“She might see us together, and suspect things. I understand. Needn’t worry about that. You may not see me again for a year. I’m here – there – everywhere. But before I go, how do things look for the election?”

“We’ll carry the city easily.”

“Who’ll you put up for mayor?”

“Probably Kennedy, the prosecuting attorney.”

“Is he safe?”

“He’ll do what he’s told.”

“That’s good. Is he strong with the people?”

“Fairly so. But the party will carry him through.”

“H’m.” Mr. Brown was thoughtful for a space. “This is your end of the game, of course, and I make it a point not to interfere with another man’s work. The only time I’ve butted in here was when I helped you about getting Marcy. But still, I hope you don’t mind my making a suggestion.”

“Not at all.”

“We’ve got to have the next mayor and council, you know. Simply got to have them. We don’t want to run any risk, however small. If you think there’s one chance in a thousand of Kennedy losing out, suppose you have yourself nominated.”

“Me?” exclaimed Blake.

“It strikes you as a come-down, of course. But you can do it gracefully – in the interest of the city, and all that, you know. You can turn it into a popular hit. Then you can resign as soon as our business is put through.”

“There may be something in it,” commented Blake.

“It’s only a suggestion. Just think it over, and use your own judgment.” He stood up. “Well, I guess that’s all we need to say to one another. The whole situation here is entirely in your hands. Do as you please, and we ask no questions about how you do it. We’re not interested in methods, only in results.”

He clapped Blake heartily upon the shoulder. “And it looks as though we all were going to get results! Especially you! Why, you, with this trial successfully over – with the election won – with the goods delivered – ”

He suddenly broke off, for the tail of his eye had sighted Blake’s open cabinet.

“Will you allow me a liberty?”

“Certainly,” replied Blake, in the dark as to his visitor’s purpose.

Mr. Brown crossed to the cabinet, and returned with the squat, black bottle and two small glasses. He tilted an inch into each tumbler, gave one to Blake, and raised the other on high. His face was illumined with his fatherly smile.

“To our new Senator!” he said.

CHAPTER X
SUNSET AT THE SYCAMORES

When the door had closed behind the pleasant figure of Mr. Brown, Blake pressed the button upon his desk. His stenographer appeared.

“I have some important matters to consider,” he said. “Do not allow me to be disturbed until Doctor and Mrs. Sherman come with the car.”

His privacy thus secured, Blake sat at his desk, staring fixedly before him. His brow was compressed into wrinkles, his dark face, still showing a yellowish pallor, was hard and set. He reviewed the entire situation, and as his consuming ambition contemplated the glories of success, and the success after that, and the succession of successes that led up and ever up, his every nerve was afire with an excruciating, impatient pleasure.

For a space while Katherine had confronted him, and for a space after she had gone, he had shrunk from this business he was carrying through. But he had spoken truthfully to Mr. Brown when he had said that his revulsion was but a temporary feeling, and that of his own accord he would have come back to his original decision. He had had such revulsions before, and each time he had swung as surely back to his purpose as does the disturbed needle to the magnetic pole.

Westville considered Harrison Blake a happy blend of the best of his father and mother; whereas, in point of fact, his father and his mother lived in him with their personalities almost intact. There was his mother, with her idealism and her high sense of honour; and his father, with his boundless ambition and his lack of principles. In the earlier years of Blake’s manhood his mother’s qualities had dominated. He had sincerely tried to do great work for Westville, and had done it; and the reputation he had then made, and the gratitude he had then won, were the seed from which had grown the great esteem with which Westville now regarded him.

But a few years back he had found that rise, through virtue, was slow and beset with barriers. His ambition had become impatient. Now that he was a figure of local power and importance, temptation began to assail him with offers of rapid elevation if only he would be complaisant. In this situation, the father in him rose into the ascendency; he had compromised and yielded, though always managing to keep his dubious transactions secret. And now at length ambition ruled him – though as yet not undisturbed, for conscience sometimes rose in unexpected revolt and gave him many a bitter battle.

When his stenographer told Blake that Doctor and Mrs. Sherman were waiting at the curb, he descended with something more like his usual cast of countenance. Elsie and her husband were in the tonneau, and as Blake crossed the sidewalk to the car she stretched out a nervous hand and gave him a worn, excited smile.

“It is so good of you to take us out to The Sycamores for over night!” she exclaimed. “It’s such a pleasure – and such a relief!”

She did not need to explain that it was a relief because the motion, the company, the change of scene, would help crowd from her mind the dread of to-morrow when her husband would have to take the stand against Doctor West; she did not need to explain this, because Blake’s eyes read it all in her pale, feverish face.

Blake shook hands with Doctor Sherman, dismissed his chauffeur, and took the wheel. They spun out of the city and down into the River Road – the favourite drive with Westville folk – which followed the stream in broad sweeping curves and ran through arcades of thick-bodied, bowing willows and sycamores lofty and severe, their foliage now a drought-crisped brown. After half an hour the car turned through a stone gateway into a grove of beech and elm and sycamore. At a comfortable distance apart were perhaps a dozen houses whose outer walls were slabs of trees with the bark still on. This was The Sycamores, a little summer resort established by a small group of the select families of Westville.

Blake stopped the car before one of these houses – “cabins” their owners called them, though their primitiveness was all in that outer shell of bark. A rather tall, straight, white-haired old lady, with a sweet nobility and strength of face, was on the little porch to greet them. She welcomed Elsie and her husband warmly and graciously. Then with no relaxation of her natural dignity into emotional effusion, she embraced her son and kissed him – for to her, as to Westville, he was the same man as five years before, and to him she had given not only the love a mother gives her only son, but the love she had formerly borne her husband who, during his last years, had been to her a bitter grief. Blake returned the kiss with no less feeling. His love of his mother was the talk of Westville; it was the one noble sentiment which he still allowed to sway him with all its original sincerity and might.

They had tea out upon the porch, with its view of the river twinkling down the easy hill between the trees. Mrs. Blake, seeing how agitated Elsie was, and under what a strain was Doctor Sherman, and guessing the cause, deftly guided the conversation away from to-morrow’s trial. She led the talk around to the lecture room which was being added to Doctor Sherman’s church – a topic of high interest to them all, for she was a member of the church, Blake was chairman of the building committee, and Doctor Sherman was treasurer of the committee and active director of the work. This manœuvre had but moderate success. Blake carried his part of the conversation well enough, and Elsie talked with a feverish interest which was too great a drain upon her meagre strength. But the stress of Doctor Sherman, which he strove to conceal, seemed to grow greater rather than decrease.

Presently Blake excused himself and Doctor Sherman, and the two men strolled down a winding, root-obstructed path toward the river. As they left the cabin behind them, Blake’s manner became cold and hard, as in his office, and Doctor Sherman’s agitation, which he had with such an effort kept in hand, began to escape his control. Once he stumbled over the twisted root which a beech thrust across their path and would have fallen had not Blake put out a swift hand and caught him. Yet at this neither uttered a word, and in silence they continued walking on till they reached a retired spot upon the river’s bank.

Here Doctor Sherman sank to a seat upon a mossy, rotting log. Blake, erect, but leaning lightly against the scaling, mottled body of a giant sycamore, at first gave no heed to his companion. He gazed straight ahead down the river, emaciated by the drought till the bowlders of its bottom protruded through the surface like so many bones – with the ranks of austere sycamores keeping their stately watch on either bank – with the sun, blood red in the September haze, suspended above the river’s west-most reach.

Thus the pair remained for several moments. Then Blake looked slowly about at the minister.

“I brought you down here because there is something I want to tell you,” he said calmly.

“I supposed so; go ahead,” responded Doctor Sherman in a choked voice, his eyes upon the ground.

“You seem somewhat disturbed,” remarked Blake in the same cold, even tone.

“Disturbed!” cried Doctor Sherman. “Disturbed!”

His voice told how preposterously inadequate was the word. He did not lift his eyes, but sat silent a moment, his white hands crushing one another, his face bent upon the rotted wood beneath his feet.

“It’s that business to-morrow!” he groaned; and at that he suddenly sprang up and confronted Blake. His fine face was wildly haggard and was working in convulsive agony. “My God,” he burst out, “when I look back at myself as I was four years ago, and then look at myself as I am to-day – oh, I’m sick, sick!” A hand gripped the cloth over his breast. “Why, when I came to Westville I was on fire to serve God with all my heart and never a compromise! On fire to preach the new gospel that the way to make people better is to make this an easier world for people to be better in!”

That passion-shaken figure was not a pleasant thing to look upon. Blake turned his eyes back to the glistening river and the sun, and steeled himself.

“Yes, I remember you preached some great sermons in those days,” he commented in his cold voice. “And what happened to you?”

“You know what happened to me!” cried the young minister with his wild passion. “You know well enough, even if you were not in that group of prominent members who gave me to understand that I’d either have to change my sermons or they’d have to change their minister!”

“At least they gave you a choice,” returned Blake.

“And I made the wrong choice! I was at the beginning of my career – the church here seemed a great chance for so young a man – and I did not want to fail at the very beginning. And so – and so – I compromised!”

“Do you suppose you are the first man that has ever made a compromise?”

“That compromise was the direct cause of to-morrow!” the young clergyman went on in his passionate remorse. “That compromise was the beginning of my fall. After the prominent members took me up, favoured me, it became easy to blink my eyes at their business methods. And then it became easy for me to convince myself that it would be all right for me to gamble in stocks.”

“That was your great mistake,” said the dry voice of the motionless figure against the tree. “A minister has no business to fool with the stock market.”

“But what was I to do?” Doctor Sherman cried desperately. “No money behind me – the salary of a dry goods clerk – my wife up there, whom I love better than my own life, needing delicacies, attention, a long stay in Colorado – what other chance, I ask you, did I have of getting the money?”

“Well, at any rate, you should have kept your fingers off that church building fund.”

“God, don’t I realize that! But with the market falling, and all the little I had about to be swept away, what else was a half frantic man to do but to try to save himself with any money he could put his hands upon?”

Blake shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, if luck was against you when that church money was also swept away, luck was certainly with you when it happened that I was the one to discover what you had done.”

“So I thought, when you offered to replace the money and cover the whole thing up. But, God, I never dreamed you’d exact such a price in return!”

He gripped Blake’s arm and shook it. His voice was a half-muffled shriek.

“If you wanted the water-works, if you wanted to do this to Doctor West, why did you pick on me to bring the accusation? There are men who would never have minded it – men without conscience and without character!”

Blake steadfastly kept his steely gaze upon the river.

“I believe I have answered that a number of times,” he replied in his hard, even tone. “I picked you because I needed a man of character to give the charges weight. A minister, the president of our reform body – no one else would serve so well. And I picked you because – pardon me, if in my directness I seem brutal – I picked you because you were all ready to my hand; you were in a situation where you dared not refuse me. Also I picked you, instead of a man with no character to lose, because I knew that you, having a character to lose and not wanting to lose it, would be less likely than any one else ever to break down and confess. I hope my answer is sufficiently explicit.”

Doctor Sherman stared at the erect, immobile figure.

“And you still intend,” he asked in a dry, husky voice, “you still intend to force me to go upon the stand to-morrow and commit – ”

“I would not use so unpleasant a word if I were you.”

“But you are going to force me to do it?”

“I am not going to force you. You referred a few minutes ago to the time when you had a choice. Well, here is another time when you have a choice.”

“Choice?” cried Doctor Sherman eagerly.

“Yes. You can testify, or not testify, as you please. Only in reaching your decision,” added the dry, emotionless voice, “I suggest that you do not forget that I have in my possession your signed confession of that embezzlement.”

“And you call that a choice?” cried Doctor Sherman. “When, if I refuse, you’ll expose me, ruin me forever, kill Elsie’s love for me! Do you call that a choice?”

“A choice, certainly. Perhaps you are inclined not to testify. If so, very well. But before you make your decision I desire to inform you of one fact. You will remember that I said in the beginning that I brought you down here to tell you something.”

“Yes. What is it?”

“Merely this. That Miss West has discovered that I am behind this affair.”

“What!” Doctor Sherman fell back a step, and his face filled with sudden terror. “Then – she knows everything?”

“She knows little, but she suspects much. For instance, since she knows that this is a plot, she is likely to suspect that every person in any way connected with the affair is guilty of conspiracy.”

“Even – even me?”

“Even you.”

“Then – you think?”

Blake turned his face sharply about upon Doctor Sherman – the first time since the beginning of their colloquy. It was his father’s face – his father in one of his most relentless, overriding moods – the face of a man whom nothing can stop.

“I think,” said he slowly, driving each word home, “that the only chance for people who want to come out of this affair with a clean name is to stick the thing right through as we planned.”

Doctor Sherman did not speak.

“I tell you about Miss West for two reasons. First, in order to let you know the danger you’re in. Second, in order, in case you decided to testify, that you may be forewarned and be prepared to outface her. I believe you understand everything now?”

“Yes,” was the almost breathless response.

“Then may I be allowed to ask what you are going to do – testify, or not testify?”

The minister’s hands opened and closed. He swallowed with difficulty.

“Testify, or not testify?” Blake insisted.

“Testify,” whispered Doctor Sherman.

“Just as you choose,” said Blake coldly.

The minister sank back to his seat upon the mossy log, and bowed his head into his hands. “Oh, my God!” he breathed.

There followed a silence, during which Blake gazed upon the huddled figure. Then he turned his set face down the glittering, dwindled stream, and, one shoulder lightly against the sycamore, he watched the sun there at the river’s end sink softly down into its golden slumber.

CHAPTER XI
THE TRIAL

Katherine’s first thought, on leaving Bruce’s office, was to lay her discovery before Doctor Sherman. She was certain that with her new-found knowledge, and with her entirely new point of view, they could quickly discover wherein he had been duped – for she still held him to be an unwitting tool – and thus quickly clear up the whole case. But for reasons already known she failed to find him; and learning that he had gone away with Blake, she well knew Blake would keep him out of her reach until the trial was over.

In sharpest disappointment, Katherine went home. With the trial so few hours away, with all her new discoveries buzzing chaotically in her head, she felt the need of advising with some one about the situation. Bruce’s offer of assistance recurred to her, and she found herself analyzing the editor again, just as she had done when she had walked away from his office. She rebelled against him in her every fibre, yet at the same time she felt a reluctant liking for him. He was a man with big dreams, a rough-and-ready idealist, an idealist with sharply marked limitations, some areas of his mind very broad, some dogmatically narrow. Opinionated, obstinate, impulsive, of not very sound judgment, yet dictatorial because supremely certain of his rightness – courageous, unselfish, sincere – that was the way she now saw the editor of the Express.

But he had sneered at her, sharply criticized her, and she hotly spurned the thought of asking his aid. Instead of him, she that evening summoned Old Hosie Hollingsworth to her house, and to the old lawyer she told everything. Old Hosie was convinced that she was right, and was astounded.

“And to think that the good folks of this town used to denounce me as a worshipper of strange gods!” he ejaculated. “Gee, what’ll they say when they learn that the idol they’ve been wearing out their knee-caps on has got clay feet that run clear up to his Adam’s-apple!”

They decided that it would be a mistake for Katherine to try to use her new theories and discoveries openly in defence of her father. She had too little evidence, and any unsupported charges hurled against Blake would leave that gentleman unharmed and would come whirling back upon Katherine as a boomerang of popular indignation. She dared not breathe a word against the city’s favourite until she had incontrovertible proof. Under the circumstances, the best course seemed for her to ask for a postponement on the morrow to enable her to work up further evidence.

“Only,” warned Hosie, “you must remember that the chances are that Blake has already slipped the proper word to Judge Kellog, and there’ll be no postponement.”

“Then I’ll have to depend upon tangling up that Mr. Marcy on the stand.”

“And Doctor Sherman?”

“There’ll be no chance of entangling him. He’ll tell a straightforward story. How could he tell any other? Don’t you see how he’s been used? – been made spectator to a skilfully laid scheme which he honestly believes to be a genuine case of bribery?”

At parting Old Hosie held her hand a moment.

“D’you remember the prophecy I made the day you took your office – that you would raise the dickens in this old town?”

“Yes,” said Katherine.

“Well, that’s coming true – as sure as plug hats don’t grow on fig trees! Only not in the way I meant then. Not as a freak. But as a lawyer.”

“Thank you.” She smiled and slowly shook her head. “But I’m afraid it won’t come true to-morrow.”

“Of course a prophecy is no good, unless you do your best.”

“Oh, I’m going to do my best,” she assured him.

The next morning, on the long awaited day, Katherine set out for the Court House, throbbing alternately with hope and fear of the outcome. Mixed with these was a perturbation of a very different sort – an ever-growing stage-fright. For this last there was good reason. Trials were a form of recreation as popular in Calloway County as gladiatorial contests in ancient Rome, and this trial – in the lack of a sensational murder in the county during the year – was the greatest of the twelvemonth. Moreover, it was given added interest by the fact that, for the first time in recorded history, Calloway County was going to see in action that weirdest product of whirling change, a woman lawyer.

Hub to hub about the hitch-racks of the Square were jammed buggies, surries, spring wagons and other country equipages. The court-room was packed an hour before the trial, and in the corridor were craning, straining, elbowing folk who had come too late. In the open windows – the court-room was on the ground floor – were the busts of eager citizens whose feet were pedestaled on boxes, the sale of which had been a harvest of small coin to neighbouring grocers; and in the trees without youths of simian habit clung to advantageous limbs and strained to get a view of the proceedings. Old Judge Kellog who usually dozed on his twenty-first vertebra through testimony and argument – once a young fledgling of a lawyer, sailing aloft in the empyrean of his eloquence, had been brought tumbling confusedly to earth by the snoring of the bench – attested to the unusualness of the occasion by being upright and awake. And Bud White, the clerk, called the court to order, not with his usual masterpiece of mumbled unintelligibility, brought to perfection by long years of practice, but with real words that could have been understood had only the audience been listening.

But their attention was all fixed upon the counsel for the defence. Katherine, in a plain white shirt waist and a black sailor, sat at a table alone with her father. Doctor West was painfully nervous; his long fingers were constantly twisting among themselves. Katherine was under an even greater strain. She realized with an intenser keenness now that the moment for action was at hand, that this was her first case, that her father’s reputation, his happiness, perhaps even his life, were at stake; and she was well aware that all this theatre of people, whose eyes she felt burning into her back, regarded her as the final curiosity of nature. Behind her, with young Harper at his side, she had caught a glimpse of Arnold Bruce, eying her critically and sceptically she thought; and in the audience she had glimpsed the fixed, inscrutable face of Harrison Blake.

But she clung blindly to her determination, and as Bud White sat down, she forced herself to rise. A deep hush spread through the court-room. She stood trembling, swallowing, voiceless, a statue of stage-fright, wildly hating herself for her impotence. For a dizzy, agonizing moment she saw herself a miserable failure – saw the crowd laughing at her as they filed out.

A youthful voice, from a balcony seat in an elm tree, floated in through the open window:

“Speak your piece, little girl, or set down.”

There was a titter. She stiffened.

“Your – your Honour,” she stammered, “I move a postponement in order to allow the defence more time to prepare its case.”

Judge Kellog fingered his patriarchal beard. Katherine stood hardly breathing while she waited his momentous words. But his answer was as Old Hosie had predicted.

“In view of the fact that the defence has already had four months in which to prepare its case,” said he, “I shall have to deny the motion and order the trial to proceed.”

Katherine sat down. The hope of deferment was gone. There remained only to fight.

A jury was quickly chosen; Katherine felt that her case would stand as good a chance with any one selection of twelve men as with any other. Kennedy then stepped forward. With an air that was a blend of his pretentious – if rather raw-boned – dignity as a coming statesman, of extreme deference toward Katherine’s sex, and of the sense of his personal belittlement in being pitted against such a legal weakling, he outlined to the jury what he expected to prove. After which, he called Mr. Marcy to the stand.

The agent of the filter company gave his evidence with that degree of shame-facedness proper to the man, turned state’s witness, who has been an accomplice in the dishonourable proceedings he is relating. It all sounded and looked so true – so very, very true!

When Katherine came to cross-examine him, she gazed at him steadily a moment. She knew that he was lying, and she knew that he knew that she knew he was lying. But he met her gaze with precisely the abashed, guilty air appropriate to his rôle.

What she considered her greatest chance was now before her. Calling up all her wits, she put to Mr. Marcy questions that held distant, hidden traps. But when she led him along the devious, unsuspicious path that conducted to the trap and then suddenly shot at him the question that should have plunged him into it, he very quietly and nimbly walked around the pitfall. Again and again she tried to involve him, but ever with the same result. He was abashed, ready to answer – and always elusive. At the end she had gained nothing from him, and for a minute stood looking silently at him in baffled exasperation.

“Have you any further questions to ask the witness?” old Judge Kellog prompted her, with a gentle impatience.

For a moment, stung by this witness’s defeat of her, she had an impulse to turn about, point her finger at Blake in the audience, and cry out the truth to the court-room and announce what was her real line of defence. But she realized the uproar that would follow if she dared attack Blake without evidence, and she controlled herself.

“That is all, Your Honour,” she said.

Mr. Marcy was dismissed. The lean, frock-coated figure of Mr. Kennedy arose.

“Doctor Sherman,” he called.

Doctor Sherman seemed to experience some difficulty in making his way up to the witness stand. When he faced about and sat down the difficulty was explained to the crowd. He was plainly a sick man. Whispers of sympathy ran about the court-room. Every one knew how he had sacrificed a friend to his sense of civic duty, and everyone knew what pain that act must have caused a man with such a high-strung conscience.

With his hands tightly gripping the arms of his chair, his bright and hollow eyes fastened upon the prosecutor, Doctor Sherman began in a low voice to deliver his direct testimony. Katherine listened to him rather mechanically at first, even with a twinge of sympathy for his obvious distress.

But though her attention was centred here in the court-room, her brain was subconsciously ranging swiftly over all the details of the case. Far down in the depths of her mind the question was faintly suggesting itself, if one witness is a guilty participant in the plot, then why not possibly the other? – when she saw Doctor Sherman give a quick glance in the direction where she knew sat Harrison Blake. That glance brought the question surging up to the surface of her conscious mind, and she sat bewildered, mentally gasping. She did not see how it could be, she could not understand his motive – but in the sickly face of Doctor Sherman, in his strained manner, she now read guilt.

Thrilling with an unexpected hope, Katherine rose and tried to keep herself before the eyes of Doctor Sherman like an accusing conscience. But he avoided her gaze, and told his story in every detail just as when Doctor West had been first accused. When Kennedy turned him over for cross-examination, Katherine walked up before him and looked him straight in the eyes a full moment without speaking. He could no longer avoid her gaze. In his eyes she read something that seemed to her like mortal terror.

“Doctor Sherman,” she said slowly, clearly, “is there nothing you would like to add to your testimony?”

His words were a long time coming. Katherine’s life hung suspended while she waited his answer.

“Nothing,” he said.

“There is no fact, no detail, that you may have omitted in your direct testimony, that you now desire to supply?”

“Nothing.”

She took a step nearer, bent on him a yet more searching gaze, and put into her voice its all of conscience-stirring power.

“You wish to go on record then, before this court, before this audience, before the God whom you have appealed to in your oath, as having told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

He averted his eyes and was silent a moment. For that moment Blake, back in the audience, did not breathe. To the crowd it seemed that Doctor Sherman was searching his mind for some possible trivial omission. To Katherine it seemed that he was in the throes of a final struggle.