Читать книгу Counsel for the Defense - Scott Leroy - Страница 4

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The room was thick with dust and draped with ancient cobwebs. In one corner dismally reposed a literary junk heap—old magazines, broken-backed works of reference, novels once unanimously read but now unanimously forgotten. The desk was a helter-skelter of papers. One of the two chairs had its burst cane seat mended by an atlas of the world; and wherever any of the floor peered dimly through the general débris it showed a complexion of dark and ineradicable greasiness. Altogether, it was a room hopelessly unfit for human habitation; which is perhaps but an indirect manner of stating that it was the office of the editor of a successful newspaper.

Before a typewriter at a small table sat a bare-armed, solitary man. He was twenty-eight or thirty, abundantly endowed with bone and muscle, and with a face——But not to soil this early page with abusive terms, it will be sufficient to remark that whatever the Divine Sculptor had carved his countenance to portray, plainly there had been no thought of re-beautifying the earth with an Apollo. He was constructed not for grace, but powerful, tireless action; and there was something absurdly disproportionate between the small machine and the broad and hairy hands which so heavily belaboured its ladylike keys.

It was a custom with Bruce to write the big local news story of the day himself, a feature that had proved a stimulant to his paper’s circulation and prestige. To-morrow was to be one of the proudest days of Westville’s history, for to-morrow was the formal opening of the city’s greatest municipal enterprise, its thoroughly modern water-works; and it was an extensive and vivid account of the next day’s programme that the editor was pounding so rapidly out of his machine for that afternoon’s issue of the Express. Now and then, as he paused an instant to shape an effective sentence in his mind, he glanced through the open window beside him across Main Street to where, against the front of the old Court House, a group of shirt-sleeved workmen were hanging their country’s colours about a speakers’ stand; then his big, blunt fingers thumped swiftly on.

He had jerked out the final sheet, and had begun to revise his story, making corrections with a very black pencil and in a very large hand, when there sauntered in from the general editorial room a pale, slight young man of twenty-five. The newcomer had a reckless air, a humorous twist to the left corner of his mouth, and a negligent smartness in his dress which plainly had its origin elsewhere than in Westville.

The editor did not raise his eyes.

“In a minute, Billy,” he said shortly.

“Nothing to hurry about, Arn,” drawled the other.

The young fellow drew forward the atlas-bottomed chair, leisurely enthroned himself upon the nations of the earth, crossed his feet upon the window-sill, and lit a cigarette. About his lounging form there was a latent energy like that of a relaxed cat. He gazed rather languidly over at the Square, its sides abustle with excited preparation. Across the fronts of stores bunting was being tacked; from upper windows crisp cotton flags were being unscrolled. As for the Court House yard itself, to-day its elm-shaded spaces were lifeless save for the workmen about the stand, a litigant or two going up the walk, and an occasional frock-coated lawyer, his vest democratically unbuttoned to the warm May air. But to-morrow——

The young fellow had turned his head slowly toward the editor’s copy, and, as though reading, he began in an emotional, declamatory voice:

“To-morrow the classic shades of Court House Square will teem with a tumultuous throng. In the emblazoned speakers’ stand the Westville Brass Band, in their new uniforms, glittering like so many grand marshals of the empire, will trumpet forth triumphant music fit to burst; and aloft from this breeze-fluttered throne of oratory——”

“Go to hell!” interrupted Bruce, eyes still racing through his copy.

“And down from this breeze-fluttered throne of oratory,” continued Billy, with a rising quaver in his voice, “Mr. Harrison Blake, Westville’s favourite son; the Reverend Doctor Sherman, president of the Voters’ Union, and the Honourable Hiram Cogshell, Calloway County’s able-bodiest orator, will pour forth prodigal and perfervid eloquence upon the populace below. And Dr. David West, he who has directed this magnificent work from its birth unto the present, he who has laid upon the sacred altar of his city’s welfare a matchless devotion and a lifetime’s store of scientific knowledge, he who——”

“See here, young fellow!” The editor slammed down the last sheet of his revised story, and turned upon his assistant a square, bony, aggressive face that gave a sense of having been modelled by a clinched fist, and of still glowering at the blow. He had gray eyes that gleamed dogmatically from behind thick glasses, and hair that brush could not subdue. “See here, Billy Harper, will you please go to hell!”

“Sure; follow you anywhere, Arn,” returned Billy pleasantly, holding out his cigarette case.

“You little Chicago alley cat, you!” growled Bruce. He took a cigarette, broke it open and poured the tobacco into a black pipe, which he lit. “Well—turn up anything?”

“Governor can’t come,” replied the reporter, lighting a fresh cigarette.

“Hard luck. But we’ll have the crowd anyhow. Blake tell you anything else?”

“He didn’t tell me that. His stenographer did; she’d opened the Governor’s telegram. Blake’s in Indianapolis to-day—looking after his chances for the Senate, I suppose.”

“See Doctor West?”

“Went to his house first. But as usual he wouldn’t say a thing. That old boy is certainly the mildest mannered hero of the day I ever went up against. The way he does dodge the spot-light!—it’s enough to make one of your prima donna politicians die of heart failure. To do a great piece of work, and then be as modest about it as he is—well, Arn, I sure am for that old doc!”

“Huh!” grunted the editor.

“When it comes time to hang the laurel wreath upon his brow to-morrow I’ll bet you and your spavined old Arrangements Committee will have to push him on to the stand by the scruff of his neck.”

“Did you get him to promise to sit for a new picture?”

“Yes. And you ought to raise me ten a week for doing it. He didn’t want his picture printed; and if we did print it, he thought that prehistoric thing of the eighties we’ve got was good enough.”

“Well, be sure you get that photo, if you have to use chloroform. I saw him go into the Court House a little while ago. Better catch him as he comes out and lead him over to Dodson’s gallery.”

“All right.” The young fellow recrossed his feet upon the window-sill. “But, Arn,” he drawled, “this certainly is a slow old burg you’ve dragged me down into. If one of your leading citizens wants to catch the seven-thirty to Indianapolis to-morrow morning, I suppose he sets his alarm to go off day before yesterday.”

“What’s soured on your stomach now?” demanded the editor.

“Oh, the way it took this suburb of Nowhere thirty years to wake up to Doctor West! Every time I see him I feel sore for hours afterward at how this darned place has treated the old boy. If your six-cylinder, sixty-horse power, seven-passenger tongues hadn’t remembered that his grandfather had founded Westville, I bet you’d have talked him out of the town long ago.”

“The town didn’t understand him.”

“I should say it didn’t!” agreed the reporter.

“And I guess you don’t understand the town,” said the editor, a little sharply. “Young man, you’ve never lived in a small place.”

“Till this, Chicago was my smallest—the gods be praised!”

“Well, it’s the same in your old smokestack of the universe as it is here!” retorted Bruce. “If you go after the dollar, you’re sane. If you don’t, you’re cracked. Doctor West started off like a winner, so they say; looked like he was going to get a corner on all the patients of Westville. Then, when he stopped practising——”

“You never told me what made him stop.”

“His wife’s death—from typhoid; I barely remember that. When he stopped practising and began his scientific work, the town thought he’d lost his head.”

“And yet two years ago the town was glad enough to get him to take charge of installing its new water system!”

“That’s how it discovered he was somebody. When the city began to look around for an expert, it found no one they could get had a tenth of his knowledge of water supply.”

“That’s the way with your self-worshipping cross-roads towns! You raise a genius—laugh at him, pity his family—till you learn how the outside world respects him. Then—hurrah! Strike up the band, boys! When I think how that old party has been quietly studying typhoid fever and water supply all these years, with you bunch of hayseeds looking down on him as a crank—I get so blamed sore at the place that I wish I’d chucked your letter into the waste-basket when you wrote me to come!”

“It may have been a dub of a town, Billy, but it’ll be the best place in Indiana before we get through with it,” returned the editor confidently. “But whom else did you see?”

“Ran into the Honourable Hiram Cogshell on Main Street, and he slipped me this precious gem.” Billy handed Bruce a packet of typewritten sheets. “Carbon of his to-morrow’s speech. He gave it to me, he said, to save us the trouble of taking it down. The Honourable Hiram is certainly one citizen who’ll never go broke buying himself a bushel to hide his light under!”

The editor glanced at a page or two of it with wearied irritation, then tossed it back.

“Guess we’ll have to print it. But weed out some of his flowers of rhetoric.”

“Pressed flowers,” amended Billy. “Swipe the Honourable Hiram’s copy of ‘Bartlett’s Quotations’ and that tremendous orator would have nothing left but his gestures.”

“How about the grand jury, Billy?” pursued the editor. “Anything doing there?”

“Farmer down in Buck Creek Township indicted for kidnapping his neighbour’s pigs,” drawled the reporter. “Infants snatched away while fond mother slept. Very pathetic. Also that second-story man was indicted that stole Alderman Big Bill Perkins’s clothes. Remember it, don’t you? Big Bill’s clothes had so much diameter that the poor, hard-working thief couldn’t sell the fruits of his industry. Pathos there also. Guess I can spin the two out for a column.”

“Spin ’em out for about three lines,” returned Bruce in his abrupt manner. “No room for your funny stuff to-day, Billy; the celebration crowds everything else out. Write that about the Governor, and then help Stevens with the telegraph—and see that it’s carved down to the bone.” He picked up the typewritten sheets he had finished revising, and let out a sharp growl of “Copy!”

“That’s your celebration story, isn’t it?” asked the reporter.

“Yes.” And Bruce held it out to the “devil” who had appeared through the doorway from the depths below.

“Wait a bit with it, Arn. The prosecuting attorney stopped me as I was leaving, and asked me to have you step over to the Court House for a minute.”

“What’s Kennedy want?”

“Something about the celebration, he said. I guess he wants to talk with you about some further details of the programme.”

“Why the deuce didn’t he come over here then?” growled Bruce. “I’m as busy as he is!”

“He said he couldn’t leave.”

“Couldn’t leave?” said Bruce, with a snap of his heavy jaw. “Well, neither can I!”

“You mean you won’t go?”

“That’s what I mean! I’ll go to the very gates of hell to get a good piece of news, but when it comes to general affairs the politicians, business men, and the etceteras of this town have got to understand that there’s just as much reason for their coming to me as for my going to them. I’m as important as any of them.”

“So-ho, we’re on our high horse, are we?”

“You bet we are, my son! And that’s where you’ve got to be if you want this town to respect you.”

“All right. She’s a great nag, if you can keep your saddle. But I guess I’d better tell Kennedy you’re not coming.”

Without rising, Billy leaned back and took up Bruce’s desk telephone, and soon was talking to the prosecuting attorney. After a moment he held out the instrument to the editor.

“Kennedy wants to speak with you,” he said.

Bruce took the ’phone.

“Hello, that you Kennedy? … No, I can’t come—too busy. Suppose you run over here. … Got some people there? Well, bring ’em along. … Why can’t they come? Who are they? … Can’t you tell me what the situation is? … All right, then; in a couple of minutes.”

Bruce hung up the receiver and arose.

“So you’re going after all?” asked Billy.

“Guess I’d better,” returned the editor, putting on his coat and hat. “Kennedy says something big has just broken loose. Sounds queer. Wonder what the dickens it can be.” And he started out.

“But how about your celebration story?” queried Billy. “Want it to go down?”

Bruce looked at his watch.

“Two hours till press time; I guess it can wait.” And taking the story back from the boy he tossed it upon his desk.

He stepped out into the local room, which showed the same kindly tolerance of dirt as did his private office. At a long table two young men sat before typewriters, and in a corner a third young man was taking the clicking dictation of a telegraph sounder.

“Remember, boys, keep everything but the celebration down to bones!” Bruce called out. And with that he passed out of the office and down the stairway to the street.