CHAPTER I THE SPRING OF 1916

“No, Mrs. Simms,” interposed Mrs. Harrison, in the low, surprised, and distinct manner of speaking which she quite understood how to make irritating. “You are entirely wrong. Henry Janeway is under, not over forty—and well under!”

Mrs. Simms tossed her head.

“He can’t be very much under,” she persisted, unabashed, and temperamentally pugnacious. She was ready to say more—had it, in fact, on the tip of her tongue—but Mrs. Harrison, whose position in the Durand circle, together with her gray hair and equally positive disposition, demanded precedence, had no scruples about cutting her off. It was done, of course, in a courteous but in a cruelly effective manner.

“Henry,” observed Mrs. Harrison, continuing with dignity to address the three younger women with whom she was drinking tea at Mrs. Robert Durand’s, in Fond du Lac, “is exactly thirty-five years old—for all his great reputation.” The last words were barbed for Mrs. Simms. Jacob Simms, her husband, and Henry Janeway were rival lawyers, both widely and favorably known in and about Chicago and Fond du Lac. “He was born,” explained Mrs. Harrison, who usually referred to her husband as the Judge, “in Fond du Lac, the winter of the big snow, 1881. I remember distinctly, because his father gave Judge Harrison a dog that winter, and the dog ate up all of the Judge’s underwear.” Young Mrs. Robert Durand, Gertrude Durand, and Mrs. Simms exclaimed in a chorus.

“He was a ferocious animal,” Mrs. Harrison went on evenly. “The dog’s mother ate all her puppies in that litter except this particular one; I was naturally sorry that he escaped. He would plunge into the snow and tear the Judge’s underwear off the clothes-line with the utmost fury, week after week—he seemed to hate red—and the poor laundress couldn’t chase him through the drifts. So when the snow and ice went off in the spring, we found red scraps and remnants scattered all the way down the hill; my husband really dates his sciatica from that awful winter.”

“But,” demanded young Louise Durand—Robert’s wife—with a bubbling laugh, “why didn’t you get rid of the horrid creature?”

“My dear!” Mrs. Harrison’s face set in amiable surprise. “Evidently you are not familiar with the etiquette governing the presentation of puppies. I couldn’t. Mr. Janeway’s father and the Judge were great friends. Happily the brute was accidentally shot by an exasperated neighbor, while making off with a boiled ham that had been set outside the kitchen door to cool. So I know,” asserted Mrs. Harrison, quite calmly confident, “that Mr. Janeway is exactly thirty-five. No, dear,” she added, in a motherly way, to Louise, “no more tea.”

Mrs. Simms saw the hopelessness of contending with so experienced a swordswoman. “I wonder,” she ventured to purr, in retreat, “whether his father’s fondness for savage brutes could be responsible for Mr. Janeway’s being so pugnacious.”

Mrs. Harrison only followed up her victory.

“Oh, my dear,” she objected, “don’t imagine that Henry’s father loved bloodthirsty dogs; he was quite an academic person; the bulldog was merely an incident. Judge Harrison and Mr. Janeway one evening fell disputing the authorship of a verse in praise of bulldogs. It proved to be, as Henry’s father had asserted, one of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s—and to assuage my husband’s humiliation at having ascribed it to some one else, Mr. Janeway very handsomely presented us with this rare bull puppy. But he loved and had all sorts of dogs. He once gave me the dearest little Skye terrier.”

“Well, is it true,” asked Louise Durand of Mrs. Harrison, “that Mr. Janeway always wears a long linen duster when he’s trying a case before a farmer jury?”

“He wasn’t wearing one yesterday,” replied Mrs. Harrison, unperturbed. “I drove to court with Judge Harrison in the afternoon. He said he thought I ought to hear Henry’s closing; and I thought Mr. Janeway the best-dressed man in the room.”

“He must be very odd, to have so many stories told about him,” said Louise, to make talk. “Where does he live?”

“Until his mother died two years ago, he kept a home for her here in Prospect Street. In Chicago he lives at the Chicago Club. He has always kept his membership here in the Country Club, of course. And after his mother’s death he fitted up one of those new apartments in Court House Square.”

“And a bachelor,” mused Louise—not as one interested, but as if lacking a new topic for comment.

“I’ve heard,” interposed Gertrude Durand, Robert’s unmarried sister, a pleasing young woman, most intense and energetic in manner, “that he had a love-affair when he was young. The story was he was engaged to a young girl. She had incipient consumption. He did everything he could to save her, but she died, and he never married.”

“He must be queer,” Mrs. Durand remarked, as if wanting to dismiss the subject.

But Mrs. Harrison firmly shrugged her shoulders. “Who told you that story, Gertrude?” she asked.

“Jim Kennedy.” Kennedy was understood to aspire to Gertrude’s hand, and Mrs. Harrison took measure accordingly.

“I am sure Jim is a reliable authority on most topics,” she observed prudently, “but I can’t vouch for that story. And I knew Henry all the time he lived with his mother in their old home.” The telephone bell rang. “I wonder, my dears,” asked Mrs. Harrison, listening, “whether that can be a verdict?”

It proved to be, as the maid presently announced, only a message from Mrs. Harrison’s husband, saying that he was driving up to take her home.

But, in matter of fact, newsboys were crying the evening extras, with the verdict in the dynamiting case, just as Judge Harrison’s car turned from his office into College Avenue. Without stopping for the newspapers, he directed the chauffeur to drive to the home of Robert Durand.

The day had been raw and the wind still blew off the lake, where great piles of anchor-ice, loosened and driven in by a dying gale, lay in fantastic heaps, as far as the eye could reach, along the frosted beach.

The home of the Durands—a young and childless couple of the very prosperous class—stood well back from the Shell Bay Road, on the bluff skirting the lake north of the town. The house, white and of a symmetrical design, with a Florentine façade, had been built to the fancy and under the direction of the wife, Louise Durand, when she had come to Fond du Lac four years earlier, a bride. As a departure from the Colonial, the English, and the non-descript types of better homes along the road, the Robert Durand home was distinctive. The few who refused to like it laid its singularity to the California rearing, and what they termed the California temperament, of Louise Durand, its mistress, only now reaching twenty-three years of age.

When Harrison walked into the Durand living-room, his wife, the gray-haired matron who had been so positive about Henry Janeway’s age, was chatting, on a davenport, with Louise. And Mrs. Simms—a vivacious brunette—her husband, the general attorney of the Durand Companies, was recounting an incident, in her lively manner, to Gertrude Durand, Robert’s sister.

Judge Sidney Harrison—so titled because early in life he had occupied a seat on the circuit bench—made his entry with an accustomed deliberation of step. He was above average height, rather tall, indeed; spare in figure and with a slight, curious stoop just at the top of the shoulders; this threw his head a little forward. He still retained from life’s unequal battle a little shock of hair, running front and back, very like a cockscomb; but for the most part he was conspicuously bald. His face, marked by keen and somewhat deep-set eyes, was not large. His features were only vaguely dried and wrinkled, and his complexion being of a tolerable hue, contributed to an agreeable expression—one strengthened by a quiet voice and an easy manner of speaking.

The women, with the exception of Mrs. Harrison, sprang up the moment they saw him.

“The news! The news!” cried Gertrude Durand. “What’s the news? Now, Uncle Sid, don’t be exasperating—what is the news?”

He regarded his questioners quizzically. “Am I as bad as that? Well, I have news—news of great pith and moment. The verdict is in, and the men that blew us up are convicted and will be sentenced shortly.”

Under the shower of congratulations, Judge Harrison settled himself in an easy chair. Louise took one close to him, and Harrison recounted the crowded court-room details. As he began, he drew from a waistcoat pocket his almost invariable and affectionate companion, a long and slender cigar which he did not venture to light—hardly bulkier than a lead-pencil—which, whether lighted or unlighted, was oftener in his fingers than between his lips. If he smoked, he smoked contemplatively, and his entire manner was at one with this trait; normally he was poised, drily laconic, and reservedly confident. As he spoke now rather directly to Louise, her youthful freshness stimulated him, and he drew from her alive and inquiring eyes the energy he needed to answer her eager questions in his most agreeable manner—this both to please Louise and to maintain an elderly masculine credit with an attractive young woman.

“Of course, I remember the first dynamiting at the North Mill,” said Louise, answering him in turn, as he went into the history of the case. She was sitting attentively forward and looking at the legal head of the family circle as he liked to be looked at, with an interest sincere enough to seem deep. “I’m not likely to forget that,” she added, with a little moue. “It happened just after Robert and I left for England last year to get the contracts.”

“Two of the men were caught in San Francisco soon after you left,” Harrison went on, “and two in Chicago. One we haven’t got yet. It took a long time to bring them to trial. Then we had a hung jury”—Harrison made a wry face, expressive of the legal difficulties endured. “Finally,” he went on, with returning satisfaction, “we got Janeway into the thing.

“Our prosecuting attorney was ill—is yet, in fact—unfortunately, poor fellow, for him, fortunately for us. The Governor took my view that for this particular job Janeway was good material, and appointed him as temporary prosecutor.” Judge Harrison coughed delicately to deprecate a possible impression that any influence of his had contributed more than the merest suggestion to the arrangement.

“And to-day,” he continued calmly, “after the longest trial ever staged in Fond du Lac County, the jury returned a verdict convicting all four defendants. It was a fight. Any lawyer,” remarked Harrison reflectively, “that goes before a Fond du Lac jury nowadays with the name of ‘Durand’ tagged to his case could be persuaded without much difficulty to trade it off for a millstone to be hanged about his neck.”

Louise listened, and a far-off expression revealed itself for a moment in her eyes. Then she smiled. “I’m sorry we’re so unpopular.”

“It’s all Bob’s fault,” burst out Gertrude Durand. “Father used to get along with the men.”

Harrison sat unruffled. “Your father had different men to get along with,” he said. “Though Bob, it’s true, is unlike his father in many respects. However, he’s certainly a steel maker.”

Mrs. Harrison and Mrs. Simms put in question and comment on the gratifying conviction of the dynamiters—for no one, they said, had thought they could ever be convicted by a Fond du Lac jury—and Judge Harrison was in good mood to make answer and return comment. As general counsel for the steel companies under the principal ownership and entire management of Robert Durand, his nephew by marriage, he had, after a long and bitter struggle, started for the penitentiary the men who had applied force as their last word in a long labor argument, and blown up a portion of the Durand Fond du Lac plant.

“And where did you get hold of Mr. Janeway?” asked Gertrude.

“He’s a Fond du Lac boy; went to Chicago some years ago——”

“A boy, Judge Harrison!” gushed Mrs. Simms, with snappy eyes. As wife of the general attorney of the Durand Companies, it was generally believed that her nose had been put slightly out of joint by the admission, so to speak, of Janeway into the Durand official family. “Why, we’ve just been talking about his age—if you set him back much further, we shall have to put him in knee pants!”

Judge Harrison pursued his thought on an even keel. He recollected that Simms had fought and lost more than one important case for the corporation, and that Janeway’s success had created a somewhat delicate situation. The Judge had, in fact, taken one case out of Simms’s hands after his failure to sway a jury; he never followed a loser.

“I’ve known Janeway since he was a boy,” he explained placatingly. “He read for a while here in my office and practised here. When he decided to try his fortunes in Chicago, I gave him a letter to Levi Stearns, counsel for the Standard Oil Company. He was in, toward the end, on that thirty-million-dollar-fine case. Your husband”—Judge Harrison, looking at Mrs. Simms, impaled her rather remorselessly on the point of his remark—“told me the gossip was—and I happen to know it’s so—that a point raised by Janeway in the case secured the reversal. Of course, Janeway was just a kid, and Levi stole the credit. I’ve often thought what a blessing it is to mankind that Levi wasn’t camping at the foot of Mount Sinai the night Moses brought down the stone tablets. If that had happened Levi and not Moses would have been the prophet of the Ten Commandments. Janeway figured, too, in the dissolution case. But I’ve known him so long, I always think of him as a boy,” added the Judge, with leisurely satisfaction.

“I’ve heard he’s Irish,” ventured Mrs. Simms.

“He well might be,” returned Harrison, unmoved. “Greeks and Celts have exasperatingly subtle minds. But he isn’t. There are just a few plain Americans left, you know.”

Mrs. Simms made her excuses and got away. Not until she had left did Judge Harrison show any irritability.

“Was Mrs. Simms born here?” he asked of Gertrude.

“No, indeed,” said Gertrude, “she is not a native.”

“She seems to know so many things about Janeway that aren’t so,” complained the Judge. “She told somebody that Bob got Janeway into this case.”

“Oh, Uncle Sidney,” exclaimed Louise, “it was I—she told me that——”

“Well, Bob didn’t get him,” averred Harrison.

“Mr. Simms?”

“No, not Mr. Simms,” Harrison went on drily. “Janeway professes to feel under some obligation to me for the worthless advice I used to impose on him; and for the letters I gave him when he packed his bag for Chicago. So when we needed him, I thought I had a pull.”

“Mr. Janeway’s a great reader,” observed Mrs. Harrison in a sage aside to Louise.

“I can’t hand him much credit for that,” remarked Judge Harrison. “The fellow has a facility that way. He grabs the meat of a page at a glance. It’s very curious to see him open a law book; nine times out of ten it will be at the very heart of the subject.”

“But, Sid,” drawled Mrs. Harrison, “tell how you ‘got acquainted’ with him, as you expressed it, after he began to practise here for himself.”

Harrison demurred, but his wife persisted.

“That was a railroad case,” said the elderly lawyer, at length. “We had to take a strip of land in town here that belonged to the Catholic Bishop. We condemned. I was attorney for the railroad, Janeway represented the Bishop. Janeway raised the point that the strip we wanted took a section corner from his client.”

Louise listened, trying to appear interested. “What’s a section corner?” asked Gertrude.

“It’s really nothing at all,” remarked the Judge. “A mere surveyor’s mark; a stone, or a stake, to designate areas of land divided into sections of six hundred and forty acres by the government. That’s the way all the newer portion of our country is surveyed; there must be several million section corners in the United States.

“But Janeway mapped out that precious section corner, photographed it, exploited it, pleaded it, enlarged on the enormity of the idea of a corporation’s forcibly taking a strip of land that included a section corner belonging to a wholly innocent and poverty-stricken client—who comprised, by the way, all in himself another powerful corporation—till he had the jury almost in tears over that blamed section corner. I may say his jury, for before he finished he owned it. There was no more sense in his contention that we were irreparably injuring the Bishop by taking a section corner away from him,” complained Harrison patiently, “than there would have been if we had proposed to move a home-made mail-box ten feet on a man’s fence—not nearly so much. But to hear Janeway lay it out, you would have thought the Washington Monument, Taj Mahal, St. Peter’s, and the ruins of the Parthenon all rested on that precious section corner, and that for a railroad to take the land that included it would ruthlessly subvert every principle of American liberty—the liberty for which our Pilgrim fathers fought so hard and so long! The strip was actually worth about twenty-five hundred dollars. They gave him a verdict for twenty-five thousand. Of course, I appealed. But the company wanted the land in a hurry, and he made us pay good and plenty for it before we got through.”

At that moment Robert Durand, just from the office, walked briskly in on the group.

Durand was in the greatest good-humor. He was a man of athletic build, with liquid brown eyes, a high forehead, and the alert air of the absorbed American business man. His face reflected traces of good living, and his underlip was rather full. Yet his general expression was a pleasant one, and his frank, open manner, simulating impulsiveness, made friends—though Durand sometimes failed to hold them.

Receiving congratulations from the women on the verdict, he turned, with a long breath, to Harrison.

“It’s the biggest thing we’ve ever put over on the labor bunch,” he exclaimed. “We’ve got those fellows cowed now for a good ten years—haven’t we, Uncle Sid?” He threw the question at Harrison with bullet-like intensity.

Harrison responded without quite echoing Durand’s intensity. “Ten years is a good while,” he observed.

Durand threw out his hand toward his uncle. “Hang on to Janeway,” he said warningly. “We don’t want to let that fellow get away.”

Harrison fenced. “He’s a high-priced man,” he observed calmly.

“Not too high-priced for what’s ahead of us,” returned Durand, without an instant’s hesitation. “I’ve more news,” he added. The women were eager to hear it. “I signed a new munitions contract to-day with the British Government.”

“Nice boy!” laughed Mrs. Harrison, amid the comments.

“We’ll be in this thing ourselves before another six months,” continued Durand, with snapping eyes. “That means more orders than we can possibly take care of—and a big sellers’ market.”

He suggested a drink to his uncle, and they adjourned to the dining-room. While Durand was mixing what was called for, he again spoke to Judge Harrison about making sure of Janeway.

“Of course Janeway’s training, while tolerably wide, has been more particularly that of a trial lawyer,” said Harrison, who understood quite well how to raise difficulties that he meant should count for his own real intention. “We should have to use him as a corporation lawyer.”

Durand brushed aside all objections. “Why, that fellow can handle anything, they tell me in Chicago. Did you ever hear him talk?”

“A good while before you did,” remarked Harrison drily. “He’s coming up for dinner to-night. Bring Louise over and we’ll talk to him this evening.”

Durand told his wife of the arrangement. She demurred. “I’m going to Gertrude’s again this evening. Bishop Marion and his sister are bringing a guest, and I promised to come over to meet her.”

“I want you with me.”

“But, Bob, I don’t want to disappoint Gertrude.”

“Oh, hell!”

“And her guests.”

“I want you to meet Janeway.”

Louise knew pretty well from experience where discussion of a request made in that tone—long familiar to her—would end. But she had grown less sensitive to consequences. “Why should I meet Mr. Janeway? I’ve heard nothing but Janeway to-day. I don’t care to meet——”

“I want you along!” exclaimed her husband, silencing her with a curt expletive. “Get ready and come.”

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