Leroy Scott - Counsel for the Defense

“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.

Despite its thirty thousand population – “Forty thousand, and growing, sir!” loyally declared those disinterested citizens engaged in the sale of remote fields of ragweed as building lots – Westville was still but half-evolved from its earlier state of an overgrown country town. It was as yet semi-pastoral, semi-urban. Automobiles and farm wagons locked hubs in brotherly embrace upon its highways; cowhide boots and patent leather shared its sidewalks. There was a stockbroker’s office that was thoroughly metropolitan in the facilities it afforded the élite for relieving themselves of the tribulation of riches; and adjoining it was Simpson Brothers & Company, wherein hick’ry-shirted gentlemen bartered for threshing machines, hayrakes, axle grease, and such like baubles of Arcadian pastime.

There were three topics on which one could always start an argument in Westville – politics, religion, and the editor of the Express . A year before Arnold Bruce, who had left Westville at eighteen and whom the town had vaguely heard of as a newspaper man in Chicago and New York but whom it had not seen since, had returned home and taken charge of the Express , which had been willed him by the late editor, his uncle. The Express , which had been a slippered, dozing, senile sheet under old Jimmie Bruce, burst suddenly into a volcanic youth. The new editor used huge, vociferous headlines instead of the mere whispering, timorous types of his uncle; he wrote a rousing, rough-and-ready English; occasionally he placed an important editorial, set up in heavy-faced type and enclosed in a black border, in the very centre of his first page; and from the very start he had had the hardihood to attack the “established order” at several points and to preach unorthodox political doctrines. The wealthiest citizens were outraged, and hotly denounced Bruce as a “yellow journalist” and a “red-mouthed demagogue.” It was commonly held by the better element that his ultra-democracy was merely a mask, a pose, an advertising scheme, to gather in the gullible subscriber and to force himself sensationally into the public eye.