The Girl at the Halfway House, Emerson Hough [best summer books .TXT] 📗

sweet. The wind is steady but pleasant, and a man may live in comfort the year round as I am told. I am but new here as yet myself, but am fully disposed, as they say in the strange language here, to drive my Stake. I want you, my dear boy, also to drive Yours beside me, and to that Effect I beg to extend you whatever Aid may lie in my Power.

"Hoping that you may receive this communication duly, and make reply to
Same, and hoping above all things that I may soon meet again my
Companion of the 47th., I beg to subscribe myself, my dear boy, ever
your Obdt. & Affect. Friend,

"BATTERSLEIGH.

"P.S.—Pray Herild your advent by a letter & bring about 4 lbs. or 5 lbs. of your Favourite Tea, as I am Short of Same."

The letter ended with Battersleigh's best flourish. Franklin turned it over again and again in his hand and read it more than once as he pondered upon its message. "Dear old fellow," he said; "he's a good deal of a Don Quixote, but he never forgets a friend. Buffalo and Indians, railroads and hotels—it must at least be a land of contrasts!"

CHAPTER VI EDWARD FRANKLIN, LAWYER

Edward Franklin had taken up his law studies in the office of Judge Bradley, the leading lawyer of the little village of Bloomsbury, where Franklin was born, and where he had spent most of his life previous to the time of his enlistment in the army. Judge Bradley was successful, as such matters go in such communities, and it was his open boast that he owed his success to himself and no one else. He had no faith in such mythical factors as circumstances in the battle of life. This is the common doctrine of all men who have arrived, and Judge Bradley had long since arrived, in so far as the possibilities of his surroundings would admit. His was the largest law library in the town. He had the most imposing offices—a suite of three rooms, with eke a shiny base-burner in the reception room. His was one of the three silk hats in the town.

Thirty-five years earlier, a raw youth from old Vermont, Hollis N. Bradley had walked into the embryonic settlement of Bloomsbury with a single law book under his arm, and naught but down upon his chin. He pleaded his first cause before a judge who rode circuit over a territory now divided into three Congressional districts. He won his first case, for his antagonist was even more ignorant than he. As civilization advanced, he defended fewer men for stealing hogs, and more for murder and adultery. His practice grew with the growth of the population of the country about him. He was elected county attorney, local counsel for the railroad, and judge of the circuit court. He was mentioned for gubernatorial honours, and would perhaps have received the party nomination but for the breaking out of the civil war. Not fancying the personal risks of the army, he hired a substitute, and this sealed his political fate; for Illinois at that time did not put in power men who sent substitutes to the war. None the less, the lands and moneys of the most prominent lawyer of the place kept him secure, and human memories are short; so that, when Edward Franklin and others of the young men of Bloomsbury returned from the war, they saw upon the streets of the little town, as they had seen before they went away, the tall form, the portly front, the smooth-shaven face, and the tall silk hat of Judge Hollis N. Bradley, who had in every sense survived the war.

It was an immemorial custom in Bloomsbury for the youth who had aspirations for a legal career to "read law" in Judge Bradley's office. Two of his students had dropped their books to take up rifles, and they came not back to their places. They were forgotten, save once a year, upon Decoration Day, when Judge Bradley made eloquent tribute above their graves. Upon such times Judge Bradley always shed tears, and always alluded to the tears with pride. Indeed, his lachrymal ability was something of which he had much right to be proud, it being well known in the legal profession that one's fees are in direct proportion to his ability to weep. Judge Bradley could always weep at the right time before a Jury, and this facility won him many a case. Through no idle whim had public sentiment, even after the incident of the substitute, confirmed him in his position as the leading lawyer of Bloomsbury.

It was therefore predetermined that Edward Franklin should go into the office of Judge Bradley to begin his law studies, after he had decided that the profession of the law was the one likely to offer him the best career. In making his decision, Franklin was actuated precisely as are many young men who question themselves regarding their career. He saw the average results of the lives of others in a given calling, and conceived, without consulting in most jealous scrutiny his own natural fitnesses and preferences, that he might well succeed in that calling because he saw others so succeeding. Already there were two dozen lawyers in Bloomsbury, and it was to be questioned whether they all did so well as had Judge Bradley in the hog-stealing epoch of the local history. Yet it was necessary for him to take up something by way of occupation, and it resolved itself somewhat into a matter of cancellation. For the profession of medicine he had a horror, grounded upon scenes of contract surgery upon the fields of battle. The ministry he set aside. From commerce, as he had always seen it in his native town, twelve hours a day of haggling and smirking, he shrank with all the impulses of his soul. The abject country newspaper gave him no inkling of that fourth estate which was later to spring up in the land. Arms he loved, but there was now no field for arms. There were no family resources to tide him over the season of experiment, and, indeed, but for a brother and a sister, who lived in an adjoining farming community, he had no relatives to be considered in his plans. Perforce, then, Franklin went into the law, facing it somewhat as he had the silent abattis, as with a duty to perform. Certainly, of all students, Judge Bradley had never had a handsomer, a more mature, or a more reluctant candidate than this same Edward Franklin, late captain in the United States Army, now getting well on into his twenties, grave, silent, and preoccupied, perhaps a trine dreamy. He might or might not be good material for a lawyer; as to that, Judge Bradley did not concern himself. Young men came into his office upon their own responsibility.

It was one of the unvarying rules of Judge Bradley's office, and indeed this was almost the only rule which he imposed, that the law student within his gates, no matter what his age or earlier servitude, should each morning sweep out the office, and should, when so requested, copy out any law papers needing to be executed in duplicate. So long as a student did these things, he was welcome as long as he cared to stay. The judge never troubled himself about the studies of his pupil, never asked him a question, indeed never even told him what books it might be best to read, unless this advice were asked voluntarily by the student himself. He simply gave the candidate a broom, a chair, and the freedom of the library, which latter was the best law library in the town. What more could one ask who contemplated a career at law? It was for him to work out his own salvation; and to sweep the stairs each morning.

Edward Franklin accepted his seat in Judge Bradley's office without any reservations, and he paid his daily fee of tenure as had all the other students before him, scorning not the broom. Indeed, his conscience in small things augured well, for it was little cousin to his conscience in great things. Ardent, ambitious, and resolute, he fell upon Blackstone, Chitty, and Kent, as though he were asked to carry a redoubt. He read six, eight, ten hours a day, until his head buzzed, and he forgot what he had read. Then at it all over again, with teeth set. Thus through more than a year he toiled, lashed forward by his own determination, until at length he began to see some of the beautiful first principles of the law—that law, once noble and beneficent, now degraded and debased; once designed for the protection of the individual, now used by society as the instrument for the individual's extermination. So in his second year Franklin fared somewhat beyond principles merely, and got into notes and bills, torts, contracts, and remedies. He learned with a shiver how a promise might legally be broken, how a gift should be regarded with suspicion, how a sacred legacy might be set aside. He read these things again and again, and forced them into his brain, so that they might never be forgotten; yet this part of the law he loved not so much as its grand first principles of truth and justice.

One morning, after Franklin had finished his task of sweeping down the stairs, he sat him down by the window with Battersleigh's letter in his hand; for this was now the third day since he had received this letter, and it had been in his mind more vividly present than the pages of the work on contracts with which he was then occupied. It was a bright, fresh morning in the early spring. A little bird was singing somewhere near the window. From where Franklin sat he could see the green grass just starting, over in the courthouse yard. A long and lazy street lay in perspective before the window, and along it, out beyond the confines of the town, there reached the flat monotony of the dark prairie soil. The leaves of the soft maples were beginning to show over there, near the village church. A dog crossed the street, pausing midway of the crossing to scratch his ear. The cart of the leading grocer was hitched in front of his store, and an idle citizen or two paused near by to exchange a morning greeting. All the little, uneventful day was beginning, as it had begun so many times before here in this little, uneventful town, where the world was finished, never more to change. Franklin shuddered. Was this, then, to be his life? He turned to the rows of scuffed-backed law books on their shelves. Then he turned again to his letter, and to the window, and to the birds and the grass. He caught himself noting how long the dog's hind leg looked, how impossible the angle between the fore leg and the spine, as it half sat in flea-compelled contortions.

There came a regular tread upon the stair, as there had always for years come at this hour of half past seven in the morning, rain or shine. Judge Bradley entered, tall, portly, smooth shaven, his silk hat pushed back upon his brow, as was his fashion. Franklin turned to make the usual morning salutation.

"Good-morning, Ned," said the Judge, affably.

"Good-morning, Judge," said Franklin. "I hope you are well."

"Yes, thank you. Nothing ever the matter with me. How are things coming?"

"Oh, all right, thank you."

This was the stereotyped form of the daily greeting between the two. Judge Bradley turned as usual to his desk, but, catching sight of the letter still held in Franklin's hand, remarked carelessly:

"Got a letter from your girl?"

"Not so lucky," said Franklin. "From a friend."

Silence resulted. Judge Bradley opened his desk, took off his coat and hung it on a nail, after his custom, thereafter seating himself at his desk, with the official cough which signified that the campaign of the day had begun. He turned over the papers for a moment, and remarked absent-mindedly, and more to be polite than because the matter interested him, "Friend, eh?"

"Yes," said Franklin, "friend, out West"; and both relapsed again into silence. Franklin once more fell to gazing out of the window,