Part 4

"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.