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Counsel for the Defense
By
Leroy Scott
Author of
"The Shears of Destiny," "To Him That Hath,"
"The Walking Delegate"
Frontispiece by
Charles M. Chapman
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1912
_Copyright, 1911, 1912, by_
LEROY SCOTT
_All rights reserved, including that of
translation into foreign languages,
including the Scandinavian_
[Illustration: "THRILLING WITH AN UNEXPECTED HOPE, KATHERINE ROSE AND
TRIED TO KEEP HERSELF BEFORE THE EYES OF DOCTOR SHERMAN LIKE AN
ACCUSING CONSCIENCE"]
TO
HELEN
PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
KATHERINE WEST.
DR. DAVID WEST, her father.
ARNOLD BRUCE, editor of the _Express_.
HARRISON BLAKE, ex-lieutenant-governor.
MRS. BLAKE, his mother.
"BLIND CHARLIE" PECK, a political boss.
HOSEA HOLLINGSWORTH, an old attorney.
BILLY HARPER, reporter on the _Express_.
THE REVEREND DR. SHERMAN, of the Wabash Avenue Church.
MRS. SHERMAN, his wife.
MRS. RACHEL GRAY, Katherine's aunt.
ROGER KENNEDY, prosecuting attorney.
JUDGE KELLOG.
MR. BROWN, of the National Electric & Water Company.
MR. MANNING, a detective.
ELIJAH STONE, a detective.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Westville Prepares to Celebrate 3
II. The Bubble Reputation 15
III. Katherine Comes Home 30
IV. Doctor West's Lawyer 49
V. Katherine Prepares for Battle 63
VI. The Lady Lawyer 80
VII. The Mask Falls 98
VIII. The Editor of the _Express_ 116
IX. The Price of a Man 131
X. Sunset at The Sycamores 146
XI. The Trial 158
XII. Opportunity Knocks at Bruce's Door 172
XIII. The Deserter 191
XIV. The Night Watch 212
XV. Politics Make Strange Bedfellows 226
XVI. Through The Storm 240
XVII. The Cup of Bliss 250
XVIII. The Candidate and the Tiger 264
XIX. When Greek Meets Greek 276
XX. A Spectre Comes to Town 295
XXI. Bruce to the Front 311
XXII. The Last Stand 328
XXIII. At Elsie's Bedside 346
XXIV. Billy Harper Writes a Story 368
XXV. Katherine Faces the Enemy 388
XXVI. An Idol's Fall 403
XXVII. The End of The Beginning 418
COUNSEL FOR THE DEFENSE
CHAPTER I
WESTVILLE PREPARES TO CELEBRATE
The room was thick with dust and draped with ancient cobwebs. In one
corner dismally reposed a literary junk heap--old magazines,
broken-backed works of reference, novels once unanimously read but now
unanimously forgotten. The desk was a helter-skelter of papers. One of
the two chairs had its burst cane seat mended by an atlas of the
world; and wherever any of the floor peered dimly through the general
debris it showed a complexion of dark and ineradicable greasiness.
Altogether, it was a room hopelessly unfit for human habitation; which
is perhaps but an indirect manner of stating that it was the office of
the editor of a successful newspaper.
Before a typewriter at a small table sat a bare-armed, solitary man.
He was twenty-eight or thirty, abundantly endowed with bone and
muscle, and with a face----But not to soil this early page with
abusive terms, it will be sufficient to remark that whatever the
Divine Sculptor had carved his countenance to portray, plainly there
had been no thought of re-beautifying the earth with an Apollo. He was
constructed not for grace, but powerful, tireless action; and there
was something absurdly disproportionate between the small machine and
the broad and hairy hands which so heavily belaboured its ladylike
keys.
It was a custom with Bruce to write the big local news story of the
day himself, a feature that had proved a stimulant to his paper's
circulation and prestige. To-morrow was to be one of the proudest days
of Westville's history, for to-morrow was the formal opening of the
city's greatest municipal enterprise, its thoroughly modern
water-works; and it was an extensive and vivid account of the next
day's programme that the editor was pounding so rapidly out of his
machine for that afternoon's issue of the _Express_. Now and then, as
he paused an instant to shape an effective sentence in his mind, he
glanced through the open window beside him across Main Street to
where, against the front of the old Court House, a group of
shirt-sleeved workmen were hanging their country's colours about a
speakers' stand; then his big, blunt fingers thumped swiftly on.
He had jerked out the final sheet, and had begun to revise his story,
making corrections with a very black pencil and in a very large hand,
when there sauntered in from the general editorial room a pale, slight
young man of twenty-five. The newcomer had a reckless air, a humorous
twist to the left corner of his mouth, and a negligent smartness in
his dress which plainly had its origin elsewhere than in Westville.
The editor did not raise his eyes.
"In a minute, Billy," he said shortly.
"Nothing to hurry about, Arn," drawled the other.
The young fellow drew forward the atlas-bottomed chair, leisurely
enthroned himself upon the nations of the earth, crossed his feet upon
the window-sill, and lit a cigarette. About his lounging form there
was a latent energy like that of a relaxed cat. He gazed rather
languidly over at the Square, its sides abustle with excited
preparation. Across the fronts of stores bunting was being tacked;
from upper windows crisp cotton flags were being unscrolled. As for
the Court House yard itself, to-day its elm-shaded spaces were
lifeless save for the workmen about the stand, a litigant or two going
up the walk, and an occasional frock-coated lawyer, his vest
democratically unbuttoned to the warm May air. But to-morrow----
The young fellow had turned his head slowly toward the editor's copy,
and, as though reading, he began in an emotional, declamatory voice:
"To-morrow the classic shades of Court House Square will teem with a
tumultuous throng. In the emblazoned speakers' stand the Westville
Brass Band, in their new uniforms, glittering like so many grand
marshals of the empire, will trumpet forth triumphant music fit to
burst; and aloft from this breeze-fluttered throne of oratory----"
"Go to hell!" interrupted Bruce, eyes still racing through his copy.
"And down from this breeze-fluttered throne of oratory," continued
Billy, with a rising quaver in his voice, "Mr. Harrison Blake,
Westville's favourite son; the Reverend Doctor Sherman, president of
the Voters' Union, and the Honourable Hiram Cogshell, Calloway
County's able-bodiest orator, will pour forth prodigal and perfervid
eloquence upon the populace below. And Dr. David West, he who has
directed this magnificent work from its birth unto the present, he who
has laid upon the sacred altar of his city's welfare a matchless
devotion and a lifetime's store of scientific knowledge, he who----"
"See here, young fellow!" The editor slammed down the last sheet of
his revised story, and turned upon his assistant a square, bony,
aggressive face that gave a sense of having been modelled by a
clinched fist, and of still glowering at the blow. He had gray eyes
that gleamed dogmatically from behind thick glasses, and hair that
brush could not subdue. "See here, Billy Harper, will you please go to
hell!"
"Sure; follow you anywhere, Arn," returned Billy pleasantly, holding
out his cigarette case.
"You little Chicago alley cat, you!" growled Bruce. He took a
cigarette, broke it open and poured the tobacco into a black pipe,
which he lit. "Well--turn up anything?"
"Governor can't come," replied the reporter, lighting a fresh
cigarette.
"Hard luck. But we'll have the crowd anyhow. Blake tell you anything
else?"
"He didn't tell me that. His stenographer did; she'd opened the
Governor's telegram. Blake's in Indianapolis to-day--looking after his
chances for the Senate, I suppose."
"See Doctor West?"
"Went to his house first. But as usual he wouldn't say a thing. That
old boy is certainly the mildest mannered hero of the day I ever went
up against. The way he does dodge the spot-light!--it's enough to make
one of your prima donna politicians die of heart failure. To do a
great piece of work, and then be as modest about it as he is--well,
Arn, I sure am for that old doc!"
"Huh!" grunted the editor.
"When it comes time to hang the laurel wreath upon his brow to-morrow
I'll bet you and your spavined old Arrangements Committee will have to
push him on to the stand by the scruff of his neck."
"Did you get him to promise to sit for a new picture?"
"Yes. And you ought to raise me ten a week for doing it. He didn't
want his picture printed; and if we did print it, he thought that
prehistoric thing of the eighties we've got was good enough."
"Well, be sure you get that photo, if you have to use chloroform. I
saw him go into the Court House a little while ago. Better catch him
as he comes out and lead him over to Dodson's gallery."
"All right." The young fellow recrossed his feet upon the window-sill.
"But, Arn," he drawled, "this certainly is a slow old burg you've
dragged me down into. If one of your leading citizens wants to catch
the seven-thirty to Indianapolis to-morrow morning, I suppose he sets
his alarm to go off day before yesterday."
"What's soured on your stomach now?" demanded the editor.
"Oh, the way it took this suburb of Nowhere thirty years to wake up to
Doctor West! Every time I see him I feel sore for hours afterward at
how this darned place has treated the old boy. If your six-cylinder,
sixty-horse power, seven-passenger tongues hadn't remembered that his
grandfather had founded Westville, I bet you'd have talked him out of
the town long ago."
"The town didn't understand him."
"I should say it didn't!" agreed the reporter.
"And I guess you don't understand the town," said the editor, a little
sharply. "Young man, you've never lived in a small place."
"Till this, Chicago was my smallest--the gods be praised!"
"Well, it's the same in your old smokestack of the universe as it is
here!" retorted Bruce. "If you go after the dollar, you're sane. If
you don't, you're cracked. Doctor West started off like a winner, so
they say; looked like he was going to get a corner on all the patients
of Westville. Then, when he stopped practising----"
"You never told me what made him stop."
"His wife's death--from typhoid; I barely remember that. When he
stopped practising and began his scientific work, the town thought
he'd lost his head."
"And yet two years ago the town was glad enough to get him to take
charge of installing its new water system!"
"That's how it discovered he was somebody. When the city began to look
around for an expert, it found no one they could get had a tenth of
his knowledge of water supply."
"That's the way with your self-worshipping cross-roads towns! You
raise a genius--laugh at him, pity his family--till you learn how the
outside world respects him. Then--hurrah! Strike up the band, boys!
When I think how that old party has been quietly studying typhoid
fever and water supply all these years, with you bunch of hayseeds
looking down on him as a crank--I get so blamed sore at the place that
I wish I'd chucked your letter into the waste-basket when you wrote me
to come!"
"It may have been a dub of a town, Billy, but it'll be the best place
in Indiana before we get through with it," returned the editor
confidently. "But whom else did you see?"
"Ran into the Honourable Hiram Cogshell on Main Street, and he slipped
me this precious gem." Billy handed Bruce a packet of typewritten
sheets. "Carbon of his to-morrow's speech. He gave it to me, he said,
to save us the trouble of taking it down. The Honourable Hiram is
certainly one citizen who'll never go broke buying himself a bushel to
hide his light under!"
The editor glanced at a page or two of it with wearied irritation,
then tossed it back.
"Guess we'll have to print it. But weed out some of his flowers of
rhetoric."
"Pressed flowers," amended Billy. "Swipe the Honourable Hiram's copy
of 'Bartlett's Quotations' and that tremendous orator would have
nothing left but his gestures."
"How about the grand jury, Billy?" pursued the editor. "Anything doing
there?"
"Farmer down in Buck Creek Township indicted for kidnapping his
neighbour's pigs," drawled the reporter. "Infants snatched away while
fond mother slept. Very pathetic. Also that second-story man was
indicted that stole Alderman Big Bill Perkins's clothes. Remember it,
don't you? Big Bill's clothes had so much diameter that the poor,
hard-working thief couldn't sell the fruits of his industry. Pathos
there also. Guess I can spin the two out for a column."
"Spin 'em out for about three lines," returned Bruce in his abrupt
manner. "No room for your funny stuff to-day, Billy; the celebration
crowds everything else out. Write that about the Governor, and then
help Stevens with the telegraph--and see that it's carved down to the
bone." He picked up the typewritten sheets he had finished revising,
and let out a sharp growl of "Copy!"
"That's your celebration story, isn't it?" asked the reporter.
"Yes." And Bruce held it out to the "devil" who had appeared through
the doorway from the depths below.
"Wait a bit with it, Arn. The prosecuting attorney stopped me as I was
leaving, and asked me to have you step over to the Court House for a
minute."
"What's Kennedy want?"
"Something about the celebration, he said. I guess he wants to talk
with you about some further details of the programme."
"Why the deuce didn't he come over here then?" growled Bruce. "I'm as
busy as he is!"
"He said he couldn't leave."
"Couldn't leave?" said Bruce, with a snap of his heavy jaw. "Well,
neither can I!"
"You mean you won't go?"
"That's what I mean! I'll go to the very gates of hell to get a good
piece of news, but when it comes to general affairs the politicians,
business men, and the etceteras of this town have got to understand
that there's just as much reason for their coming to me as for my
going to them. I'm as important as any of them."
"So-ho, we're on our high horse, are we?"
"You bet we are, my son! And that's where you've got to be if you want
this town to respect you."
"All right. She's a great nag, if you can keep your saddle. But I
guess I'd better tell Kennedy you're not coming."
Without rising, Billy leaned back and took up Bruce's desk telephone,
and soon was talking to the prosecuting attorney. After a moment he
held out the instrument to the editor.
"Kennedy wants to speak with you," he said.
Bruce took the 'phone.
"Hello, that you Kennedy?... No, I can't come--too busy. Suppose you
run over here.... Got some people there? Well, bring 'em along.... Why
can't they come? Who are they?... Can't you tell me what the situation
is?... All right, then; in a couple of minutes."
Bruce hung up the receiver and arose.
"So you're going after all?" asked Billy.
"Guess I'd better," returned the editor, putting on his coat and hat.
"Kennedy says something big has just broken loose. Sounds queer.
Wonder what the dickens it can be." And he started out.
"But how about your celebration story?" queried Billy. "Want it to go
down?"
Bruce looked at his watch.
"Two hours till press time; I guess it can wait." And taking the story
back from the boy he tossed it upon his desk.
He stepped out into the local room, which showed the same kindly
tolerance of dirt as did his private office. At a long table two young
men sat before typewriters, and in a corner a third young man was
taking the clicking dictation of a telegraph sounder.
"Remember, boys, keep everything but the celebration down to bones!"
Bruce called out. And with that he passed out of the office and down
the stairway to the street.