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Page 20
Holcombe laughed. "Well," he said, "I'd be glad to do something for
you if you'd let me know what you'd like."
Meakim put his hands behind his back and puffed meditatively on his
cigar, rolling it between his lips with his tongue. Then he turned it
between his fingers and tossed the ashes over the side of the boat. He
gave a little sigh, and then frowned at having done so. "I'll tell you
what you _can_ do for me, Holcombe," he said, smiling. "Some
night I wish you would go down to Fourteenth Street, some night this
spring, when the boys are sitting out on the steps in front of the
Hall, and just take a drink for me at Ed Lally's; just for luck. Will
you? That's what I'd like to do. I don't know nothing better than
Fourteenth Street of a summer evening, with all the people crowding
into Pastor's on one side of the Hall, and the Third Avenue L cars
running by on the other. That's a gay sight; ain't it now? With all
the girls coming in and out of Theiss's, and the sidewalks crowded.
One of them warm nights when they have to have the windows open, and
you can hear the music in at Pastor's, and the audience clapping their
hands. That's great, isn't it? Well," he laughed and shook his head.
"I'll be back there some day, won't I," he said, wistfully, "and hear
it for myself."
"Carroll," said Holcombe, drawing the former to one side, "suppose I
see this cabman when I reach home, and get him to withdraw the charge,
or agree not to turn up when it comes to trial."
Carroll's face clouded in an instant. "Now, listen to me, Holcombe,"
he said. "You let my dirty work alone. There's lots of my friends who
have nothing better to do than just that. You have something better to
do, and you leave me and my rows to others. I like you for what you
are, and not for what you can do for me. I don't mean that I don't
appreciate your offer, but it shouldn't have come from an Assistant
District Attorney to a fugitive criminal."
"What nonsense!" said Holcombe.
"Don't say that; don't say that!" said Carroll, quickly, as though it
hurt him. "You wouldn't have said it a month ago."
Holcombe eyed the other with an alert, confident smile. "No, Carroll,"
he answered, "I would not." He put his hand on the other's shoulder
with a suggestion in his manner of his former self, and with a touch
of patronage. "I have learned a great deal in a month," he said.
"Seven battles were won in seven days once. All my life I have been
fighting causes, Carroll, and principles. I have been working with
laws against law-breakers. I have never yet fought a man. It was not
poor old Meakim, the individual, I prosecuted, but the corrupt
politician. Now, here I have been thrown with men and women on as
equal terms as a crew of sailors cast away upon a desert island. We
were each a law unto himself. And I have been brought face to face,
and for the first time in my life, not with principles of conduct, not
with causes, and not with laws, but with my fellow men."
THE BOY ORATOR OF ZEPATA CITY
The day was cruelly hot, with unwarranted gusts of wind which swept
the red dust in fierce eddies in at one end of Main Street and out at
the other, and waltzed fantastically across the prairie. When they had
passed, human beings opened their eyes again to blink hopelessly at
the white sun, and swore or gasped, as their nature moved them. There
were very few human beings in the streets, either in Houston Avenue,
where there were dwelling-houses, or in the business quarter on Main
Street. They were all at the new court-house, and every one possessed
of proper civic pride was either in the packed court-room itself, or
standing on the high steps outside, or pacing the long, freshly
calcimined corridors, where there was shade and less dust. It was an
eventful day in the history of Zepata City. The court-house had been
long in coming, the appropriation had been denied again and again; but
at last it stood a proud and hideous fact, like a gray prison,
towering above the bare, undecorated brick stores and the frame houses
on the prairie around it, new, raw, and cheap, from the tin statue on
the dome to the stucco round its base already cracking with the sun.
Piles of lumber and scaffolding and the lime beds the builders had
left still lay on the unsodded square, and the bursts of wind drove
the shavings across it, as they had done since the first day of
building, when the Hon. Horatio Macon, who had worked for the
appropriation, had laid the corner-stone and received the homage of
his constituents.
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