my client in your hands."

He resumed his seat contentedly and wiped his forehead with his silk handkerchief. The judge looked down at O'Brien with raised eyebrows.

"I will leave the case to the jury on Your Honor's charge," remarked the latter carelessly.

"Gentlemen of the jury," began the judge, "the defendant is accused of entering the house of Mr. Hepplewhite with the intent to commit a crime therein—"

Mr. Hepplewhite sat, his head upon his breast, for what seemed to him several hours. He had but one thought—to escape. His ordeal had been far worse than he had anticipated. But he had made a discovery. He had suddenly realized that one cannot avoid one's duties to one's fellows by leaving one's affairs to others—not even to the police. He perceived that he had lived with his head stuck in the sand. He had tried to escape from his responsibilities as a citizen by hiding behind the thick walls of his stone mansion on Fifth Avenue. He made up his mind that he would do differently if he ever had the chance. Meanwhile, was not the jury ever going to set the poor man free?

They had indeed remained out a surprisingly long time in order merely to reach a verdict which was a mere formality. Ah! There they were! Mr. Hepplewhite watched with palpitating heart while they straggled slowly in. The clerk made the ordinary perfunctory inquiry as to what their verdict was. Mr. Hepplewhite did not hear what the foreman said in reply, but he saw both the Tutts and O'Brien start from their seats and heard a loud murmur rise throughout the court room.

"What's that!" cried the clerk in astonished tones. "What did you say, Mister Foreman?"

"I said that we find the defendant guilty," replied the foreman calmly.

Mr. Tutt stared incredulously at the twelve traitors who had betrayed him.

"Never mind, Mr. Tutt," whispered Number Six confidentially. "You did the best you could. Your argument was fine—grand—but nobody could ever make us believe that your client went into that house for any purpose except to steal whatever he could lay his hands on. Besides, it wasn't Mr. Hepplewhite's fault. He means well. And anyhow a nut like that has got to be protected against himself."

He might have enlightened Mr. Tutt further upon the psychology of the situation had not the judge at that moment ordered the prisoner arraigned at the bar.

"Have you ever been convicted before?" asked His Honor sharply.

"Sure," replied the Hepplewhite Tramp carelessly. "I've done three or four bits, I'm a burglar. But you can't give me more than a year for illegal entry."

"That is quite true," admitted His Honor stiffly. "And it isn't half enough!" He hesitated. "Perhaps under the circumstances you'll tell us what you were doing in Mr. Hepplewhite's bed?"

"Oh, I don't mind," returned the defendant with the superior air of one who has put something over. "When I heard the guy in the knee breeches coming up the stairs I just dove for the slats and played I was asleep."

Leaving the courthouse Mr. Tutt encountered Bonnie Doon.

"Young man," he remarked severely, "you assured me that fellow was only a harmless tramp!"

"Well," answered Bonnie, "that's what he said."

"He says now he's a burglar," retorted Mr. Tutt wrathfully. "I don't believe he knows what he is. Did you ever hear of such an outrageous verdict? With not a scrap of evidence to support it?"

Bonnie lit a cigarette doubtfully.

"Oh, I don't know," he muttered. "The jury seems to have sized him up rather better than we did."

"Jury!" growled Mr. Tutt, rolling his eyes heavenward. "'Sweet land of liberty!'"

Lallapaloosa Limited

"Ethics: The doctrine of man's duty in respect to himself and the rights of others."—CENTURY DICTIONARY.

"I don't say that all these people couldn't be squared; but it is right to tell you that I shouldn't be sufficiently degraded in my own estimation unless I was insulted with a very considerable bribe."—POOH-BAH.

"I've been all over those securities," Miss Wiggin informed Mr. Tutt as he entered the office one morning, "and not a single one of them is listed on the Stock Exchange."

"What securities are those?" asked her employer, hanging his tall hat on the antiquated mahogany coat tree in the corner opposite the screen that ambushed the washing apparatus. "I don't remember any securities," he remarked as he applied a match to the off end of a particularly green and vicious-looking stogy.

"Why, of course you do, Mr. Tutt!" insisted Miss Wiggin. "Don't you remember those great piles of bonds and stocks that Doctor Barrows left here with you to keep for him?"

"Oh, those!" Mr. Tutt smiled inscrutably. "Mr. Barrows is not a physician," he corrected her, running his eye over the General Sessions calendar. "He's only a 'doc'—that is to say, one who doctors. You know you can doctor a lot of things besides the human anatomy. No, I guess they're not listed on the Stock Exchange or anywhere else."

"Well, here's a schedule I made of them—Miss Sondheim typed it—and their total face value is seventeen million eight hundred thousand dollars. I tried to find out all I could, but none of the firms on Wall Street had ever heard of any of them—excepting of one that was traded in on the curb up to within a few weeks. There's Great Lakes and Canadian Southern Railway Company," she went on, "Chicago Water Front and Terminal Company, Great Geyser Texan Petroleum and Llano Estacado Land Company—dozens and dozens of them, and not one has an office or, so far as I can find out, any tangible existence—but the one I spoke of."

"Which is this great exception?" queried Mr. Tutt absently as he searched through the Law Journal for the case he was going to try that afternoon. "You said one of them had been dealt in on the curb? You astonish me!"

"It's got a funny name," she answered. "It almost sounds as if they meant it for a joke—Horse's Neck Extension."

"I guess they meant it for a joke all right—on the public," chuckled her employer. "How many shares are there?"

"A hundred thousand," she answered.

"Jumping Jehoshaphat!" ejaculated Mr. Tutt. "How on earth did old Doc manage to get hold of them?"

"It sold for only ten cents a share!" replied Miss Wiggin. "That would mean ten thousand dollars—"

"If Doc paid for it," supplemented Mr. Tutt. "Which he probably didn't. What's it selling for now?"

"It isn't selling at all."

Mr. Tutt pressed the button that summoned Willie.

"When you haven't anything better to do," he said to her, "why don't you go round and see what has become of—of—Horse's Neck Extension?"

"I will," assented Miss Wiggin. "It makes me feel rich just to talk about such things. I just love it."

"Many a slick crook has taken advantage of just that kind of feeling," mused Mr. Tutt. "There are two things that women—particularly trained nurses—seem to like better than anything else in the world—babies and stock certificates."

Then upon the arrival of the recalcitrant William he gathered up his papers and took down his hat from the tree.

"I wish you'd let me get your hat ironed, Mr. Tutt," remarked Miss Wiggin. "It would cost you only fifty cents."

"That's all you know about it, my dear," he answered. "More likely it would cost me a hundred thousand dollars."

Mr. Tobias Greenbaum, of Scherer, Hunn, Greenbaum & Beck, carefully placed his cigar where it would not char his Italian Renaissance desk and smoothed out the list which Mr. Elderberry, the secretary of The Horse's Neck Extension Copper Mining Company, handed to him. The list was typed on thin sheets; of foolscap and contained the names of stockholders, but as it had lain rolled up in the bottom of Mr. Elderberry's desk for five years without being disturbed it was inclined to resist the gentle pressure of Mr. Greenbaum's fingers.

Mr. Greenbaum glanced sharply round the plate-glass lake that separated him from the other directors of Horse's Neck, rather as if he had detected his associates in a crime.

"Isaacs says," he announced in an arrogant, almost insulting tone, though below the surface he was an entirely genial person, "that the new vein in the Amphalula runs into the west drift of Horse's Neck almost to where we quit work in Number Nine five years ago."

"If it does it will make it a bonanza property," emphatically declared his partner, Mr. Scherer, a dolichocephalous person with very black hair and thin bluish cheeks. "It's a pity we didn't buy it all in at ten cents a share."

"We did!" retorted Greenbaum. "All that could be shaken out. We've got all the stock that hasn't gravitated to the cemeteries."

"Even if the Amphalula vein doesn't run into it it will come near enough to make Horse's Neck worth dollars per share. It's a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose proposition," commented Mr. Hunn dryly. "Who controls Amphalula?"

"We do," snapped Greenbaum.

"Then it's a cinch," returned Hunn mildly. "Shake out the sleepers, reorganize, and sell or hold as seems most advisable later on."

Mr. Elderberry cleared his throat tentatively.

"If you gentlemen will pardon me—I have been considering this matter for some little time," he hazarded. Mr. Elderberry was not only the professional salaried secretary of Horse's Neck but was also treasurer of the Amphalula, and general factotum, representative and interlocking director for Scherer, Hunn, Greenbaum & Beck in their various mining enterprises, combining in his person almost as many offices as, Pooh-Bah in "The Mikado." Though he could not have claimed to serve as "First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Chief Justice, Commander-in-Chief, Lord High Admiral, Master of the Buck Hounds, Groom of the Back Stairs, Archbishop of Titipu and Lord Mayor, both acting and elect, all rolled into one," he could with entire modesty have admitted the soft impeachment of being simultaneously treasurer of Amphalula, vice-president of Hooligan Gulch and Red Water, secretary of Horse's Neck, Holy Jo, Gargoyle Extension, Cowhide Number Five, Consolidated Bimetallic, Nevada Mastodon, Leaping Frog, Orelady Mine, Why Marry and Sol's Cliff Buttress, and president of Blimp Consolidated.

All these various properties were either owned or controlled by Scherer, Hunn, Greenbaum & Beck and had been acquired with the use of the same original capital in various entirely legal ways, which at the present moment are irrelevant. The firm was a strictly honorable business house, from both their own point of view and that of the Street. Everything they did was with and by the advice of counsel. Yet not one of these active-minded gentlemen, including Mr. Greenbaum, the dolichocephalous Scherer and the acephalous Hunn, had ever done a stroke of productive work or contributed anything toward the common weal. In fact, distress to somebody in some form, and usually to a large number of persons, inevitably followed whatever deal they undertook, since their business was speculating in mining properties and unloading the bad ones upon an unsuspecting public which Scherer, Hunn, Greenbaum & Beck had permitted to deceive itself.

Thus, when Greenbaum called upon Mr. Elderberry for advice, it savored strongly of Koko's consulting Pooh-Bah and was sometimes almost as confusing, for just as Pooh-Bah on these occasions was won't to reply, "Certainly. In which of my capacities? As First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Chamberlain, Attorney-General, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Privy Purse or Private Secretary?" so the financial and corporate Elderberry might equally well ask: "Exactly. But are you seeking my advice as secretary of Horse's Neck, of Holy Jo, of Cowhide Number Five, or as vice-president of Hooligan Gulch and Red Water, treasurer of Amphalula or president of Blimp Consolidated?"

Just now it was, of course, obvious that he was addressing the company in his capacity of secretary of Horse's Neck.

"It goes without saying, gentlemen, that this property is pretty nearly down and out. You will recall that most of the insiders sold out on the tail of the Goldfield Boom and waited for the market to sag until we could buy in again. The mines are full of water, work was abandoned over four years ago, and the property is practically defunct. The original capitalization was ten million shares at one dollar a share. We own or control at least four million shares, for which we paid ten to fifteen cents, while we had sold our original holdings for one dollar sixty to one dollar ninety-five a share. While Horse's Neck represents a handsome profit—in my opinion"—he cleared his throat again as if deprecating the vulgarity of his phrase—"it is good for another whirl."

"You say it's full of water?" inquired Hunn.

"It will cost about fifty thousand dollars to pump out the mines and a hundred thousand to repair the machinery. Then there's quite an indebtedness—about seventy-five thousand; and tax liens—another fifty. Half a million dollars would put Horse's Neck on the map, and if the Amphalula vein crosses the property it will be worth ten millions. If it doesn't, the chance that it is going to will make a market for the stock."

Mr. Elderberry swept with a bland inquiring eye the shore of the glassy sea about which his associates were gathered.

"I've been over the ground," announced Greenbaum "and it's a good gamble. We want Horse's Neck for ourselves—at any rate until we are confident that it's a real lemon. Half a million will do it. I'll personally put up a hundred thousand."

"How are you going to get rid of the fifty thousand other stockholders?" asked Mr. Beck dubiously "We don't want them trailing along with us."

"I propose," answered Mr. Elderberry brightly, in his capacity as chief conspirator for Scherer, Hunn, et al., "that we organize a new corporation to be called 'Lallapaloosa Limited' and capitalize it at a million dollars—one million shares at a dollar a share. Then we will execute a contract between Horse's Neck and Lallapaloosa by the terms of which the old bankrupt corporation will sell to the new corporation all its assets for one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. We underwrite the stock of Lallapaloosa at fifty cents a share, thus supplying the new corporation with the funds with which to purchase the properties of the old. In a word we shall get Horse's Neck for a hundred and twenty-five thousand and have three hundred and seventy-five thousand left out of what we subscribe to underwrite the stock to put it on its feet."

"That's all right," debated Hunn. "But how about the other stockholders in Horse's Neck that Beck referred to? Where do they come in?"

"I've thought of that," returned Elderberry. "Of course you can't just squeeze 'em out entirely. That wouldn't be legal. They must be given the chance to subscribe at par to the stock of the new corporation on the basis of one share in the new for every ten they hold in the old; or, as Horse's Neck is a Delaware corporation, to have their old stock appraised under the laws of Delaware. In point of fact, they've all written off their holdings in Horse's Neck as a total loss years ago and you couldn't drag 'em into putting in any new money. They'll simply let it go—forfeit their stock in Horse's Neck and be wiped out because they were not willing to go in and reorganize the property with us."

"They would if they knew about Amphalula," remarked Beck.

"Well, they don't!" snapped Greenbaum, "and we're under no obligations to tell 'em. They can infer what they like from the fact that Horse's Neck has been selling for ten cents a share for the last three years."

"Is that right, Chippingham?" inquired Beck of the attorney who was in attendance. "I mean—is it legal?"

"Perfectly legal," replied Mr. Chippingham conclusively. "A corporation has a perfect right to dispose of its entire assets for a proper consideration and if any minority stockholder feels aggrieved he can take the matter to the Delaware courts and get his equity assessed. Besides, everybody is treated alike—all the stockholders in Horse's Neck can subscribe pro rata for Lallapaloosa."

"Only they won't," grinned Scherer.

"And so, as they are wiped out—the new corporation—that is us—in fact gets their equity, just as much as if they had deeded it to us."

"That is, we get for nothing about one-half the value of the property," agreed Elderberry. "Now, I've been over the list and I don't think you'll hear a peep from any of them."

 
  "He's got 'em on the list—he's got 'em on the list;
  And they'll none of 'em be missed—they'll none of 'em be missed!"
 

hummed Mr. Beck. "It looks good to me! I'll take a hundred thousand."

"Mr. Chippingham has the papers drawn already," continued Elderberry. "Of course you've got to give the old stockholders notice, but we can rush the thing through and before anybody wakes up the thing will be done. Then they can holler all they want."

"Well, I'll come in," announced Hunn complacently.

"So will I," echoed Scherer. "And the firm can underwrite the last hundred thousand, and that will clean it up."

"Is it all right for us to underwrite the stock ourselves at half price?" inquired Mr. Beck. "I mean—is it legal?"

"Sure!" reiterated Mr. Chippingham. "Somebody's got to underwrite it; why not us?"

"Move we adjourn," said Mr. Greenbaum. "Elderberry—the usual."

Mr. Elderberry removed from his change pocket five glittering gold pieces and slid one across the glass sheet to each director.

"Second motion. Carried! All up—seventh inning!" smiled Mr. Scherer; and the directors, pocketing their gold pieces, arose.

If, as it has been defined, ethics consists of a "system of principles and rules concerning moral obligations and regard for the rights of others," it may be interesting to speculate as to whether or not these gentlemen had any or not, and, if so, what it may have been. But in considering this somewhat nice question it should be borne in mind that Messrs. Scherer, Hunn, Greenbaum & Beck were bankers of standing, and were advised by a firm of attorneys of the highest reputation. On its face, and as it was about to be represented to the stockholders of Horse's Neck, the proposition appeared fair enough.

The circular, shortly after sent out to all the names upon the list, stated succinctly that financial and labor conditions had been such that it had been found impossible to operate the mine profitably for several years, that it had depreciated greatly in value owing to the water which had accumulated in its lower levels, that it had exhausted its surplus, that a heavy indebtedness had accumulated, that the corporation's outstanding notes had been protested and that the property would be sold under foreclosure unless money was immediately raised to pay them, the interest due and taxes; that half a million dollars was needed to put the property in operation and that there was no way to secure it, as nobody was willing to loan money to a bankrupt mining concern. That under these circumstances no practical method had been proposed except to organize a new corporation capitalized at one million instead of ten, to the stock of which each shareholder in Horse's Neck might subscribe in proportion to his holdings, at par, and to which the assets of the old corporation should be transferred practically for its debts. That this, in a word, was the only way to save the situation and possibly make a go of a bad business, and that it was a gamble in which the old stockholders had a right, up to a certain date, to participate if they saw fit. Those that did not would find their stock in Horse's Neck entirely valueless as it would have no assets left which had not been transferred to Lallapaloosa. Stockholders who were dissatisfied could protest against the enabling resolution to be offered at the annual meeting of the stockholders of Horse's Neck to be held the following week at Wilmington, Delaware, and could avail themselves of the right to have their equity assessed under the laws of Delaware, but as the liabilities practically equaled the present value of the property that equity would naturally be highly problematical.

Now, as a matter of morals or of law the only thing that made the proposed reorganization unethical or inequitable was the single trifling fact that those responsible for it were the only ones who knew of the existence and proximity of the Amphalula vein. When a mining company, a railroad, an oil well or any other enterprise is down and out it is only fair that the majority stockholders, who are obliged to protect their investment, should have the right to call upon the rest to come forward and do their share or else drop out. A minority stockholder cannot appeal to any canon of fair play whereby he should be entitled to sit back and let the majority take all the risks and then claim his share of the profits.

The imponderable element of injustice in the situation consisted in the suppression of a fact which the directors concealed but concerning which, however, they made no representation, false or otherwise. They were going to risk half a million dollars of their own money and they wanted the whole gamble for themselves. They sincerely felt that nobody else was entitled to take that risk with them. Once they had floated Horse's Neck they had come to look upon it as their own private affair. The minority had no rights which they, the majority, were bound to respect. The minority were nothing but a lot of piking gamblers, anyway, who bought or sold for a rise or fall of a few cents. They knew nothing of the property and cared less for its real value. They were merely traders and if they lost they forgot it or tried to. On the other hand Scherer, Hunn, Greenbaum & Beck were promoters, who contributed something to the economic advancement of the nation.

"Regarding my hat, which you suggested this morning should be pressed at a cost of fifty cents," remarked Mr. Tutt to Miss Wiggin when he returned to the office upon the adjournment of court in the afternoon and replaced that ancient object in its accustomed resting-place—"regarding that precious hat of mine"—he eyed it affectionately—"I can only say that I would as soon send myself to a dry-cleaning establishment as to permit its profanation by the iron of a haberdasher."

Miss Wiggin laughed lightly.

"That doesn't explain your cryptic statement that it would probably cost you a hundred thousand dollars," she replied. "Still—"

Mr. Tutt turned suddenly upon his heel and held her with an upraised hand, the bony wrist of which was encircled, after an intervening space of some five inches, by a frayed cuff confined with a black onyx button the size of a quarter.

"Behold," he cried in the deep resonant voice that he used in addressing juries at the climax of a peroration, "the integuments of my personality—the ancient habiliments of an honorable profession—the panoply of the legal warrior. Here, my corslet"—he touched his dingy waistcoat with his left hand; "my greaves"—he brushed the baggy legs of his pantaloons; "my halberd"—he raised his old mahogany cane with its knot of yellow ivory; "my casque"—he indicated his ruffled stove-pipe "Arrayed in these I am Mr. Ephraim Tutt, attorney and counselor at law—the senior partner in Tutt & Tutt—a respected member of the bar duly accredited and authorized to practise before the Supreme Court of the State of New York, the Court of Appeals, the District Court of the United States, the Circuit Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court of the United States, the Court of Claims—"

"—the Police Court and the Coroner's Court," concluded Miss Wiggin, making him a mock curtsy.

"Without these indicia of my profession and my individuality I should be like David without his sling or Samson without his hair. I should be merely Tutt, a criminal lawyer—one of a multitude—regarded perhaps as a shyster. But in these robes of my high office I am a high priest of the law; just as you, my dear girl, are one of its many devoted and worthy priestesses. Can you imagine me going to court in a bowler hat or arguing to the jury in a cutaway coat or bobtail business suit? Can you picture Ephraim Tutt with his hair cut short or in an Ascot tie, any more than you can envisage him in riding breeches or wearing lilacs? No! There is but one Mr. Tutt, and these are his only garments. He who steals my hat may steal trash, but without it I should be like a disembodied spirit unable to return to my earthly dwelling-place.

"A paltry hundred thousand?

"Nay, without my hat—my helmet!—I should be valueless to myself and everybody else; so estimate my worth and you can assay the value of my hat. What am I worth in your opinion?"

And then Miss Wiggin, having glanced cautiously if quickly round, made a most astonishing declaration.

"Just about a million times more than anybody else in the whole world, you old dear!" she whispered and rising upon her toes she kissed his wrinkled cheek.

"Dear me! You really mustn't do that!" gasped Mr. Tutt.

"Well," she retorted, "you can discharge me if you like. But first sit down, light a cigar and let me tell you something."

Mr. Tutt did as he was bid, chuckling.

"Well," said Miss Wiggin, "there is such a thing as Horse's Neck Extension after all!"

"Um—you don't say?" he answered, struggling to make his stogy draw.

"And it has an office with about a hundred other corporations of various kinds—most of them with names that sound like the zoo—Yellow Wildcat, Jumping Leapfrog, and that sort of thing. It seems Horse's Neck is played out and they are going to reorganize it—"

"Who are?" demanded her employer, suddenly sitting erect.

"Scherer, Hunn, Greenbaum & Beck."

"The dickens they are!" he ejaculated. "That bunch of pirates? Not if I know it!"

"Why not?"

"Reorganize! Reorganize? Reorganization is my middle name!" cried Mr. Tutt. "So Scherer, Hunn, Greenbaum & Beck are going to reorganize something, are they? Let 'em try! Not so long as I've got my hat!"

"This is all very enigmatical to me," replied Miss Wiggin. "But then, I'm only a woman. Aren't they all right? Why shouldn't they reorganize a mine if it's exhausted?"

"If it's exhausted why do they want to reorganize it?" he demanded, climbing to his feet. "Let me tell you something, Minerva! All my life I've been fighting against tyranny—the tyranny of the law, the tyranny of power, the tyranny of money."

He drew fiercely on his stogy, which being desiccated flared like a Roman candle.

"You don't need to tell me what this plan of reorganization is; because they wouldn't propose one unless it was going to benefit them in some way, and the only way it can be made to benefit them is at the expense of the other stockholders. Quod erat demonstrandum."

Mr. Tutt seemed to have become distended somehow and to have spread over the entire wall surface of his office like the genie which the fisherman innocently permitted to escape from the bottle.

"There isn't one reorganization scheme in a hundred that isn't crooked somewhere."

"According to that, if a business is unsuccessful it ought to be allowed to go to pot for fear that somebody might make a profit in putting it on its feet," she countered. "I think you're a violent, irascible, prejudiced old man!"

"All the same," he retorted, "show me a reorganization scheme and I'll show you a flimflam! What's this one? Bet you anything you like it's as crooked as a ram's horn. I don't have to hear about it. Don't want to read the plan. But I'll bust it—higher than Hades. See if I don't!"

He spat the remaining filaments of his stogy from the window and fished out another.

"How do we come into it, anyhow?" he demanded.

"Doctor—I mean Mister Barrows," replied Miss Wiggin.

"Oh, yes. Of course. Well, you send for him to come down here and sign the papers."

"What papers?"

"The complaint and order to show cause."

"But there isn't any."

"There will be, all right, by the time he gets here."

Miss Wiggin looked first puzzled and then pained.

"I don't understand," she said rather stiffly. "Do you mean that the firm of Tutt & Tutt is going to engage in the enterprise of trying to break up a plan of reorganization without knowing what it is? Won't you lay us all open to the accusation of being strikers?"

Mr. Tutt's ordinarily brown complexion became slightly tinged with purple.

"Let the court decide!" he cried hotly. "You say Scherer, Hunn, Greenbaum & Beck are proposing to reorganize a mining company? You admit we hold some of the stock? Well—as the natural-born and perennial champion of the outraged minority—I'm going to attack it, and bust it, and raise heck with it—on general principles. I'm going to throw that damned old hat of mine into the ring, my child, and play hell with everything."

And with a cluck Mr. Tutt leaned over, produced a dingy bottle wrapped in a coat of many colors and poured himself out a glass of malt extract.

When Mr. Greenbaum was summoned to the telephone and informed by Mr. Elderberry in disgruntled tones that somebody had just served upon him an order to show cause why the proposed reorganization of Horse's Neck should not be set aside and enjoined, he not only became instantly annoyed but highly excited.

"What!" he almost screamed.

"I'll read it to you, if you don't believe it!" said Mr. Elderberry.

"'United States District Court, Southern District of New York, Edward V. Barrows, Complainant against Horse's Neck Extension Mining Company, Defendant.