Porcellis nodded to him familiarly

"Good-evening, James," he said.

"Good-evening, Mr. Porcellis. And the other gentleman, sir?"

"Mr. Huber," said Porcellis with careful distinctness.

The servant turned his head toward the crowd in the room behind him.

"Mr. Porcellis!" he cried, and then, as if it were an afterthought: "Mr.

Urer!"

"It's all right," Porcellis hurriedly reassured Luke. "Nobody pays the

slightest attention to him, anyhow."

Nobody did. As they shouldered their way forward, the huge apartment

that they now entered was like what Luke thought the rooms of state at

Versailles must be, and the great hall in the Brussels Palace of

Justice. All about the walls, and especially about the large entrance,

was a press of men and women, standing still, or moving slowly from

group to group through an invisible, but palpable, cloud formed by a

mixture of the odor of withering flowers, Parisian scents, and human

sweat. A band of music, concealed in a far-away balcony, blared

rag-time, but distinct from its impudence, there rose from all these

people the noise of shoe-leather dragged over parquette flooring, the

composite of laughter in many keys and the perplexed buzz of small-talk.

The moving figures of the women, over whom countless aigrettes quivered,

had a kaleidoscopic effect, curiously unreal: an effect of flashing

colors--crimson, ivory, blues, greens, and pinks--splashing against

white breasts and backs, falling away from dazzling shoulders, the waves

mounting in oily satin, feline velvet, or clinging peau de cygnes, and

breaking in the foam of lace and the flying spray of diamonds. Here

even the ordinary black-and-white of the men became black-and-gray or

black-and-lavender, with gems for waistcoat buttons. On the

dancing-floor many couples, hugging each other so tightly that their

bodies touched from chest to center, swayed to the sensuous music of a

one-step, the leaders' high collars wilting, the fingers of their right

hands spread wide along the women's upper vertebras, their partners

looking into their intent faces from narrowed eyes.

The picture was too bright, too varied, for the unaccustomed mind to

seize it: Luke turned to Porcellis:

"And Mrs. Ruysdael?"

He was expecting his hostess to meet her guests at the door of the

ballroom.

Porcellis, however, did not wholly understand.

"Oh, she's about somewhere, I dare say," he responded--"though she

doesn't care for late hours and sometimes leaves after the third dance.

Come on. I'll introduce you to some worth-while people."

He introduced Luke to a great many people, for he seemed to know them

all. There was the British Ambassador and a German baron, a string of

dowagers with marriageable daughters (Luke danced with each daughter and

liked her), an artist, a scientist, and a bibliophile, and several

debutantes that were not marriageable at all, but were quite frankly

determined to marry.

As is the way when a name runs in one's brain, three out of five of the

people that Luke talked to sooner or later mentioned the man that the

elder Huber had spoken of that morning and that Porcellis had later so

highly extolled. The Ambassador said that this man had, by lending or

withholding tremendous sums, preserved the peace of nations; the artist

praised him as the only true patron of art in America; the scientist

told how the same man had established and equipped a now world-famous

institution for the study and cure of a world-plague; the bibliophile

envied his first editions and medieval manuscripts.

Leading his prettiest partner across the floor, Luke's glance, in spite

of his will, rested on a diamond pendant that hung from a thread of gold

about her neck and fell above her beautiful bust. She was a girl with

the face of one of those Italian peasant girls that the early painters

loved to paint as Madonnas, and Huber felt that his regard must be an

insult.

The girl, however, took the pendant between a white thumb and forefinger

and looked from it to him with pleased eyes.

"You like it?" she asked.

"I think it's wonderful," said he.

"It is pretty," she replied. "My uncle gave it to me on my last

birthday. It used to be in a heathen god's crown in some Chinese or

Hindu temple or other."

"The god ought to be pleased to lose it to you," said Luke, "even if it

didn't come to you directly."

"Oh, but it did come to me directly," she laughed prettily. "That's

half the charm of it. Uncle sent right over there and got it for me."

When Luke found Porcellis again, he asked him about this.

"Who's that girl with the broad, low forehead," he inquired, "and the

expression of a stained-glass saint?"

"You're aiming high," said Porcellis; "that's one of the richest girls

in New York."

"Who's her uncle?"

"Ah, she's been talking of him, has she? Well, I don't blame her. Her

uncle is the man I call the American Shakespeare. She'll get a lot of

his money, too, for he has no children of his own."

"Is he here himself?"

"Not he. He doesn't care for this sort of thing. That

football-playerish sort of fellow that the niece introduced you

to--that's young Hallett she's dancing with now--he's the son of George

J. And there's George J. himself!"

Luke remembered that George J. Hallett was one of the financiers whose

name was most frequently associated with the donor of diamonds and

benefactor of medical research.

"And," continued Porcellis, "do you see that stoutish, nervous pale man

over there talking to the British Ambassador? Oh, don't be alarmed:

they're probably not talking about anything more important than how they

hate dances. Well, that's the third member of the triumvirate: that's

L. Bergen Rivington."

Luke went home in the early dawn, feeling that these were pleasant

people, however they came by their money, and that he had certainly

judged the one that was not there long before he knew much about him.

Sec.4. Leighton was out of town--he, too, was before the legislature's

investigating committee at Albany--and the bar-examination was not to be

held for a week or more, so that Luke had the next few days to devote to

himself. The use that he put them to was an endeavor to learn what he

could of the city of which he had seen so little before he came to live

there. He saw what, considered of itself, was a great deal, but what,

considered as a part of New York, was minute; and at many turns, the

number of which surprised him--for long as he had known of the man's

power, he never before looked for its effects--he came across traces of

that financier who more and more seemed to him to be the controlling

force in America.

He was shown a great college, handsomely housed, splendidly equipped, in

which the higher education was provided free to every graduate of the

public schools that chose to take advantage of it, and this, he was

told, had been given to New York by the great "money editor." He was

taken through a cancer hospital, where mesothorium, which cost about

$52,000 a grain, and radium at $64,000, had been bought and were kept

and used without charge in the treatment of poor patients--where

physicians and surgeons of international repute were engaged to spend

all their time searching for a true cure and final prevention--and this

institution had been largely endowed by the same man, whose first wife,

it appeared, had died of cancer. There were homes for destitute widows,

pure-milk depots, orphan asylums, all assisted by this man or his

associates.

"Do you know him?" Luke asked Porcellis one evening as they sat at

dinner in the latter's club. They had been talking of many things, but

Luke found this one conspicuously interesting.

"No," said Porcellis. "He doesn't go out much. I saw him once. I was

being shown through his library--it's a marvelous place, full of

treasure-trove that would make a scholar think he was in heaven--and the

librarian pointed him out to me: he was sitting in the alcove that held

the First Folios, and he was reading the current 'World Almanac.'"

They both laughed.

"Still," protested Luke, "he seems more Jovian than ever to me. I don't

know whether he's a good Jove or a bad one, but I don't see how he can

really be bad when he does so much good."

Porcellis was still intolerant of the ethical question. He pointed out

that nobody of weight ever knew or cared whether Shakespeare's life was

moral or whether the effect of his work was immoral. What had happened

in regard to the American was that, because he had at last been secured

to come to a public hearing, people were beginning to realize that he

was a living man and not a force of nature. For a quarter of a century

he had been the greatest individual power in the United States, and for

all that time he had remained hidden. He had been doing daily

tremendous things, things that were epic in their sweep and yet affected

every man, woman, and child included in the census--and nobody knew of

them, no paper printed a word about them, until he had passed them out

of his own hands and into those of his lieutenants, not until, indeed,

his lieutenants had sent them so far from hand to hand that none could

tell precisely when and where they had started.

"The man's a genius," said Porcellis, "and like all geniuses he's just

what we all are when his genius isn't at work. What he feels is just

what we'd feel if we were in his place."

"Still," argued Luke, "the influence of such a man is too great; it's

dangerous. It oughtn't to be allowed in politics."

"There you go again!" sighed Porcellis. "Allow? How are you going to

allow or disallow a force? It simply is. This man can give the big

politicians certain large advantages if they pass laws that suit him.

The big politicians can give the little politicians certain lesser

advantages if they furnish the votes. The lesser politicians can get

the votes if they let the police charge the criminals for protection in

crime. Each man seizes his opportunity, and that's all there is about

it."

"You think so?" said Luke. "I can't believe it. I can't believe it

would be necessary if the right laws were passed and enforced. Wait

till your brother-in-law gets the District-Attorney's office cleaned out

and in working order. Then you'll see I'm right."

Sec.5. At ten o'clock on the following Sunday night, Luke, on a lonely

walk through the East Side, noticed that, whereas the front rooms of the

saloons were darkened, the back rooms were all alight. The doors to

these back rooms were forever swinging to the entrance and exit of

unmistakable customers, many of whom came out bearing foaming jugs of

beer under the indifferent noses of policemen at the corners. Luke

chose a saloon in Essex Street and entered it.

The room was small, but crowded. The walls, which were papered in

green, bore a few framed prints in high colors, advertisements of

various brands of beer and whisky. All about were small tables at which

blowsy women and men in stained clothes were drinking.

Luke hesitated. Nobody had questioned his entrance, there was no guard

and no password: the door hung free; but now his startled eye could not

see a vacant table, and he knew that he must appear an alien to this

place.

Presently a nearby woman smiled at him. She looked to be about fifty

years old. There was a mangy peacock feather in her straw hat, which

was set a-slant of dank black hair touched with gray.

"Hello, sweetheart," she said. "Come over here a minute." Her smile

was toothless.

"Shut up, Mame," somebody else commanded. "You're drunk."

Luke looked at the man that had spoken. He was sitting alone at a table

the length of the room away. He had a puffed face, red from liquor and

blue from an unshaven beard; his coat, once black, had turned green; he

wore no collar, and a part of the rim of his greasy derby-hat was torn

away.

"Shut up," he repeated. "You're drunk."

"Thank Gawd," the woman assented. Her acknowledgment of the accusation

was fervent; she returned her attention to the glass of whisky that

stood on the table before her.

"You can sit here, if you want to," said the man, addressing Luke, and

nodding at a chair beside him.

Luke crossed the room and took the chair. The other people in the room

were indifferent to his entrance with the same indifference that the

guests of Mrs. Ruysdael had shown. The woman that had invited him did

not look his way; even the man that had invited him remained for some

time silent. Luke ordered a glass of beer from an aproned waiter, who

came with a tray full of whisky glasses in one hand, and five foaming

beer-mugs in the fingers and thumb of the other.

"Will you have a drink with me?" Luke inquired of the derelict beside

him.

"Sure," said he, and Luke noticed that, though he did not cough, his

voice was hoarse.

They gave their orders.

"And perhaps your friend would have one?" Luke suggested.

The man raised his rheumy eyes.

"What friend?"

"The--the one that spoke to me when I came in."

"Who? That skirt? I never saw her before in my life."

Their drinks came, and the men drank for a while in silence.

"What's _your_ graft?" asked the man presently.

"I'm a lawyer," said Luke. He was first proud of the answer and then

ashamed of himself for being proud of it.

The man looked at him dreamily through watering eyes.

"Quit yer kiddin'," he presently remarked.

"I'm not kidding."

"You're a lawyer?"

"Yes."

"Well, I'm a bum," said the man. He tilted up his bristled chin; his

seamed throat swelled; sounds that, because they were not speech, Luke

took to be song, came from his throat. He sang:

"The Spring has came, I'm just out o' jail;

I haven't any money an' I haven't any bail!

_Hall_eyloolyah, I'm a bum--bum!

Halleyloolyah, bum again!

Halleyloolyah, give----"

He stopped abruptly. "I'm sorry for _you_," he said.

"Why?" asked Luke. He thought the sentiment of that song as horrible as

the creature that sang it.

"Because you're all tied up with everything. But me--there ain't

nothin' _can_ tie me. You fellers is in jail all the time an' don't

know it; I'm only in jail when you fellers can ketch me and put me

there."

Luke realized that he had found a philosopher who, however mistaken in

his deductions, had seen quite as much of the world as Jack Porcellis.

He attempted the vernacular.

"Is this a bums' joint?" he inquired.

The philosopher sneered.

"Naw," he said. "It's a bum joint, but it ain't a bums' joint. Too

much class for me. This bunch"--he included the entire company with a

wide gesture--"is all in the same jail with you. If they wasn't here,

you'd be where I am."

"I suppose they do give us lawyers cases," Luke granted; "but they seem

to get around the laws pretty frequently: they're wide open to-night."

"Sure they are. See that?" The other man indicated the waiter, who was

disappearing into the dark vestibule with two drinks on his tray.

"Them's for the cop on this beat, an' a vice-squad cop 'at's with him.

I'm wise. I seen Tony (that's the boss o' this joint) slip them a

fifty-dollar bill last Sunday--protection money."

"But some day," urged Luke, who was trying to plumb the dark pool that

was this man's mind, "the Mayor or the District-Attorney will get proof

of that sort of thing--some day when the Mayor and the District-Attorney

are honest men----"

"Don't make me laugh," the derelict interrupted: "me lip's cracked. The

Mayor and the District-Attorney's got to get elected, whoever they are,

don't they?"

Luke supposed so.

"Well, then. Tony an' his kind gets the votes. They can't elect without

the Tony kind says so. It's a fair trade. An' the Mayors an' the

District-Attorneys ain't got no easy thing of it, neither. Votes costs

money. They've got to get the money from the money-guys, the candidates

do, an' then they've got to let the money-guys kill as many people as

they wants to on their railroads without sendin' them to jail for

it.--Have another?"

Luke consented to another drink.

"This one's on me," said the other man, and he paid for the order. "No,

sir," he went on, as they were finishing their second drink together,

"there's only two sorts o' men that ain't tied up. One sort's me that

knows things an' ain't afraid to starve (there's lots of me); the other

sort's the guys at the top that does the tyin', an' there's only a few

of them, with the King as the boss-knotter."

"The King?" repeated Luke. "Who's he?"

But he had guessed the answer before the derelict gave it: the answer

was the man that Porcellis considered the greatest American.....

All the way to his apartments in Thirty-ninth Street that night, Luke's

feet were pounding to the wretched derelict's wretched hymn:

"_Hall_eyloolyah, I'm a bum--bum!

Halleyloolyah, bum again!"

*CHAPTER II*

On a morning of that same April in a large rear room on the twentieth

floor of a Wall Street skyscraper, three men were seated around a large

mahogany table. They were talking business. Each man had his own

offices and his own businesses, but they frequently and quietly met in

this, the inner office of one, because most of the businesses of each

were closely connected, at several points, with the business interests

of all.

There was nothing unusual about the outward appearance of the public

actions of this trio; they were apparently but three units of the legion

that makes this portion of New York a city by day and a desert by night.

Each had come downtown in his own motor that morning, defying speed laws

and traffic regulations, just as scores of his business neighbors had

done. Each had descended at his own offices, passed through a

half-dozen doors guarded by six bowing attendants, and proceeded to his

own desk in his own private room, precisely as a small army of other

business men were doing at the same time within a radius of half a mile.

Each looked like the rest of that army. All three were men of about the

average in height, not noticeably either above or below it, and inclined

to bulkiness. They had pale faces and close mouths and quiet eyes,

which looked out upon the world from under bushy brows with glances that

gave the lie to the lethargic indications of the little pouches of loose

skin below their lower lids. Each man wore a flower in the lapel of his

dark coat; one wore a white waistcoat; the cropped mustache of one was

black; that of another was touched with gray; the man at the head of the

table was clean-shaven.

The man at the head of the table was, for the most of the time, even

less remarkable than his companions. He was somewhat shorter and

heavier; his abdomen swelled so that his shoulders were somewhat farther

from the table than were those of his associates; his bushy eyebrows

were somewhat more bushy; his pale face somewhat paler; his calm eyes

somewhat sharper, yet more calm;--and his lips, in addition to closing

tightly, were so heavy that the compression of the mouth must have

resulted from a habit acquired only by a strong and long effort of the

will. He sat with his great hands flat upon the surface of the table,

his thick fingers extended, his elbows raised at right angles to his

torso and pointing ceilingward. His chest heaved visibly, but his

breathing was inaudible. His eyes were everywhere. He spoke rarely,

but when he did speak it was as if he darted over the table, seized

something, and returned: he was startlingly brief and sudden, and was

instantly back again in his quiet watchfulness, apparently heavy,

unruffled, slow.

He had come to work that morning with his usual promptness--the moment

of his coming never changed--and in his usual temper. He had threaded

the maze of corridors with a springing step. In the mahogany-paneled

room with its heavy table and arm-chairs, and its one decoration, a rare

engraving of George Washington, hung between the two windows that gave

the place its only chance for sunlight, he found on his desk, in a

corner, a clean blotter, a fresh pen, a small pad of cheap paper for

memoranda, and nothing else. He pressed one of a row of worn buttons in

the side of the desk. He was ringing for his private secretary.

The secretary, who patently tried to look as much like his master as

possible, and succeeded, entered, a sheaf of open letters in his hand,

and noiselessly closed the door behind him.

"Good-morning," said his master. His voice was quite low; it was thin

and cool, but his words fell quickly.

"Good-morning," said the secretary.

"What's in the mail?"

"Not much, sir. Only about twenty things that need your personal

attention."

"_About_ twenty!" The master's words seemed to leap from him and

assault the secretary, but his face was set like a plaster-cast of calm

and his tone was even. "Do you mean nineteen or twenty-one?"

The secretary was too used to this manner of speech to be alarmed by it.

"Twenty-two," he said. He handed the letters to his master.

That one ran them over with a quick hand and a quicker eye. In terse,

sharp sentences, he directed his secretary how to reply to them, the

latter taking rapid stenographic notes of the commands.

"You have turned the begging communications over to Simpson to

investigate?" the employer inquired.

"Yes, sir."

"And the requests for contributions?"

"Yes, sir. There was one for a new hospital at Akron. The rubber

people have given five thousand, and----"

"Tell Simpson to write that I'll give ten thousand if the town raises

ten thousand more."

"Very well, sir."

"Has Mr. Brinley telephoned from Washington?"

"Yes, sir. He says he is to take breakfast at the White House

to-morrow."

"What's that? He was told to arrange it for to-day."

"He was; but he said he'd got word from the----"

"Never mind. To-morrow will do, if he only keeps his word this time.

Wire him: 'Right; but positively no more postponements.' Use the code

signature and send from somewhere uptown,--Anything from Albany?"

"Yes. Senator Scudder says to tell you that bill will be reported

to-day and rushed through before evening."

"Have Conover go up to the Astor and get Scudder on the 'phone and say

that the bill must be passed before noon recess. The Governor will sign

it immediately."

"Yes, sir."

"And Conover is not to mention names."

"Of course not, sir."

"Anything else?"

"No--except somebody has been trying to get you on the long-distance

wire from Hartford."

"That's Sparks.--Run over to the corner pay-station and call up the

legislative building at Hartford. Get Sparks on the 'phone. Be sure

it's the right man you're talking to. Tell him that the New York

gentleman he wanted to speak to--just that: the New York gentleman he

wanted to speak to--is out of town, but has telegraphed you to say to

him it is all right for him to go ahead. Got that?"

"Yes, sir."

"Read it."

The secretary read from his notes.

"Now," said the business man, "get Mr. Rivington and Mr. Hallett on your

own 'phone and ask them if they can find it convenient to come around

here to see me for a half-hour. Tell me what they say, and then give me

Atwood and the other brokers in the regular order."

"Yes, sir."

"And, Rollins----"

"Yes, sir?"

"When Mr. Hallett and Mr. Rivington arrive, we are not to be disturbed."

The secretary went; the brokers were given their orders, and then came

L. Bergen Rivington and George J. Hallett, the two men with whom this

third man was now consulting.

"About the Manhattan and Niagara----" began Rivington. He had a way of

moving his hands nervously when he spoke, and he rarely completed a

sentence.

Hallett, who was the man in a white waistcoat, stopped chewing his cigar

to ask:

"What are they kickin' about? We own seventy-five per cent. of the

preferred and sixty of the common."

"And it is too much, I think," said Rivington. "We need it only to keep

from unsettling the N. Y. & N. J. interests, because---- Fifty-five of

the preferred and fifty-two of the common, perhaps, but seventy-five and

sixty----"

"And, now," chimed Hallett, "this little fellow--what's his name?--the

president. Oh, yes: Dohan, that's it--starts out to launch a new

stock-issue to bridge the river five miles from town and come into New

York, an' all without as much as sayin' 'If you please' to us! We ought

to wreck his damned picayune road for him; that's what we ought to do."

The two continued their indignant comments. Every little while they

paused to give the crouching man at the head of the table a chance to

speak, and more often they looked at him to see whether he wanted to

speak; but, though his eyes were always alert to meet theirs, he did

not, for some time, utter a word.

"Of course," said Rivington, "we are not directors of the road, but

still----"

"Oh, hell!" grunted Hallett disgustedly. "Didn't you just say between

us we owned all the stock worth ownin'? We ought to unload and smash

'em."

"You may be right. I am inclined to think----"

"Right? Of course I'm right. I'm not goin' to be bullied by a handful

of dummies when I can sell them up as if I was a sheriff closing down on

a crossroads grocery store!"

"They certainly are impudent and----"

"They're beggars on horseback! Wastin' our money like this!"

"They have---- We should tell the legislature----"

"Gentlemen,"--it was the clear, crisp voice of the man at the head of

the table that interrupted; he spoke in a tone somewhat different from

that in which he habitually addressed his clerks and his brokers, but he

spoke as suddenly and with all the authority that he used toward

them--"if the M. & N. comes into New York, it will not take one-half of

one per cent. of the profits away from our other roads. For all but its

last thirty-two miles, the new line taps territory new to us, and the

new stock will have paid for itself, and have paid a profit too, in five

years."

Rivington and Hallett looked at each other. The latter took his cigar

between his fingers and folded his arms.

"What do we care?" he asked, but his tone had lost the assertiveness

that had marked it a moment earlier. The man at the head of the table

did not answer this question directly. He proceeded:

"Except for ourselves, most of the old stockholders are poor people.

They need the money, and the old holders are to have the first chance at

the new issue. In five years, then, the minor stockholders will have

realized a profit on their investment; so shall we. At that time we

could unload without hurting anybody but the officials that have defied

us. Always supposing," he added, "that the management observe a proper

economy."

Hallett's eyes burned.

"You're right," he said. "We can win both ways if we do that. The road

will be bankrupt, and we can buy it in."

The man at the head of the table did not smile. He only said:

"You have always been very naive, Hallett; but I did think you would

have seen this point sooner."

Rivington at length cut in:

"But the cost of getting the bill through the legislature----"

"The bill will pass this morning," said the man at the head of the

table. "The Governor will sign it immediately."

His certainty silenced them for a moment; but Rivington, whom the

outside world pictured as a pirate, was still timid.

"Yes," he said, "but the expense of the city ordinance----"

"Oh, we'll take care of that," grinned Hallett.

"And the cost of construction----"

"I said," repeated the man at the head of the table: "'Always supposing

the management observe a proper economy.'"

He settled back in his chair. He seemed to consider the subject closed,

and so, presently, did his companions. Within five minutes they had

left him, and he was ringing for Rollins.

"Rollins," he said, "take this letter."

The secretary seated himself at the far end of the table.

His employer walked to a window and looked out. His hands were clasped

behind him now, and he did not turn his head as he rapidly dictated:

"Robert M. Dohan. (Send it to his house address, Rollins, and mark it

'Confidential.') 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, (Underline that, Rollins), 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.

"(Paragraph) 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.

"(Paragraph) 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. ---- Very truly

yours."

The secretary closed his book.

"Is that all?" he asked.

Without turning, his employer nodded, and Rollins left the room.

In the corner by the desk, a stock-ticker was clicking out yards of tape

into a high wicker basket. The man that had just given the M. &. N.

Railway permission to enter New York started to walk to the ticker; but

he paused again, at the second window, to look down on the thoroughfare

and buildings below him. From that height the streets of the city

seemed to be threads leading in every direction; they seemed to radiate

from the building in which the watcher stood. On the threads black dots

that were hurrying men and women seemed to quiver like entangled flies.

*CHAPTER III*

Sec.1. The legislature's committee made its report--the legislature was

heavily Republican that year--declaring that no wrong had been done, and

Luke accepted this verdict as a proof and triumph of right. He passed

his examinations and, shortly after Porcellis sailed for Russia, became

a member of the staff of the District-Attorney, who was to "clean up"

New York.

District-Attorney Leighton was a pleasant man, still young at forty, who

had a plausible and engaging manner supported by that bluff and

downright good-humor which passes current as the legal tender of

honesty. He had been in politics, and on the losing side, since his

twenty-first year, and during all that time he was fighting toward the

office which he had ultimately attained. Even his relatives, who were

people of so high a position that they regarded voting as something

beneath their caste and would rather be pillaged than lay hands upon the

pillagers, had kept him at a distance and were a little ashamed of their

pride in his success now that he had secured it. With a few other men,

all his elders, he had found his party a ruined fortress and rebuilt it,

stone by stone, now seeing the work of months plundered in a day, now

resisting his assailants by their own sort of arms, until the

stronghold, still far from impregnable or potent to command the entire

city, could at least dominate that spot beneath its guns on which he had

been able to take up his present position.

Under him Luke went cheerfully to work. He was at first disappointed

because his tasks were minor tasks and seemed to possess only the most

distant connection with the great crusade; but he was, in those times,

as modest as he was ardent, and he realized that he was still in his

novitiate. He tried petty offenders whose crimes were so insignificant

that he frequently found it hard to consider them crimes at all, and he

was often too sorry for the accused to be glad when he convicted them.

The first time he won a sentence, which was by no means the first time

he tried a case, he passed a sleepless night, because he feared that the

defendant's plea might have been the true one. It was long thereafter

before he could exult in a conviction that carried with it a term in

prison, even when he was certain of the condemned man's guilt.

The other members of the staff, more experienced in criminal practice,

showed no compunctions. They were a rather jolly lot of men, ranging in

age from twenty-five to thirty, with a cynical tolerance of life and a

tendency to regard their work as a game that everybody played solely for

the sake of winning it, with the opposing lawyers as the rival players

and with the accused as insensate pawns. Luke forgave them only because

of their unanimous and unbounded loyalty to their high-purposing chief.

"I got that case," declared one of these young men, a Larry O'Mara, when

he came through Luke's little office one afternoon after the court had

risen.

"What case?" Luke inquired.

"That one I had against Burroughs--and old Laurie was sitting, too. The

jury was only out ten minutes."

O'Mara was pink with triumph.

"What was the charge?" asked Luke.

"Larceny. It was hard work to make out; but the fellow's past record

did for him. I got that in while Burroughs was asleep at the switch.

When he did object, Laurie ruled against me, but the jury'd heard it all

right. Laurie's the strictest man on the bench, and Burroughs is about

the cleverest criminal lawyer in town."

Luke blushed for this victor:

"Was the man guilty?"

O'Mara's eyes were first wondering and then amused.

"They all are," he said. "If he didn't do this he did something else we

didn't know about--lots else. They're all guilty."

Luke supposed they were, but he could not understand his associates'

desire to secure convictions for the convictions' sake.

The innocent did not always suffer, nor yet the guilty. Luke was not

directly attached to the homicide bureau, the name applied to that

branch of the staff regularly employed to investigate and try cases of

suspected murder. Nevertheless, Leighton believed in giving his men

some chance at many branches of practice, because he wanted them to be

what he called "all-round criminal practitioners" when the time should

come for them to leave his service, and so Luke was once or twice called

into a capital trial. On one such occasion he was helping young Uhler.

Leighton himself had tried a striker named Gace on the charge of

shooting and killing a detective during a strike-riot, and Gace, greatly

to the District-Attorney's chagrin, was acquitted. Some slight evidence

adduced at the Gace trial seemed to point to another striker, Reardon,

and, though there was small hope of convicting Reardon, popular clamor

forced Leighton to plead for a true bill against him and bring him to

trial.

"I won't touch it any more, though," laughed Leighton. "Uhler, you'll

have to take it, and you might as well have Huber with you. We're bound

to lose, and so I'm going to give my assistants a chance to bear the

discredit. That's what you boys are here for."

Smarting under his chief's prophecy, Uhler, one of the youngest of the

staff, went into court and fought hard, which was doubtless the

intention behind Leighton's words. His enthusiasm was strong and

contagious. He convinced himself of Reardon's guilt, and he ended by

convincing Luke. The proceedings, indeed, went largely in the State's

favor until, shortly after the defense had opened its case, the man

Gace, who had previously been acquitted, was called to the stand to

testify to some minor detail. His examination was about to be completed

when he quite calmly volunteered the statement that it was he who had

done the killing.

"Cross-examine," said the defending lawyer and, covering amazement, sat

down.

Uhler looked helplessly at Luke. Luke, now enough of a lawyer to

believe that this was no more than a clever ruse to secure an unjust

acquittal, sprang to his feet and shook an angry finger under the nose

of the witness murderer, whose confession, had it been expected, would

have been prevented.

"So," he cried, "not satisfied with cheating justice in your own case,

you come back here to taunt it, do you?"

"Oh, I don't know as I'm taunting anything," replied the witness. He

was a big man with the frame of a blacksmith and the eyes of a

ruminating cow.

"Then," thundered Luke, "you really mean to tell this court that you

actually killed that man?"

The faintest shadow of a smile brushed the murderer's lips.

"They buried him, didn't they?" he inquired.

That answer lost Luke's case.

Sec.2. Luke's enthusiasm long resisted these miscarriages of justice

and the undeniably slow progress of his chief to secure indictments

against the Democratic politicians whose drastic punishment Leighton had

promised in his ante-election speeches. It resisted even the

callousness of the participants in the legal game, and the discovery

that the best minds at the Bar, of course seeking the most lucrative

field for their practice, were in the position of advisers to the great

financiers, their incomes, which far exceeded those of their more active

fellows, being composed almost entirely of the annual retaining fees and

"tips" for speculation. It required more and more resistance, but Luke

continued to hug tightly the faith that the wrongs of the world could be

set right through honest laws administered by honest men.

As he loved his work, so also he came to love the scene of it. The

vortex of the city fascinated him. Broadway, one color by day and

another by night, one spot of color uptown, a second at its middle, and

a third below the street that lies across New York like a gorged but

devouring anaconda; the dark passages full of tenements; the quiet

pavements bordered by prosperous dwellings; the roar of every sort of

business and the crackle of all sorts of pleasure; the joy and suffering

eternally intermingled, yet so intermingled that he could not tell which

caused the other, or whether they were independent; the whole tremendous

whirlpool whirled him, a straw among uncounted straws, now on its

surface and now sucked below beyond all plummets' soundings, and

intoxicated him by its dizzy revolutions.

He knew Fifth Avenue, Riverside Drive, and Central Park. Because he

felt it his duty, he learned the outsides of the houses in the Italian

quarter, the French quarter, the Syrian quarter. He walked the Bowery

and thought that he understood it. From that artery of America, he

turned a corner and found himself in China, in crooked streets heavy

with the smells of the East, among shops whose signs bore Oriental

characters, among crowds of impassive yellow faces--men and only

men--where there was no sound of English speech. Once, passing the door

of a slum mission, he saw a crowd of half-human things, their heads sunk

upon their chests, listlessly droning a popular hymn around a puffing

harmonium: on one side of the mission was a saloon and on the other a

shop that displayed the legend:

+----------------+

| BLACK EYES |

| PAINTED HERE |

+----------------+

With some of his friends--for he made many friends both in the office

and out of it, and Mrs. Ruysdael and her husband, whom he finally met,

were exceedingly kind to him--he went on a tour of those cafes that

called themselves Bohemian. That night he descended from restaurants

where one drank champagne and heard songs by vaudeville performers who

thus earned more money than at the theaters which they had deserted, to

seats in shoddy beer-halls where there was dancing by women too old or

too unskilled to continue upon the stage; and on the way home from

"Little Hungary," a place in which a dull company drank strange wines to

the music of a good band, the motor that conveyed his party crept under

smoking naphtha lamps through a jumble of push-carts converted into

bargain counters, and past the overcrowded squalor of the quarter of the

Russian Jews.

Poverty hurt him, or the sight of poverty. Somewhere he read that one

per cent. of the families in the United States owned more than the other

ninety-nine per cent., but he explained this by the theory that the one

per cent. had created the wealth that they owned. He was told that

there were four million paupers in the country; but he ascribed their

condition to their failure to take advantage of a republic's free

opportunities. Somebody said that, during the past winter, seventy

thousand New York children had gone hungry to the public schools; Luke

was sure that the schools would soon supply their pupils with free

meals. From a report of the New Jersey Department of Charities that

came into his hands, he learned that, in New Jersey, one person in every

two hundred and six of the population was a ward of the State; but his

reflection was only that New Jersey must be badly governed. His heart

ached over what he saw; but his intellect satisfactorily explained all

hearsay evidence. He could go out to Ellis Island and, listening to its

thousands of immigrants prattle their hopes in forty-three languages and

dialects, could share their hopes. Evil administrators had hurt the

country by overturning the purpose of its founders; the remedy lay in a

return to first principles.

Already in men of the Leighton type and in their works, he saw signs of

the revival. He had more than one occasion to visit the Children's

Court. Its quarters near Third Avenue were cramped, but it was soon to

be fittingly housed, and already here especially adapted magistrates,

acting as judge, jury, and parent, conducted in kindly, quiet, and

colloquial fashion the cases of fourteen thousand children in one year.

These, all of them under the age of sixteen, were no longer herded with

mature criminals that completed their education in vice, though their

offenses ranged from mere waywardness to burglary. Their judges were

patient and sympathetic men. One was the president of a society called

the Big Brothers, the duty of whose members was to act in fraternally

helpful fashion to boys less fortunate than they themselves had been;

and some of the women probation officers of this court belonged to a

similar organization known as the Big Sisters. There were twenty-six

probation officers, some men and some women, and into their care were

given all the little offenders for whom the court entertained any hope

of reformation.

Luke concluded that the public schools, because of bettered conditions,

were turning out fewer candidates for the Children's Court than ever

before. He saw with high hope the Washington Irving High School for

Girls, the result of an agitation begun by pupils. Here was a building

eight stories high, and Luke, with the American love for size and

numbers, wrote enthusiastically home to his sister that it was the

largest school in the world.

"It cost half a million dollars," he told her; "it has a hundred and

sixty rooms and it holds six thousand pupils. Think of that! Six

thousand,--not your pasty-faced, moping diggers either, but all noisy,

laughing, healthy girls. The equipment is wonderful--just wonderful:

you girls from the old Americus High School would think you were in

Heaven if you came here. There are two big restaurants, chemical and

physical laboratories, a conservatory, a zoological garden and a

roof-garden, and laundries. There's a regular theater--stage, scenery,

and all that--a store, a bank, a housekeeping department, and an

employment bureau. They have an orchestra, and they dance. There are

nurseries with real babies in them--babies that can cry--and there is a

five-room model house, a hospital, and a section where they train

nurses. They use all these things really to _teach_, and this is in

addition to languages and the usual unpractical stuff. They teach

librarians' work, shorthand, typewriting, bookbinding,

costume-designing, and dressmaking. Why, Jane, the girls are taught to

make their own clothes. Every girl is expected to make her own

graduation dress, and only a few of the dresses cost more than a dollar

apiece. I'll bet you wouldn't like that part of it!"

Even his social life served subtly to confirm him, during this period,

in the opinions he had brought to it. He mistrusted combinations of

capital, because he thought they tended to restrain honest trade, but he

believed such combinations could properly and effectively be curbed by

legislation, and he had a fine respect for such of his acquaintances as

had made their own money by building up their own industries. He

doubted certain men in whose hands lay the administration of government,

but he was sure that the cure for this was the election of honorable

men. He brought to New York, and long retained, what he called a

muscular Christianity (he had read Kingsley), and, under its control, he

sought a remedy for the world's evils that he could synthesize with, a

respect for authority and an acceptance of the dogma that the individual

man is nothing and the omnipotent Deity everything.

He used often to be invited to dinners at the Ruysdaels' when there was

no other guest, because Ruysdael liked this earnest lad and enjoyed long

evening talks with him. On one such occasion, his host, little, sallow,

with almond eyes that gave him a strangely Japanese appearance, fell to

talking of these questions while the two men sat over a glass of

port--for Ruysdael liked the old-fashioned English custom of

after-dinner port--in the candle-lit, oak-paneled dining-room.

"I can't understand," said Ruysdael, "the shortsightedness of these

really honest men who call property a crime."

"They call it that," said Luke, "because it's the result of profit."

"Yes, but what's profit?"

"Selling dear what you buy cheap, I suppose."

"Yes, that's one way of putting it, but it's really wages. It's the

wages that the employer draws for his executive ability: he must be paid

for his work if his employees are paid for theirs. It's the fair return

that he gets for the risk he's run in starting his business, and it's

his reward for his years of saving up his money till he had enough to

start that business."

Luke agreed.

"Of course," said he, "we don't want the man that's done these things to

use his power so as to prevent other men from doing them, but we haven't

any right to take from him what he's earned or to stop him from going on

earning it."

In much Ruysdael's manner, Luke's father, during Luke's visits to his

home in Americus, would talk of government. Government, by which he

meant the particular form of government adopted by the United States,

was one of the few topics that could move the Congressman from his

characteristic reticence. He scorned the tyranny of Russia and the

English make-shift of a constitutional monarchy. In the United States

the people could rule; the means were provided; if they failed now and

then, it was for a brief time only. To Mr. Huber the majority was as

infallible in matters of government as, in matters of faith, the Pope is

to a devout Catholic, and the hope of the majority lay in that party

which had freed the negro from slavery and saved the country from

disruption.

To these ideals Luke was true. He saw the rottenness of Tammany rule in

New York and knew it for a symptom of the disease that made a national

danger of the entire rank and file of the Democrats; he saw the

integrity of Leighton, and accepted it as a true token of Republican

virtue. He wanted the government restored to its pristine simplicity,

wealth curbed of its newly developed predatory instincts, religion

restored to its place in the daily thought and conduct of man.

Sec.3. Leighton's announced intention to "clean up" New York was

proving, nevertheless, a slow process. He had great difficulty in

obtaining evidence against the Democratic politicians whose scalps he

had promised to hang to the belt of the public. Grand Juries had a way

of including enough partisans of these politicians to prevent the

finding of true bills. When true bills were found, petty juries

generally contained enough Democrats to persuade the other jurors to

acquit or to hold out for a disagreement. Even when convictions were

secured, the appeals had to be argued before appellate courts composed

of men that owed their positions to friends of the appellants.

"It's rotten luck," said Leighton, "but I believe they've got us

scotched. We've tried seven cases, four of them twice and two three

times; we've had our hands full with appeals, and the only one of the

lot that we've sent to jail is a peanut politician from Second Avenue

who doesn't control ten votes."

"Yes," said O'Mara, "and they let _him_ go because they believed he was

getting ready to go back on them next election."

"We've got to begin lower down," concluded Leighton, "and work up."

He began immediately. He found that, in violation of the law, cocaine

was sold at scores of places on the East Side, and that the use of the

drug was spreading alarmingly. Against these retailers he proceeded

with all the vigor he had shown in his larger and less productive

efforts. Evidence to convict the sources of supply was hard to get,

since those sources were high in Tammany politics, but small sellers and

street peddlers were rushed to jail with such commendable speed that the

trade soon seemed abolished.

Luke appeared in some of these cases, and won most that he appeared in.

He had been feeling the chill of disappointment, but this gave him fresh

courage. One day, when Uhler was on vacation and Luke was taking the

work of the absent man, he thought he saw the chance to approach "the

people higher up," which they had all been waiting for.

A gang-leader named Zantzinger had been dancing with his wife at a ball

on the second floor of a house in Avenue A. As he waltzed past the door

leading to the back stairs, a friend looked in and called Zantzinger

aside.

"Excuse me a minute," said the gangster to his wife.

He left her and went to his friend.

"Well?" he demanded.

"Butch Dellitt's down there," warned his friend, nodding toward the

door. "His crowd's after you 'cause they say you piped off Dutch's

brother-in-law's poolroom to the fly cops. He says he's goin' to croak

you."

"Where is he?"

"He'll be 'round front when you come out."

"Where is he now?"

"Down back."

"Down these stairs?"

The friend nodded.

Zantzinger walked to his wife.

"I've got a little business below," he explained. "Wait here: I'll be

right back."

He opened the door and descended the stairs. As he went, he drew his

revolver. Dellitt was standing in the doorway, with his back to the

stairs, smoking a cigarette. Without warning, Zantzinger shot him

through the head. Then he returned to the ballroom, apologized to his

wife for leaving her so hurriedly, and resumed his interrupted dance.

This was the story that came to the homicide bureau. Luke took it at

once to Leighton.

"And this man Zantzinger," he reminded the District-Attorney, "is the

right-hand man of the Tammany leader in that ward."

"Who saw him?" asked Leighton.

"Three men on the street."

"Got their names?"

"We can get them."

"Is the coroner on the case?"

Luke thought he was.

Leighton shrugged.

"Then that'll be the end of it," he said.

Luke could not credit this.

"Oh, yes," said Leighton wearily, "I mean it. By the time he's done with

the case, he'll see to it nobody knows anything. Why, man alive, that

coroner's the cousin of the ward leader."

"But you'll try?" urged Luke. "You'll fight?"

Leighton swung back in his swivel-chair. He put his feet on his desk

and clasped his hands behind his head.

"No," he said, "I won't. What's the use? I'm getting tired of trying

to do things with all the people taking no interest and a Democratic

Mayor and Police Commissioner fighting against me." He spoke like a man

at last driven to declare something he has long striven to conceal. "If

ever I want to be re-elected," he continued, "this office has got to be

more careful about taking up cases that are lost to begin with."

Sec.4. Luke fought hard with the ugly doubt this incident raised. He

tried to convince himself that Leighton had spoken only in a moment of

passing weariness and discouragement; but he daily found this endeavor

more difficult. What suddenly turned his mind to other things was the

news that an aunt, his father's widowed sister who lived in

Philadelphia, had died, leaving him a hundred thousand dollars.

*CHAPTER IV*

Sec.1. Luke had never expected to be possessed of so much money. His

father's income was comfortable, but it was well understood that the

family lived somewhat beyond it, and that what might be left at the

Congressman's death would go to his widow for life and, after that, to

Luke's sister Jane. The Philadelphia aunt had inherited her fortune from

her husband, and her affection for her relatives was generally supposed

to be slight. Luke, consequently, found himself in a position for which

he was totally unprepared.

"I suppose," he said to Ruysdael, to whom he went for advice, "that I

ought to invest it."

"You ought to lose no time," counseled Ruysdael. "A hundred thousand

dollars is too much for a young man to have at his call in New York.

It's not enough to spend, and it's too much to gamble with in the

bucket-shops."

Ruysdael thought he knew a safe investment.

"There's a man named Forbes," he said--"Wallace K. Forbes, who came to

the offices of our estate the other day when I happened to be there. He

wanted to borrow just the amount you name, and my agent says it's a good

thing; but we happened to have a bigger one on hand. His concern's an

old one, one of the oldest American firms in its line; this man's the

third generation of his family to be in it, so it's well-established and

has the good old-fashioned element of family pride behind it. Nowadays,

you don't find many men regard their businesses the way an English

landed gentleman used to regard his estates and his family honor; but

Forbes seems to be an exception."

"What is the business?" asked Luke.

"Ready-made clothing, and well made, too, I'm told."

"Still, he does need money."

"Yes, but you couldn't get in if he didn't need it. He only wants it to

complete some improvements he's begun. He's perfectly well-grounded,

but I suppose he has to keep up with the progress of the trade. Of

course, that very element of family pride might disincline him to give

an outsider any hold on the business, but if you want me to, I'll have

Croy--that's the man that runs our estate for us--look into the

situation and sound Forbes."

Luke, after some satisfactory inquiries in other quarters, acquiesced in

this proposal. All the reports were good, and that of Herbert Croy, the

shriveled Ruysdael lawyer, was especially rosy. Forbes expressed his

willingness to meet Luke, and Luke called at the offices of the R. H.

Forbes & Son's factory in Brooklyn.

The present head of the firm was a grave man with a direct and

unassuming manner. His aquiline nose gave his face the air of strength,

and his mustache and the hair about his temples being slightly touched

with gray, he seemed sober and conservative. He sat at a plain roll-top

desk, in a room simply furnished, and he lost no time in coming at once

to business.

"Would you like to walk through the place?" he inquired, when he had

told Luke much of what Ruysdael had already said.

"I suppose I ought to," smiled Luke; "though of course I don't know

enough about the business to appreciate what you show me."

Forbes smiled sadly.

"You are no different, then," he said, "from most modern investors, or,

for the matter of that, most owners of businesses either. In these

times the average president of a company thinks he earns his salary by

manipulating its stock; he seldom knows anything about the work that

makes the stock marketable. Our firm isn't like that."

Under Forbes's care, Luke was accordingly taken through the factory,

with which, he noted, the office of the chief administrative was in

close touch. He was shown the room where the cloth manufacturers

brought their products; the scales to weigh the material; the

windmill-like machine that spread the offered fabric on its wide arms

and, turning at the will of the expert buyers, displayed its burden

before the examiners in a strong north light; the long boards on which,

having been re-rolled, the cloth, once its quality had been thus

determined, was again uncoiled, an ingenious contrivance attached to the

uncoiling-wheel stamping its measurements at every fifth revolution.

"We have to be careful," Forbes explained. "Business isn't so honest as

it once was, and if the cloth-makers could gain an inch in ten yards,

they'd do it."

The factory, which closed the end of a street, was built about four

sides of a small square, and the center of this square was occupied by a

large room with overhead ventilation and lighting, the glass fluted and

sloping as the ribs of a Venetian blind may be made to slope, so that,

in summer, the sun's rays would be tempered to the workers under it.

Here, at the tables nearest the entrance, men were employed at designing

patterns of cardboard and working, amid busy calculations, with rulers

and T-squares, like so many architects' draughtsmen. From them the

completed patterns were taken to other tables at which they met the

cloth accepted in the first room, other workmen tracing the designs in

chalk upon pieces of the cloth. The problem of these second workers,

Forbes explained, was to arrange the designs in such a way that almost

no shred of cloth was wasted. Luke observed that they solved it with

astonishing skill; and, as each piece was completed, a ticket was

roughly sewn on it with written directions for its further progress and

blanks to be filled in by the signature of each worker responsible for

its future steps.

Then came what to Luke was the most wonderful part of the work.

Nineteen pieces of unmarked cloth to be made into suits of the same

style as that on which the chalk pattern had been outlined, were laid

under that piece and the whole bundle given to a man at a large table.

Through a slit in the center of this table, a knife of incredible

strength and keenness plunged rapidly up and down. The man in charge

forced the bundle against the knife, deftly pushing it forward, so that

the blade followed the lines drawn upon the top piece, and in three

minutes a score of suits of clothes were cut into their various parts

and were being sorted and ticketed and signed for waiting boys to carry

them to the sewing-machines.

"Those patterns look like the parts of a jig-saw puzzle," said Luke,

"and that knife looks like a cross between a jig-saw and the

guillotine."

"It cuts twenty suits at a time," said Forbes gravely, "and the bottom

one doesn't vary the thirtieth of an inch from the one on top."

"Twenty suits!" Luke wanted to rub his eyes.

"Yes; but the inventor is still at work on the knife. We hope soon to

get one that will do three dozen."

At each corner of the building was an elevator and a stairway, the

latter walled in so to serve as a fire-escape. Forbes took Luke up one

of these stairways, a broad and easy flight of which the corners at each

landing were protected by curved wainscoting to prevent jamming in case

of panic.

The three floors above ground contained the rooms in which the sewing

was done and one room known as the matching-room. All seemed well

lighted and well aired and well protected by the overhead pipes of an

automatic sprinkling-plant.

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."