Part 34 (1/2)

”Motion overruled,” came the laconic judgment. ”Mr. Clerk, call the next case.”

”Your Honour has fixed a punishment,” protested Colonel Wallifarro's son with a deliberately challenging note in his voice, ”which is the highest fine in your power to inflict without opening to us the door of appeal.

Had you added one dollar, we could have carried it to the Circuit Court--and we believe that it was only for the purpose of denying us that right that you amended the charges. In the court of public opinion, before which even judges must stand judgment, I shall endeavour to make that unequivocally clear.”

”Fine Mr. Wallifarro twenty dollars for contempt of Court!” This time the voice from the bench rasped truculently, forgetting its suavity.

”And commit him to jail for twenty-four hours.”

That evening Boone Wellver paid two calls behind the barred doors of the city prison. One was to Asa Gregory, who still languished there, and the other to the lawyer who had been willing to pay for his last word.

”I'm sorry you lashed out, Wallifarro,” said Boone. ”But I'd be willing to change places with you, for the satisfaction of having said it.”

Morgan grinned with a strong show of white teeth.

”It's cheap at the price,” he declared, ”and as for las.h.i.+ng out, I haven't begun yet. From now on I'm going to work regularly at this contempt of court job, unless I can put some of these gentry behind bars or make them swim the river. I've hung back for a long while but now I've enlisted for the war.”

As Judge McCabe had said, Morgan lacked the diplomatic touch.

CHAPTER XXVIII

One morning of frosty tang, that touched the pulses with its livening, found Boone's eyes and thoughts wandering discursively from the papers ma.s.sed on his desk. His customary concentration had become a slack force, though these were days of pressing hours and insistent minutes in the Wallifarro offices. The reception room was crowded with waiting figures that savoured of the motley, and this was one of the new things brought to pa.s.s by the strange bedfellows.h.i.+p of politics. Yonder in a corner sat with fidgeting restiveness a young man whose eyes, despite his obvious youth, were mature in guile and pouched with that pasty ugliness with which unwholesome night life trade-marks its own.

He was one of that crew imported from elsewhere to register, re-register and vanish, but he had lingered, and now a grievance had sent him skulking to the enemy's camp with vengeance in his heart. In an interval of political inaction he had picked a pocket and had been locked up by a ”harness bull” who had never liked him and who chose to disregard his present and special prerogative. In court he had been dismissed with an admonition, it is true, but his dignity was affronted. This morning he sat in the anteroom of Morgan Wallifarro, ready, in the inelegant but candid parlance of his ilk, to ”spit up his guts.”

Not far from him sat a woman whose profession was one of the most ancient and least revered. The vivid colouring of her lips and cheeks shone out through thickly laid powder in ghastly simulation of a coa.r.s.e beauty long fled. ”I lodged a good half-dozen of those beer-drinking loafers, though they roistered and drove away my respectable trade--and then the cops had the nerve to raid me,” she inwardly lamented. Now she, too, sat among the informers.

Morgan had complained that reformers always failed through their dreamy impracticability. Now he was being as practical as the foes he sought to overthrow. From the dribble of small leaks come the breaks that wreck dams, and Morgan was neglecting none of them.

To Boone, whom he no longer quarantined behind a manner of aloofness, he had confided, ”We have no illusions about the courts. Their judgments will bear the label of party, not justice; but when they turn us down I mean to make them do it in the face of a record that will d.a.m.n them before the public.”

So, together with gentlemen like General Prince and ministers of the Gospel bearing sworn narratives of police browbeating, came the backwash of the discontented riffraff: deserters who were willing to disclose their secrets to appease their various resentments.

Boone, who had played simple and direct politics in the backwoods, found himself in the midst of a more intricate version of the game--and into it he had thrown all the weight of his energies--until this morning.

Now, as he sat gazing out over roofs and chimney-pots, a messenger boy, impatient of anteroom delays, burst officiously into his office.

”Are you Mr. Morgan Wallifarro?” he demanded, scanning a label on the package he bore, and, as Boone shook his head, he heard Morgan's voice behind him: ”I'm the man you're looking for.”

Then as the younger Wallifarro took the package from the snub-nosed Mercury, he opened it, revealing a gold-k.n.o.bbed riding crop. Once before that morning the young attorney had halted the all-but-congested tide of business to telephone to a florist, and through the open door Boone had heard the order given. Then Morgan had directed that violets and orchids be sent that evening to Miss Anne Masters. Presumably the riding crop was bound for the same destination.

”Anne's riding some of those Canadian hunters tonight at the Horse Show,” was Morgan's casually put remark as he felt Boone's eyes upon him. ”I thought she might like this.”

It was the first time that Anne's name had pa.s.sed conversationally between them since the evening when, in that same office, Morgan's pistol had clicked harmlessly, and upon each face fell a faint shadow of embarra.s.sment. Then Wellver admitted, ”It's a very handsome one,” and the other pa.s.sed on into his own office.

Already Boone had been thinking of those Canadian hunters. It was that which had lured his mind away from his littered desk and filled him with the spirit of truancy.

Tonight would see the opening of the Horse Show with the fanfare of its bra.s.s bands and the spreading of its peac.o.c.k plumes of finery.