Jeremy Clarke, of John Adams' administration, was a public prosecutor; and his sons also took to the service of the commonwealth. Like him, they became prosecutors, leaving a long and oft-referred-to record of convictions of criminals, civil offenders and enemies of the state. Naturally, Calvin Clarke was a state's attorney; he had never thought about being anything else.
He was thirty, although he was only two years out of law school; for the Clarke character in him made him steady and conscientious, but he was not at all precocious. He had entered Harvard University when he was nineteen and left when he was twenty-three to go to France. At twenty-five, he had returned to the law school for three years, upon the completion of which he had traveled to Chicago and soon afterwards was appointed an assistant state's attorney.
A classmate, named Todd, had procured the appointment. Todd, who was a native Chicagoan, recently had married and had built a pleasant, red brick and plaster-and-timber Elizabethan house on a stretch of the suburban shore several miles north of Chicago where the land is called Winnetka.
Todd and his bride had week-end guests in mind when they had planned the house; and they had a room which they always denoted, hospitably, as "Calvin's." He was supposed to spend Saturday nights with them; so there he was, asleep in his room in the new Elizabethan house at one o'clock on this moonlit Sunday morning, when the telephone bell rang and Emily Todd answered from her phone in her bedroom.
Emily tried to make sense of what she heard but after a few seconds she handed the instrument to her husband, exclaiming:
"There's a creature on the wire who says his name is
