Chapter III: Part 3

In the matching-room girls especially trained to the task selected, from vast quantities of samples, the fitting shades of thread and buttons best adapted to the different bundles of cut fabric brought by elevators from the cutting department below. Beside them were four other girls, who worked at a contrivance in which, when covered buttons were required, an uncovered button, a piece of tin and a bit of cloth were inserted, a lever pulled and the three factors withdrawn ready clamped together and complete for use. From here, after the tickets had been signed, and the necessary further directions added to them, the cloth was sent on to the sewing-rooms.

Luke found those sewing-rooms crowded with machines of possibilities that he had heretofore never dreamed machines could realize; machines horrible because they seemed half-human, and diabolically intelligent; machines that not only moved up and down in the manner of the old foot-pumped sewing-machine in the second floor back of his home in Americus, but twirled and danced over the cloth pressed under them by women feeding them as a frightened keeper in a menagerie might feed an angry beast. They were all of them run by steam or gasoline, and Forbes told Luke that they were all made by one trust, which owned all the patents. There were different machines for every kind of sewing, for every loop that could be required of the thread: machines for hemming; machines for the cord-stitch, the lock-stitch, the chain-stitch, and the damask-stitch; machines for sewing the cloth together, for sewing the lining, for sewing the trouser-seams; and there was one machine, the needle of which moved in dizzy zigzag, for sewing, on a sort of herring-bone design, the stiffening material into coats.

Next Luke was shown a room in which, on benches a foot from the floor, beside tables six inches high, sat rows of intent little girls, their arms flying like flails as they stitched the shoulders into the coats, and still another row in which still other girls, their arms flying in a similar manner, sewed buttons on coats, waistcoats, and trousers--the only two processes that invention was as yet unable wholly to deliver over to machinery. Lastly, there was a half-floor given to what at first looked like linotype machines, and at these sat brawny women who passed over the coat-shoulders long flat-irons, each heated by flexible tubes attached to it and reminiscent, for Luke, of those terrible instruments that, immediately revolving, grind the heart and lungs out of a patient's teeth.

Forbes exhibited it all with a quiet pride. He said there was no work sent out of the factory, and so no "sweating"; the factory was a union shop; there had never been but one strike, and that one was speedily adjusted by arbitration.

Luke was impressed. He secured favorable reports from a financial agency and from a firm of expert accountants. Then he invested his fortune in R. H. Forbes & Son.

Sec.2. About this time, the United States Senate happened to be investigating itself and unavoidably stumbled upon a witness whose testimony filled all the newspapers for several weeks and remained a matter of public comment for quite two months. Perhaps because he had fallen out with his employers, this witness insisted upon telling how he had for ten years been hired by a combination of the ruling corporations to influence national legislation. Five hundred letters and telegrams substantiated his assertions; he gave dates and mentioned places; the names of popular idols fell from his lips with infinite carelessness, and the idols broke as their names fell.

Speaking in unimpassioned detail, the informer showed how his activities had covered the entire country and included the chiefs of both the large parties with a splendid catholicity. He had bought the services of labor leaders to end strikes, had broken up unions by purchasing information from their members, and had ended one dispute by having himself appointed a member of its arbitration board. He had operated in congressional campaigns throughout the Union, and he told how he had bought the defeat at the polls of members of Congress that sought re-election after having opposed the corporate interests at Washington, and how he had spent thousands of the trusts' dollars in electing candidates who, personally or through their bosses, promised that they would support a high tariff and prevent the passage of laws too kindly to the working class. He had hired congressional clerks and pages, the former to betray what advance information came to them, the latter to pick up valuable gossip. He had the secretaries of Congressmen on his salary-roll when he could not buy or defeat their masters or when, having bought those masters, he feared treachery. He had secured the appointment of those legislators in his pay to important committees, and he had, he said, planned and secured the establishment of a national tariff commission for the benefit of the powers he served. Those powers were headed by the man that Jack Porcellis likened to Shakespeare and that the derelict in the Essex Street saloon called the King.

Luke, who of course had nothing to do with the management of the Forbes company, nevertheless occasionally passed an evening at the quiet Brooklyn home of its president, who was a widower living alone with his only child, Betty, a pretty, high-colored, brown-eyed girl, as yet unformed and only twenty-two years old. As a rule, these two men sat in the parlor, a room that retained the character of Forbes's grandfather, and talked of everything and nothing, the girl rarely intruding upon them. It was inevitable that they should, during the floodtide of the Washington scandal, speak of its revelations.

"I don't know what to make of them," sighed Luke. "It seems as if the fellows at the head of our party were no better than the fellows at the head of the other."

"They are not," said Forbes with conviction. "Here they all are blackmailing the tariff, a system the country owes all its prosperity to."

"We shall have to pick honest leaders in the future," Luke reflected. He still believed in the power of a party's individual members. "We've simply been too easy-going in the past."

Forbes thought this would avail nothing.

"The parties themselves are rotten," he declared, "and the deeper a man gets into them, no matter how well he starts out, the more certain he is to be infected. You see how even the good measures are fraudulently put through. Then here's our own state with a Governor we all believed in--a Democrat, to be sure, but an anti-Tammany man. He comes out for a fine thing like direct primaries. Well, the other day an Assemblyman I know went to him and asked him to sign a bill this Assemblyman wanted passed. What happened? The Governor said: 'Will you vote for the direct primary law?' The Assemblyman happens to be a fool and against that law. He said he'd vote against it, and he tells me the Governor told him in that case the other bill wouldn't be signed. No, the thing we need in this country is a brand-new party run by honest business men on sound business principles."

Luke could not yet consider such a revolution; but the next day the papers contained further news of the senatorial investigation, which lent weight to Forbes's opinion. A witness, after testimony further entangling that great financier whose power seemed to pervade the country's entire industrial system, described an alleged forgery in the books of a railway known to be controlled by Porcellis's hero and eager to evade the anti-trust laws. According to this witness, a "double entry" of $2,000,000, representing securities that the road assumed in taking over two other roads, was carried in the "Consolidated balance sheet" for some time, then erased from one side of the ledger, and left as a credit balance on the other side.

"They took all the securities of the acquired roads," he swore, "and used them as securities for a bond-issue. They got that money and used it to finance two other outside transactions that they sold out at a tremendous profit."

He named as participants in this three Senators high in the councils of Luke's party.

"Of course they're a bad lot," Leighton cheerfully admitted when the District-Attorney's staff gossiped about the latest revelation, "and the party is no better right here in New York than it is in any other state. But you can't repair an organization by smashing it. What we need is reform within the party. The party must reform itself. And that's what I'm trying to bring about."

He did, indeed, give out interviews to this effect, and gathered a considerable following. A little convention was called at Saratoga where, fired by fresh faith, Luke made his first political speech, holding up Leighton as the Erasmus of Republicanism. It was an unfortunate simile, for the opposition press lost no time in lampooning the District-Attorney as Erasmus at his weakest; but the movement grew, and Luke, in common with his fellow-believers, began to see light in the political darkness.

He still possessed the beautiful power of dreaming, and when, by night, coming from a theater or leaving the house of Mrs. Ruysdael or one of her friends, he turned into Broadway and saw the myriad lights of its cafes mount heavenward and mix with and illuminate the pillars of smoke and steam rising from its chimneys, he could detect in their wreaths the faces of grinning devils raised by the pestilential life below, laughing at it, dipping enormous white claws to stir it, and then hissing skyward as if to proclaim, because of what New York was, their defiance of God. Once or twice, to escape from them, he walked as far downtown as Wall Street and loitered through the silent night, where the three churches stood on the modern battleground of mad finance to remind of its history the city with the shortest memory in Christendom. Mentally, he converted that portion of the town to what it once had been. He saw it the home of a modest aristocracy in simple houses along shaded streets, a center of good taste, of culture, of social well-being.

The old Astor House, now fallen into shabby desuetude, he pictured as it was when state banquets were given there, and when it was the one place in which the distinguished visitor would stop. Close by the spot where the Woolworth Building to-day houses eighteen thousand persons, the Astor House had moved Horace Greeley to admiration because six hundred and forty-seven persons slept under its roof. There Clay had received the news of his nomination in 1844, and Webster the word of his defeat at the hands of the Whig convention in 1852. That hotel had been familiar to Pierce, Van Buren, Buchanan, and Taylor, to Seward, Choate, and Douglas. Edward, Prince of Wales, had given it an almost royal atmosphere, and recollections of Lincoln still hung about its tarnished walls.

Would the old spirit come back again? Could it return? Luke was sure that it could and would. He was sure that Leighton, and the honest men associated with him, had begun a movement that must end by restoring the nation's lost ideals. Government would govern, honest property would be protected, religion would again open man's eyes to his own littleness and the omnipotence of the Deity. There would be legislation that would be the end of industrial combinations, of the crushing of the small manufacturer and the grinding of the faces of the poor. No more national banks would be merged, none would engage in promoting or underwriting; interlocking directorates would cease, and the concentration of credit, the Money Trust, would forever after be an impossibility. It was so easy. It needed but an awakened conscience in the majority of the voters and a few conscientious men to lead.

Sec.3. Luke's father died within three years after the young man entered upon his duties under Brouwer Leighton. The elder Huber had embarked his small fortune in an adventure that, as events soon proved, was opposed to one of the interests of the great financier whom he had once so much admired: those interests ruined the adventure and, more from grief because of this than from any specific malady, the Congressman fell in the fight. He died proud of his son--a pride that Mrs. Huber and Jane zealously shared--and he left the family in Luke's care.

The young man, who had loved his father in spite of all the differences between them, and long felt the loss, met this situation without complaint. Neither the mother nor the sister wanted to go to New York, and, as Luke managed to live within his meager salary, he was able to continue for them the home in Americus upon the income from his now well-paying investment in R. H. Forbes & Son. Jane, indeed, soon engaged herself and was married to a Doncaster lawyer who secured an election to the late Mr. Huber's seat in Congress, so that Luke's expenses in Americus were light.

He began to fall in love with Betty Forbes. The women of the Ruysdael set did not fail to attract him, but he never considered them as within his means, and so speedily placed them outside of his desires. Forbes's daughter, on the other hand, was the feminine counterpart of her father, and, as she grew, she developed many of his qualities, being quiet, determined, unobtrusive, and womanly in the sense in which men like Forbes used that word before Woman began to give it a new significance. Accepting the world in the garb in which Forbes thought it well to present it to her, she owned only the finest standards of her type, and there was no meanness in her. Physically, she had that rarity in young women: height combined with grace. Her hair, as Luke saw it, was like so much sunshine, her eyes were clear and brown, and the radiance of her coloring not even a man that was not her lover could deny. Luke, for his part, thought her far too good for him. He told himself she was all that the people of the Ruysdael set should be and were not: she made important and shameful the casual relations he had had with women of the half-world and that in their occurrence--less frequent than is usual in the lives of young men--had seemed trivial and matter-of-fact; and therefore he determined to win her, so soon as he could make a place for himself through the pursuit of his ideals.

Sec.4. That pursuit grew daily more difficult. The candle of his faith in Leighton, though it continued to burn steadily, burned less fiercely than of old. The movement for reform within the party spread, but it spread almost too rapidly; it came to include certain politicians who were now for the first time in their careers evincing a desire for the organization's betterment, and that only after the organization had failed to re-elect them to office. These men, in one or two instances, came into control, and it was soon necessary to reform the reformers. Sometimes Leighton appeared disheartened, and Luke began to acquire a weary and well-nigh uninterested manner in dealing with his part of the crusade.

"Look here," he once said to his chief, "that fellow you got a pardon for last week has been in to see me."

"Yes?" said Leighton. His feet were cocked on his desk and, in his favorite attitude, he was leaning back in his chair with his fingers clasped in his crisp, black hair. His face was not the face that Luke had known when he first came to New York.

"Well," continued the assistant, "he came in just after I got back from the Ludlow Street Jail. That place is full of nobody but husbands who won't pay alimony, but the keepers act as valets and barbers and do light housekeeping for the prisoners."

"It's the civil prison. We can't help it."

"Couldn't you swing things so a Grand Jury would report on it?"

"What's the use? And what has Ludlow Street got to do with Auburn, where our pardoned friend has been?"

"Only this: the rich men in Ludlow Street are living as if they were in a hotel, but at Auburn, this fellow says, they've got a cell with pointed nails in the floor so a prisoner sent to it for bad behavior can't sit down or sleep. They've---- Oh, I can't go into it all now; but the women are treated as bad as the men; the thing must be worse than the Black Hole of Calcutta, and all the while the State's paying for the warden's horses and carriages."

Leighton showed some interest, but later, when Luke returned to the subject, he said there was nothing to be done: the political situation would not just then permit it.

Came the unmasking of one of the new partisans of reform. This man, a Simon Kaindiac, was an inspector in the New York post-office. Federal detectives arrested him and showed him to have made a fortune by extortion from swindling concerns that were using the United States mails to entrap their victims.

"I know, I know!" cried Leighton peevishly when Uhler brought him the news in Luke's presence. "But how am I to blame for that? All the papers will be at me for it. As if I were responsible for the business morals of every man that happened to think as I do about the political ethics of the party!" He turned to Luke. "What's on _your_ mind, Huber?"

Luke said that what was on his mind was this: the office had that morning received the report of investigators who pointed out that, since the success of the cocaine raids, heroin had taken the place of the proscribed drug.

"Well," said Leighton, "I'm sorry, but the laws governing the sale of heroin aren't the same as those governing the sale of cocaine, and, until they are, you'll find you can't successfully prosecute under them."

"We might get at the thing another way," Luke protested. His growing love for Betty had given him new views on some old subjects. "They say the girls in the houses----"

Leighton swung his feet to the floor. His tired face worked irritably.

"Now, don't begin on them," he commanded. "They're the police's affair, anyhow. They've always existed and always will. They simply adapt themselves to whatever form of society happens to exist. No really effective method of regulation, let alone suppression, has ever been devised or ever will be. Gee whiz, young man, do you know what you'll get up against if you tackle this subject? For four thousand years the high-brows have been trying to make it unpopular, and they haven't succeeded yet."

It was much the same when Luke and O'Mara came across the trail of corruption among the police. They found one man who would make affidavit to the fact that patrolmen had paid him to instigate burglaries in order that the patrolmen might make arrests and win promotion. This man had friends among the keepers of illegal resorts who would swear to paying tribute to police captains. He introduced the two lawyers to a collector who said that $2,400,000 were yearly paid in this way, that he himself was the go-between for a police lieutenant, securing from fifty to five hundred dollars a month each from those who bought protection. No discretion seemed to be used, and he showed checks to corroborate his story.

"Do you think you could do anything on such evidence?" sneered Leighton. "You couldn't send a yellow dog to jail on it. This fellow confesses he's a crook himself. Start an agitation to force the Police Commissioner to resign as unfit? Not much! If he resigned, 'unfit' would mean 'guilty.' His crowd's in the saddle, and if you want to unhorse him, you've got to unhorse them."

He walked up and down the floor.

"The trouble with us is we don't fight the devil with fire," he said; "and the trouble with the whole system is too many laws. There are too many lawyers at Albany and Washington; they know all about law and nothing about Man, so when the public conscience turns over and whines in its sleep, these fellows think they can cure it of what ails it by passing a few more laws. They pass a law against dance-halls, and they breed brothels. That's the way it goes all down the line. They pass a lot of such laws and then say: 'Now, let the District-Attorney do the rest.' I wish they had my job for one day! People have got to understand that other people don't indulge their tastes out of mere love of law-breaking."

He took another turn of the room.

"And if we're going to whip political gangs," he said, "we must have a political gang of our own, and one better than the one we happen to be fighting. There's Tim Heney over on the East Side. He may be as crooked as God makes them, but when people give him votes, he gives them coal in winter and picnics in summer. He goes to their funerals and their weddings, and he knows more about what the people of this country want than Thomas Jefferson would have known if he'd lived to be a hundred. And what's more, he can do what none of your statesmen ever can do: he can keep them quiet. Do you wonder? Think what he does for them. Do you wonder they stick to him?"

Sec.5. Luke began to believe that Forbes was right: There was need of a new party. Daily his lethargy increased; daily he lived more in his love for Betty and in the dreams that emerged less and less upon the plane of his actual life.

His contact with the bar did not raise either it or the bench in his estimation. In a file of documents at his office, the legacy of a former administration, he came across vouchers for sums aggregating $3,000 paid by a local railway to witnesses who had sworn against a lawyer indicted for subornation of perjury in pressing a damage-case against the company, and among these was one for $500 paid to the referee that signed the report. He heard of a rural courthouse that by night became a gambling-house conducted by court officers; there was a judge on the Pacific Slope who sold a patent, the idea for which he stole from the plaintiff in a patent case in his own court; the District-Attorney of Doncaster County, in Pennsylvania, told Luke that only the statute of limitations saved from jail three associate judges of that county who had accepted bribes in the granting of liquor licenses, and that a judge in a nearby county had accepted $3,500 toward his campaign fund from brewing companies whose retailers must apply to him for licenses. It seemed that of two of the most prominent judges of the higher court in New York, one was chosen directly through the efforts of Tim Heney, and the other was the brother of the principal member of a trust which had cases in his court. A judge of a Federal Court was forced from the bench because of his financial interests in a company with which he had to deal in his judicial capacity, and a New Jersey judge, a friend of Leighton, was said to be hearing suits to which a certain railway was a party and then, during vacations, appearing in a neighboring county court as a lawyer retained by the same company.

The follies of the law appeared to be more numerous than its faults. One judicial decision enjoined members of a labor union from the peaceable persuasion from work of individuals not under agreement to work for the corporation in the mills of which a strike was in progress. A Philadelphia jurist denied the right of free speech to aliens. In Illinois, Smith appealed from a conviction for swindling Brown, and the Supreme Court upheld him because the indictment, which read that Smith "did unlawfully and feloniously obtain from Brown his money," was indefinite and misleading: the learned court held that the pronoun "his" might refer to either party, and that the Grand Jury might simply have been indicating its belief that Brown obtained his own money unlawfully.

Worse miscarriages of justice were, of course, common, even in Leighton's office, and sentences were often out of all proportion to the crimes that incurred them. The editor of a radical paper in Paterson was given an indeterminate term in prison of not less than one year and not more than fifteen years for criticising the Paterson police. The larger the scope of a swindler's transactions, the better his chances of immunity. One minor case long remained in Luke's memory. A clerk in a trust company disappeared with $25,000, and a fugitive bill of indictment was returned against him; the runaway opened negotiations with his former employers by means of advertisements in the Paris newspapers and then used his wife as an intermediary until the trust company promised to have the District-Attorney submit the indictment for a verdict of not guilty if the clerk would return with the $15,000 still in his hands; the careful fugitive hid $7,500 in Germany, and returned with the rest; he refused to tell the hiding-place until he was safe; the company found the District-Attorney willing to follow its suggestion; the verdict of Not Guilty was accordingly recorded, and the clerk, free from further harm, made over to the company the remaining $7,500 that he had left in Europe as an anchor to windward.

There was probably no more laxity among lawyers than among men of other professions, but to Luke's mind it seemed imperative that traders in justice should be especially just. He came across countless cases of pettifogging among shyster practitioners, and nearly as many suspicious actions in the ranks of their cleverer and, therefore, more successful and eminent brethren.

Ever seeking remedies, he once drew up a list of such as he found. He wanted more publicity and freedom of criticism; measures to curb the bench's power to declare laws unconstitutional, to force it to give fuller reasons in support of its decisions; he wanted devices to end "the law's delays," simplified procedure and judges who were closer to the people and farther from the corporations; he thought the courts of appeal ought to be forced to decide every question in every case appealed to them; and he advocated but one appeal in civil actions together with the right of recall both in regard to judges and to their decisions.

Sec.6. He had come to a point where he doubted, not it is true Leighton's intentions, but his ability to achieve them. Those were the days when the Progressive Party was being formed, and Luke for some time considered it as a hopeful sign. Forbes enlisted in the ranks of the new organization and championed it wherever he went, not least among the workers in his factory. Luke had joined a club of young men who had for the most part inherited their money and were unanimous for the new movement; it was time, they said, that politics should be taken out of the hands of the muckers, and they came near to convincing Luke until, in a moment of enthusiasm, he happened upon secrets which showed him that the men in power in this party were not different from the men that had spoiled Leighton's plan for the purification of the Republican Party from within. From a source he could not doubt, he heard that even George Hallett had talked of offering his support "because these old crowds are too greedy; they're chargin' us too much; it's got to be highway robbery that big business has to submit to, and I'm tired of it."

For some time Luke lost faith in the possibility of any cure. There was talk of a movement to fuse the reform voters of all parties, but it left him cold. He had been a successful prosecutor, and his name was familiar to newspaper readers; his advocacy of Leighton had won him a prominence, even a certain following, among the public; but the irony of life was too much for him; he had, at this period, an eye too appreciative of the odds against him. He saw Betty two or three times a week, took her motoring and to the theaters, but he refrained from showing her that he loved her, because he saw no chance of offering her himself as a man worth while. The lethargy of his manner became more marked. He began to bear the outward tokens of one that does not care. To this he had come after four years in New York.

*CHAPTER V*

Sec.1. The hideous North Bridge disaster occurred on a spring morning during the last year of Leighton's first term in office. The District-Attorney, whose habitual disparagement of his post did not dull his desire to retain it, was busy planning for re-election, and the work of his staff, labor how they would, was congested. The assistants were straining to make a record of convictions with which their chief might go before the electors in the autumn, and were giving to participation in political councils every half-hour that they dared spare from their legal tasks; they were hard driven and worn to the nerves; yet the news of the wreck of the Manhattan & Niagara Railway, immediately within the city's limits, burst through doors that had been opened only to men with power or appointments and swept, even from the collective mind of the corps, the bulking thought of jury lists and ballots.

The Manhattan and Niagara had entered New York only a few years before, with a line that tapped fresh territory. Along this line real-estate operators forthwith plotted ten or a dozen towns, and white-and-yellow suburbs leaped up like mushrooms. They were peopled by clerks and small businessmen that came into the city over the M. & N. every morning and returned home by the same route each evening.

From the opening of the new line, complaints had been common: it was said that the service was inadequate, that the cars and other rolling-stock were largely second-hand material purchased from the older New York & New Jersey Railroad; that the rails were the cheapest obtainable, the ties bought from an abandoned branch line near Buffalo. One serious wreck had preceded that at the North Bridge, but had not been followed by the improvements the company had promised. The patrons had protested with all the vigor Americans exhibit when they feel that a public-service corporation is cheating them, and had stopped as far on the discreet side of action as protesting Americans usually stop: the M. & N.'s parsimony became grist for the mill of the humorous weeklies and produced no further reaction. This morning, a train crowded with men going to their offices plunged through a bridge crossing an uptown street: a hundred passengers were wounded and twenty-five killed.

The earliest editions of the evening papers shrieked the news, and special editions rushed from the presses. In most of them the M. & N. had taken care to be a heavy advertiser, but here was an event so clearly due to the railway's known policy that no paper could belittle the culpability of the management: the bridge had been recently examined and pronounced safe by state inspectors, yet all reports agreed that it was constructed of the very lightest material, and the earliest evidence showed that a rail had flattened and thrown the train. To persons having a fair knowledge of current finance, it was known that the M. & N. was controlled by the group of capitalists who were actively at the management of the nominally rival N. Y. & N. J.

Luke sent his office-boy to buy him the first edition that he heard called beneath his window. It placed the dead at a hundred and the injured at thrice that figure, and when Huber's eyes caught the obscure paragraph that hinted at the real ownership of the road, his cheeks, now so generally pale, reddened, and the hand that held the paper trembled. Something of his old indignation and purpose woke in him. He ordered the boy to bring him a copy of each fresh edition as it appeared on the street, and though the lists of victims shrank to their true number, the outstanding fact of the owners' guilt remained.

Leighton passed through Luke's room on his return from luncheon. His face was drawn with the long worry of his campaign; he had been eating with two politicians and shaping plans while he bolted food.

"Begins to look as if we can get the indorsement of the anti-Tammany Democrats," he said as he hurried by. "I've just had a talk with Seeley and Ellison. They're coming here at three o'clock."

Luke held up his paper.

"This is an awful thing," he said.

"What?" asked Leighton. He passed beside Luke's desk. "Oh, the North Bridge wreck? Yes, isn't it? When Ellison and Seeley come, don't let anybody butt in on me."

"You know who are really the responsible crowd in the M. & N.?" Luke persisted. His manner was the sleepy manner that had grown upon him for the past twelvemonth, but his eyes were keen.

"Yes," said Leighton absently. He ran his fingers through his always disordered hair. "Yes I know, but we couldn't prove it." He looked at his watch. "Don't forget," he concluded, "you're to head off anybody that comes after three o'clock, and if you're busy, then turn them over to one of the other fellows."

Sec.2. At half-past four Luke's office-boy announced James T. Rollins.

Luke looked up heavily from the latest edition of the _Evening World_.

"Who's James T. Rollins?" he inquired.

The boy did not know. "But he looks like he owned the Stock Exchange," he said. "Wanted the Boss: I told him he was busy."

Luke wearily laid aside his paper.

"Very well, bring him in."

The boy went out and straightway reopened the door to admit the visitor.

Dressed in a russet brown, Rollins was short and stout; his eyebrows were bushy, and he made an effort to keep his thick lips drawn in a firm line. He so much resembled the pictures of the man just then predominant in Luke's mind that the assistant District-Attorney was startled.

"Mr. Rollins?"

The visitor tried to speak, but seemed to be unable to accomplish articulation. He nodded. He stood erect in the attitude of one accustomed to receive orders, and his right hand tapped his stiff hat against his thigh.

Luke indicated a chair beside his desk.

"Sit down."

Rollins complied. He sat far forward in the chair, as if expecting to be ordered out of it at the next moment. Both hands now clutched the brim of his hat, which he held between his fat, outspread knees.

"You wanted to see Mr. Leighton?" inquired Luke.

Rollins coughed.

"Yes, sir."

"I'm sorry." Luke was accustomed to callers of the hesitant sort: he wished that this one would go and leave him alone with the new idea that was growing in his brain; but Leighton, like the good politician that he was, had always given strict orders that every caller should be well received. "I'm afraid Mr. Leighton's very busy now. He has some most important business in hand."

Rollins made an effort toward dignity; his words succeeded, but his manner of uttering them failed:

"My business is important, too."

"And immediate?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then perhaps I can attend to it for you."

Rollins shook his head.

"I've got to see the District-Attorney."

"But I am his assistant."

"Yes, sir, I know. But this is confidential."

Luke began to lose patience.

"Well," he said, "as I told you, I'm sorry, but you can't see him."

In spite of Leighton's orders and his own customary obedience to them, Luke's voice had become sharp. It was just then only the sharpness of an underling; but, because Rollins himself was an underling, the visitor resented it, and this resentment gave him the courage he wanted. He stood up, and he bore himself with an erectness which had a fresh character.

"It's him that will be sorry," he said. "I came here to give him information that'd re-elect him."

Notwithstanding the man's new attitude, Luke thought he scented the crank. All sorts of cranks infested the District-Attorney's office, and every sort was certain it could purge the city or re-elect Leighton. Luke lost his temper. He spoke with the drawl with which he commonly spoke, but his tone was bitter. His tongue laid hold of the uppermost thought in his head.

"I suppose," he said, "you've come here to place the blame for the North Bridge wreck?"

The breath caught in Rollins's throat.

"How did you know?" he demanded.

It was not a crank that asked that question: it was a sane man badly startled. Luke recognized the distinction and instantly resolved to push the advantage he had fortuitously gained. He rose, smiling slowly.

"You've told me you knew I was one of the assistant district-attorneys of New York," he drawled. "I would advise you to act on the knowledge, Mr. Rollins, and not to lose any time about it."

"I----" began Rollins; but bluster came to the aid of his timidity. "No," he said, "I've got to see Mr. Leighton."

Luke had no idea who his visitor was or what information he might possess, but he was now certain that worth-while information was in Rollins's possession. Without further fencing, the lawyer, therefore, resorted to an old stratagem that he had learned when he first entered the District-Attorney's office: on the bare chance that the evidence might be documentary and within reach, he took a quick stride towards Rollins, raising his right hand as if to seize him. At once the right hand of Rollins shot upward and stopped protectingly over his breast.

"Now then," said Luke, "hand me those papers that you've got in your breast-pocket."

"No," said Rollins; "no; they're for Mr. Leighton."

"Hand them over.'"

"They're mine."

"If you don't hand them over," said Luke lazily, "I shall take them."

"You've got no right to!"

"You'd better save yourself trouble, Mr. Rollins."

"I won't!"

From under his lazy lids, Luke saw that the man was only frightened. With a flash of inspiration, the lawyer guessed something of the truth. This fellow was probably a clerk in the M. & N. offices.

"You won't be arrested for robbing the office-files, if that's what you're scared about," he said; "and you won't be told on and discharged."

Rollins was visibly relieved.

"You give me your word, Mr. Huber?"

"I do. Come on now: let's see what you've got."

"And--I'm not a rich man, Mr. Huber."

Luke's face showed his disgust.

"I shan't pay you a cent," he said; "but I daresay Leighton won't mind paying. Only even he won't buy a pig in a poke. Give me those papers. If they're worth anything, I'll take you into the District-Attorney's room right away--or, if there's somebody in there, I'll have him out here."

Rollins realized that Luke meant what he said. He believed, moreover, that his inquisitor was merely cautious.

"All right," he agreed, though with some reluctance. "This is a letter from my employer to a man that always had to return such letters after he's read them. The other letter is the letter from the rail manufacturers that's referred to in the first one. I got them both by----"

"I can guess how," said Luke.

He put out his hand and into it Rollins placed two sheets of paper, that were headed on top simply by an embossed Wall Street address and dated almost five years before.

Luke read:

"_Confidential_.
"MR. ROBERT M. DOHAN,
"Delaware Avenue,
"Buffalo, N. Y.

"DEAR MR. DOHAN:

"I understand that the bill of which you have spoken to me will be passed and become a law to-day. I have just seen Messrs. Hallett and Rivington and have secured their agreement to the plan outlined in my personal conversation with you last week. In view of the favors that you have done me in the past, I think it fair to tell you, _for your own use only_, that my friends have decided that they and I ought to do what you thought they might decide, viz.: unload at the end of five years. Considering your contemplated resignation next year, this will not affect you, except favorably in case you care to manipulate your own holdings in accordance with this news.

"I note what you say about the estimate submitted by the construction-department; also the letter of the steel-rail manufacturers which you inclosed, in which they say that the grade I suggested might not wear well. I think their use of the word 'dangerous' is absurdly exaggerated. We have used this grade on several of our roads and feel sure from long experience that, with proper repair-gangs, it will wear for five years as well as the best.

"My desire and the desire of my associates is to protect the interests of the stockholders. With that in mind, I should state, what you have probably already gathered, that we feel that the new line must be built and operated with all possible economy."

The signature was the signature that Luke expected.

"Those rails," said Rollins, "weren't replaced. Dohan resigned, and these letters have been in our office ever since. The crowd was planning to unload in November."

"Yes," said Luke dryly. His face was immobile and his voice calm, but his heart seemed to beat against his ribs, demanding freedom. "Come on in here to Mr. Leighton's office."

Sec.3. He had forgotten Seeley and Ellison, but they were already gone, and Leighton was alone. Apparently the conference had been satisfactory, for the District-Attorney's face was a little less careworn.

"Mr. Leighton," said Luke, closing the door, "this man"--he indicated Rollins by a lazy movement of his hand--"is a secretary in the employ of the person to whom these letters belong--or belonged." He held out the letters that Rollins had given him.

Leighton's face clouded.

"Office business? I thought I told you I had some personal matters to think over."

Luke choked an impulse of resentment.

"If you'll look at these letters," he said, "I believe you'll find they apply to--both sorts of duties."

Leighton took the papers with a gesture of annoyance, but when he saw the signature to the more important of them, his eyes shone, and he looked up quickly.

"Where did you get these?" He flung the question at Rollins.

The informer had been standing behind Luke, as if seeking his shelter. His breath came heavily.

"I found them in the office-files," he mumbled.

"He stole them," said Luke quietly.

"Oh, Mr. Huber, if you're going to talk like that----"

"He stole them," Luke pursued--"or so he says. The only question in my mind is: are they genuine?"

Rollins showed signs of resenting this suggestion more keenly than the declaration that he was a thief. Leighton, however, interrupted: he was squinting at the letter that Luke had read in full.

"No," he said, "this is real enough. I know the signature."

"You know it?" Luke was surprised.

"Yes, yes." Leighton read the letter through; then turned upon Rollins with a resumption of his cross-examining manner. "How much d'you want for these?"

Rollins beat his hat upon his thigh.

"Well," he said, "they ought to be worth a good deal to you, Mr. Leighton."

"I'll give you five hundred dollars."

"Mr. Leighton!" Rollins was deprecating. "Five hundred dollars!"

"What do you want, then? Speak up."

"Five thousand would be nearer value, Mr. Leighton."

Luke turned away. This was the part of the business that he loathed.

"I'll give you two thousand and not a cent more," said Leighton.

Rollins thought himself now in a commanding position.

"I can't consider that," he said with the nearest approach to firmness he had yet shown.

"All right," said Leighton. "Huber!" He handed the letters to Luke. "Put these in your safe while I telephone this fellow's employer."

"Mr. Leighton!" Rollins bounded forward. His fat face worked with rage, disappointment, and fear. "You wouldn't do that. This is robbery. It's blackmail! For God's sake, Mr. Leighton----"

"Two thousand dollars," said Leighton.

"But think a minute, Mr. Leighton! I've been in my job for seven years--worked up to it from office-boy. I could any time have sold tips along the street for twice that money, and yet this is the first time I've ever--ever----"

"Ever double-crossed your boss. Well, why'd you do it?"

"I don't know. It was because this wreck is so awful."

"And what else?"

"Nothing else."

Leighton thrust a forefinger into the informer's face.

"_What else?_"

Rollins jumped back.

"Well, he--he didn't raise my pay. I've got a big family, and there's a mortgage on my little house in Roseville, and a man in my position has to live well, or people'd talk."

Leighton relaxed. He swung back in his chair and cocked his feet on the desk.

"I'll make it two thousand five hundred for your family's sake. That's my last word."

Luke, who had again turned his back on the hagglers, the letters safely buttoned in an inside pocket of his coat, wondered how his chief could afford such an outlay.

"Is that really the best you can do?" whined Rollins.

"It is the best I _will_ do," said Leighton. Without lowering his feet, he pulled toward him the telephone, which was attached to his desk by an arm that could be lengthened or shortened at the user's will. "Now, then, your boss has gone home long ago; but I can get him at his house; do you want to lose your job or make this money?"

Rollins surrendered.

"I guess I'll have to take your price," he said. "But it's almost a charity I'm doing."

"Right!" Leighton released the telephone, quickly swung his legs from the desk and sat straight.

"And you'll promise nobody'll ever know where you got these letters?"

"Certainly."

Rollins looked toward Luke's significant back.

"And Mr. Huber, too?"

Luke turned.

"I've already promised you that," he said.

Leighton smiled faintly as he said to Luke:

"I guess you don't happen to have two thousand five hundred in loose change about you, do you, Huber?"

"No," said Luke. He saw nothing humorous anywhere in the situation.

"Well, this is no affair for checks, and my bank's uptown," Leighton continued. "I don't suppose," he said to Rollins, "you would care to give credit, my dear sir?"

Rollins could smile, if Luke could not. He shook his head.

"My bank," said Luke, anxious to end the scene, "is just around the corner. It's closed, but the clerks will still be there. They know me. I can get them to let me in the side door, and I know they'll do me a favor. I've got just about that much on deposit." He looked at Leighton. "Shall I take Rollins along?"

"Rollins? Yes." Leighton's good-humor seemed to have returned to stay. "Then hurry back here--alone. I'll want to talk this thing over with you."

Sec.4. Luke paid and dismissed Rollins. Returning, he found Leighton walking rapidly up and down his office.

"Shut the door," said the District-Attorney. His face was flushed; he spoke quickly.

Luke shut the door.

Leighton came forward and brought his hand down on Luke's shoulder with a resounding smack.

"Do you know what this means?" he cried. His mouth was wide with laughter; the whole man exulted. "This re-elects me! Nothing can keep us out now, Huber--not a thing on God's green footstool. All we've got to do is use these letters and then sit back and fold our arms and attend to office business. Politics? These two pieces of paper will play all the politics we need, and more besides. I could shout, Huber; I could sing a regular Song of Deborah. What about Mr. Timothy Heney, _now_? And his Tammany? Gone the way of Sisera, my boy. Tim Heney! 'At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead!'"

Luke's old enthusiasm was rekindled. He thought that he had been misjudging Leighton. Of course the man had been discouraged: he had never before been able to seize an efficient weapon with which to shatter the forces of wrong; even at this time it was only reasonable that his first thought should be of his immediate political opponents; but the weapon was put into his hand at last, the blow would be given against both Tammany and Wall Street; it would be the blow that Luke had hoped for when he read the first accounts of the North Bridge wreck.

"There must be a special Grand Jury to investigate the disaster," said Luke, his words falling over one another much as Leighton's had done. "We must keep the letters dark till it's in session, and then produce them. We can give them to the papers right afterward. It will be jail for the lot of them. Big as they are, it'll be that. It'll be the end of the whole crowd!"

Leighton drew away. His face changed. His entire attitude altered.

"What are you talking about?" he asked dryly.

"Why"--Luke was amazed--"about these letters, of course."

"Well, do you think I'm green enough to waste them on a jury? Not much!"

Luke began to comprehend. He felt unsteady. He was standing close to Leighton's desk, and he put out a hand and gripped the edge of its top shelf.

"Not give them to the jury?" But perhaps he was wrong. Of course he was wrong. "Oh, I see," he said; "maybe it's better not to risk any more lives by waiting. You're going to force this crowd to put down a decent road-bed? Only if you do that---- Well, it's fine of you, but you'll not be any better off politically."

Leighton turned his swivel-chair and sat down in it. His manner became that of an employer trying to be calm and to instill reason into an annoying employee.

"Young man," said he, "just you listen to me for about two minutes. Those fellows do control this road, but they didn't operate it. In spite of Rollins's blessed letters, you can't absolutely say they operate it. But what they do operate, when they want to, are the politics of this city, and if they tell Tammany, yes, or me, to hold off and let an election go the way they want it, why, hold off Tammany or anybody else has to. Nobody could win if they said 'No.' Now, then"--Leighton punctuated his words with the rise and fall of an index finger--"they're not actually morally responsible for the conduct of the M. & N., but they'll know the publication of these letters would make the public think they were. They'll know the publication would wreck the road they're still interested in, smash all their other stocks and depreciate all their other interests, start a panic that might swamp even them, and maybe begin a public row that would send them close to jail, on general principles, legal evidence or no legal evidence. To stop that, they'd be willing to have me elected, which they weren't yet quite certain about being to-day. I'll go to them quietly, and then I'll surrender these letters, when they've kept their part of the bargain I'll make. And don't you worry about loss of life. That engineer was probably green or drunk, or the signal man got rattled. You'll see the coroner's jury says so. But, anyhow, once I'm safely re-elected, I'll take care the M. & N. is better regulated than it has been. There's no use in a row: a little moral suasion will do the trick."

He tossed back, and clasped his hands behind his head.

The explanation had been too long: it was long enough to allow Luke to master the shock of what it implied. He saw his last illusions concerning Leighton fall under the impact of Leighton's own words. He was aghast. He was ashamed of his master; he was ashamed of himself for ever having served such a master. But he was not crushed. As his chief proceeded, Luke's soul rose through indignation to red revolt. By the time that Leighton ceased speaking, Luke, except for two spots of crimson on his cheeks, was captain of his rage. He leaned against the desk-side indolently, his eyelids lowered, and when he replied it was with an indifferent drawl.

"It doesn't much matter whether the engineer was drunk or the signal man rattled," he said: "the rail flattened, and the bridge fell. The rail was drunk and the bridge was rattled."

Leighton shook himself peevishly.

"You're trying to be humorous," he said.

"No; oh, no," said Luke gently. "What I'm getting at is, it seems to me the men who directly controlled this road were directly responsible for its operation. I mean that the men who authorized that letter, and insisted on the policy it lays down, are guilty. It strikes me they ought to be either reformed or punished."