Counsel for the Defense

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

WESTVILLE PREPARES TO CELEBRATE

The room was thick with dust and draped with ancient cobwebs. In one corner dismally reposed a literary junk heap—old magazines, broken-backed works of reference, novels once unanimously read but now unanimously forgotten. The desk was a helter-skelter of papers. One of the two chairs had its burst cane seat mended by an atlas of the world; and wherever any of the floor peered dimly through the general débris it showed a complexion of dark and ineradicable greasiness. Altogether, it was a room hopelessly unfit for human habitation; which is perhaps but an indirect manner of stating that it was the office of the editor of a successful newspaper.

Before a typewriter at a small table sat a bare-armed, solitary man. He was twenty-eight or thirty, abundantly endowed with bone and muscle, and with a face——But not to soil this early page with abusive terms, it will be sufficient to remark that whatever the Divine Sculptor had carved his countenance to portray, plainly there had been no thought of re-beautifying the earth with an Apollo. He was constructed not for grace, but powerful, tireless action; and there was something absurdly disproportionate between the small machine and the broad and hairy hands which so heavily belaboured its ladylike keys.

It was a custom with Bruce to write the big local news story of the day himself, a feature that had proved a stimulant to his paper’s circulation and prestige. To-morrow was to be one of the proudest days of Westville’s history, for to-morrow was the formal opening of the city’s greatest municipal enterprise, its thoroughly modern water-works; and it was an extensive and vivid account of the next day’s programme that the editor was pounding so rapidly out of his machine for that afternoon’s issue of the Express. Now and then, as he paused an instant to shape an effective sentence in his mind, he glanced through the open window beside him across Main Street to where, against the front of the old Court House, a group of shirt-sleeved workmen were hanging their country’s colours about a speakers’ stand; then his big, blunt fingers thumped swiftly on.

He had jerked out the final sheet, and had begun to revise his story, making corrections with a very black pencil and in a very large hand, when there sauntered in from the general editorial room a pale, slight young man of twenty-five. The newcomer had a reckless air, a humorous twist to the left corner of his mouth, and a negligent smartness in his dress which plainly had its origin elsewhere than in Westville.

The editor did not raise his eyes.

“In a minute, Billy,” he said shortly.

“Nothing to hurry about, Arn,” drawled the other.

The young fellow drew forward the atlas-bottomed chair, leisurely enthroned himself upon the nations of the earth, crossed his feet upon the window-sill, and lit a cigarette. About his lounging form there was a latent energy like that of a relaxed cat. He gazed rather languidly over at the Square, its sides abustle with excited preparation....