THE LIBERTY OF THE JAIL
There are two kinds of lawyers—the one who knows the law and the one who knows the judge.—Joseph H. Croate.
There is a third kind of lawyer—the one that knows his fellow man.—Ephraim Tutt.
One of those breezy, back-slapping fellows; Javelin-collar type, you know, or thought he was; feather in his hatband; tartan silk neckerchief; cigarette with his initials; coat cut in at the tenth vertebra; the kind that calls his stenographer “sister”; known in belles-lettres as a paper sport; a mean one; T. Otis Crabb, his name.
He had foozled everything from the time he wore kilt skirts—sold books, bonds, softstuff, hardware, real estate, automobiles—everything except himself; this not his life story, but merely an episode. To cut it short, about his fifty-fifth year he met a rich widow—another mean one—called her “sister”—landed her—easy money!
Mrs. T. Otis Crabb, née Peterman, would have had you know that she was of another sphere. Really she was very much like Otis, although she had always had what she called “position,” due to the circumstance that Father Peterman had reached New York in 1870, when all one had to do was to buy a swamp lot and hold it to become a millionaire. Lucretia was his only child, but even to his prejudiced eye she lacked that indescribable thing called charm. Time sped and she still dangled, a withering pippin on what the bard refers to as the virgin tree. Her father and mother died, leaving her a fortune outright. Suitors came, but turned hurriedly away. At last old Admiral Buck was put in command of the Brooklyn Navy Yard—seventy-one, his eyes bad, but his taste for wine still good. So Lucretia became Mrs. Admiral Buck. Since she gained somewhat by being both married and official, her “position” became stronger than ever.
Then the admiral, having been retired by a grateful country, quickly drank himself to death, leaving the Widow Buck with not much in her life except bridge. Her second blooming synchronized with the jazz era. She might just as well have married her dancing teacher, but, as it happened, she ran into T. Otis at a thé dansant; thought him a dashing fellow. She had always wanted a dashing husband, and now she had one—gave him three thousand a year pin money. On their return from the honeymoon at Miami he developed influenza, had to give up work and lost all interest in girth control. After a month or so he got on Lucretia’s nerves, sitting around the house and doing nothing but take the little white dog out in the afternoon. Also, with returning health he began to get a bit skittish. So she bought an interest for him in Smith, Murphy & Wasservogel to get him out of the way.
After a while T. Otis didn’t mind, particularly in the summer when Lucretia was out of town, although he always ran down to Atlantic City from Friday afternoon until Monday—liked the bathing. The rest of the time he devoted to his young-man-about-town complex. As he was gray-haired and fifty-five, it came high. In fact, it cost more than he got either from Lucretia or out of his share in Smith, Murphy & Wasservogel. He was a good spender—overdrawn at both banks.
His only friend was a dasher like himself, another of those rosy young-old boys you see on the billboards ogling a cigarette, a bachelor—Algie Fosdick, known on the Rialto as Fozzy. They hunted in the same leash. All summer long he and Algie palled it on the roof gardens, at Long Beach, and at Coney, and Lucretia let him use her runabout—the little yellow one with red wheels you always see on Broadway. It kept him quiet. He was a poor thing, but her own. Not nice people—any of them.
That is how the accident happened, the worst in years—T. Otis driving the yellow runabout back from Coney after a shore dinner with Algie and a couple of girl friends. He had had a little too much clam broth and thought he’d show ’em what the little bus would do.
II
“Mr. Tutt,” said Tutt, hopping in over the threshold from the outer office like a belated robin, “may I disturb you for a moment?”
The old lawyer turned from the window through which he had been contemplating the Syrian wash fluttering from the roofs of the nether tenement houses.
“Tutt,” said Mr. Tutt, “you may.”
“I want to kill a man!” said Tutt.
“Dear, dear!” answered his elderly partner. “Only one?”
“At the present writing, only one. But believe me, at that, hell’s too good for him!”
“You surprise me, Tutt!” exclaimed Mr. Tutt, reaching down into the recesses of his desk for a decrepit bottle and pouring out a glass of amber-colored liquid. “Have some Malt Extract?”
“No, thanks,” replied Tutt. “I never drank until prohibition, and somehow I can’t seem to get used to it.”
“I confess it is hard to break the habits of a lifetime,” agreed his partner, absorbing the contents of the tumbler; after which, having replaced the bottle, he seated himself in his swivel chair, leaned back, crossed his long legs upon his desk, lit a stogy and locked his hands behind his head—his customary office attitude—while Tutt started an all-tobacco cigarette as a sort of back fire and sank into the chair reserved for paying clients.
“You remember Wallace Barrington,” began Tutt—“that young accountant we did some business for? His wife died two years ago, and he’s been looking after his old mother and four children ever since. Firm paid him fifty-five hundred a year—pretty good; but his wife’s illness took all his savings. They lived over in Flatbush, somewhere near the Coney Island Boulevard.”
“Well?” inquired Mr. Tutt, exhaling a cloud of poison gas.
“Well,” echoed Tutt, “he was walking home from an overtime job the other night and a drunken bounder motoring back from Coney with a party of women ran him down and smashed him up. He’s done for. Wheel chair all his life, I guess. Earning capacity entirely gone. Nothing for it but to send the children to an orphanage and the mother to an old folks’ home.”
“What’s the brute’s name?” demanded Mr. Tutt, all attention.
“T. Otis Crabb. He’s a banker and broker.”
“Sue him for a hundred thousand dollars!”
“Won’t do any good. He says he’s broke. Threatens, if we do sue, to go through bankruptcy.”
“Whose motor was it?”
“His wife’s.”
“Sue her!”
“Can’t! She was out of town, at Atlantic City, and swears he was using the car without her permission. Rotten luck, for Crabb’s wife is worth a couple of millions. I asked her if she would do something for the Barringtons, and she laughed in my face.
“‘Me?’ she says. ‘What have I got to do with it? I wasn’t in the car!’
“‘But,’ I said, ‘it was your car that broke Barrington’s back, and your drunken husband was driving it. Haven’t you any heart?’
“At that she rang a bell and the butler threw me out.”
“The female of the species!” muttered Mr. Tutt. “Won’t either of ’em pay anything?”
“Crabb offered me five hundred dollars for a complete release. A good nerve! What?”
“Where’s Barrington?”
“In the charity ward at Bellevue.”
Mr. Tutt brought his feet down with a bang, and his tall frame shot toward the ceiling like an avenging jack-in-the-box suddenly released.
“Where is this cur Crabb?” he shouted.
“Right over in his office—smoking a perfecto paid for by Mrs. Crabb. Says he’s sorry, but hasn’t any money of his own. She underwrites him—all right; but if she keeps him she ought to be responsible for the damage he does!”
“Poor Barrington! I’ll go over and see him at once,” said Mr. Tutt. “Meantime just you call up this Crabb animal and inform him that unless he sidles over here with twenty thousand dollars by to-morrow morning at ten o’clock we’ll bring suit against him and his wife for one hundred thousand, and that it’s going to cost them exactly five thousand more for every week he holds back. Meantime tell Barrington’s mother to send us the bills for the rent and household expenses. It isn’t exactly ethical for us to pay ’em, but what’s a little ethics when an old woman and four children are starving? Eh, Tutt? Did you say you wanted to kill a man? I’d like to draw and quarter him, burn him in chains and boil him in oil! I’d like gently to peel off his epidermis and shake salt and pepper on his quivering subcuticle! I’d like—I’d like”
He stood quaking with rage, his fist shaking in mid-air.
“U-r-r-h!” he roared. “And, by heck, I will!”
III
“There are two kinds of lawyers,” said Joseph H. Choate—“the one who knows the law and the one who knows the judge.”
But this cynically jocular aphorism is true only in a general sense. It is not enough for a lawyer to know either the law or the judge, or even both. To succeed in his profession he must above all else know his fellow man. In this latter quality Ephraim Tutt excelled. Inevitably he knew his man, whether the latter were a mean-spirited complainant, a weak or timid juryman, or an uncertain or lying witness. The last thing he did was to look up the law; the first to study the characteristics, temperament, and relationships of the various dramatis personæ involved in any case; and he was accustomed to illustrate this great principle of practice by a certain litigation which, much to everybody’s surprise, had resulted favorably to the defense for the sole but sufficient reason that the only witness for the complainant—who had a perfectly good case—owed the defendant’s lawyer twenty-five dollars.
He used to say that it was as important to know what money men owed or what women they were in love with as to be able to quote the Statute of Frauds or the Fifteenth Amendment. By this we do not intend to intimate that Mr. Tutt ever resorted to improper means to win his verdicts, but only that he placed a proper value upon the so-called human element in every case. The law might be entirely against him, and so might the facts; but that never disturbed his equanimity so long as there was a jury to be appealed to; and he believed that the chief requirements for the legal career were a good digestion and a stout pair of legs. In a word, he was a practical man.
To him every case that came into the offices of Tutt & Tutt presented a concrete triangular problem, standing on its own bottom, and exposing three sides, on one of which was inscribed “What are the facts?” on another “What’s the law?” and on the third “What then?” And Mr. Tutt, a gangrenous stogy protruding from his mouth, his hands thrust beneath his coat tails, would saunter contemplatively around said problem, viewing each side in turn, but pausing inevitably before the last, where, if the truth must be known, the question of what the law or the facts actually were played a small part. There is more than one way to kill a legal cat, and Tutt & Tutt’s job was to find the best method of executing every such feline that wandered into their office. Both Tutts enjoyed the law as a science and delighted in it as a craft, joyfully uniting science and craft in a scientific craftiness in which inevitably a pleasant time was had by all—except their opponents. They loved their profession for its own sake, apart from the fact that they earned their living by it; but they cared for it rather upon its pragmatic than upon its academic side.
Mr. Aaron T. Lefkovitsky, on the other hand, though also a legal pragmatist, was the kind of lawyer who mistakenly thought he knew both the law and the judge, and everything else. Like seeks like. A smart-Aleck client is apt to engage a smart-Aleck lawyer, much as men are said, out of personal vanity, to marry women who in general resemble them. Thus it was natural that T. Otis should have retained Aaron T. to defend the damage suits brought on behalf of the Barringtons against him and his wife. It was also natural that after Aaron had blustered around for several months, loudly asserting that Tutt & Tutt could never get a verdict against his clients, the several juries interested should have soaked the latter an aggregate of fifty thousand dollars in damages. This unlooked-for consummation might have resulted in a loss of mutual confidence had it not been for the fact that T. Otis was unquestionably judgment-proof.
Nevertheless, one shadow still stalked behind him by day and hovered above his bed at night—his liability to arrest and imprisonment for debt in default of paying the judgment. This lever old Mr. Tutt still had concealed upon his lanky person, and both T. Otis and Aaron T. knew that he would certainly make use of it, the fact being that he had served written notice upon them that unless someone should pay that fifty thousand in full, with interest, costs, and disbursements added thereunto, within five days, he proposed to cast Mr. Crabb into durance vile, which, as it happened, would be just when Mrs. Crabb desired to take her departure to Atlantic City for the summer. As the lady did not want to go without her husband, and wanted neither to pay the aforesaid fifty thousand dollars nor to have it publicly known that T. Otis was visiting the warden of the City Prison, she immediately and in some distress telephoned to the Honorable Aaron T. Lefkovitsky, who stood not upon the order of his coming.
Hence there were assembled on a certain June evening, in the gilt drawing-room of the golden suite of the rococo apartment-house upon Riverside Drive overlooking the Hudson where dwelt the Crabbs—the lady herself, the Honorable Aaron, her dashing spouse, and Algie Fosdick, his friend.
“Well, Mr. Lefkovitsky,” she was saying, “what kind of a mess have you got us into now, losing all these cases, and my husband threatened with jail?”
Mr. Lefkovitsky received the broadside good-naturedly.
“Jail!” quoth he nonchalantly. “A good joke, that is!”
“Joke!” repeated Mrs. Crabb in dudgeon. “It may be a joke to you, but a nice thing for me to have it in all the papers just as I’m going away for the summer! I’d almost rather pay the fifty thousand dollars and be done with it!”
“Not much you won’t!” asserted the lawyer grandly. “And your husband won’t go to jail, either; that is, really go to jail. All he has to do is to give a bond for the amount of the judgment, and under the law he gets the liberties of the jail. At the end of six months the bond is automatically discharged and that’s the end of it. Nobody need ever know he’s even been arrested.”
He nodded his glossy black head sagely.
“I don’t understand!” declared Mrs. Crabb suspiciously, for she was suspicious of all men, her only experience with the sex having been with her Admiral and T. Otis. “First you say he’ll have to go to jail, and then that he won’t have to go to jail! What sort of bunk is that?”
“They call it going to jail, but practically he can go anywhere he chooses,” said Lefkovitsky. “The jail limits in New York County are New York County itself!”
“You mean Otis can live right here in this apartment and still be in jail?” she demanded incredulously.
“You’ve said it!”
“I told you he was a smart lawyer, mamma,” murmured Mr. Crabb.
“Don’t you call me mamma,” she retorted, “or go to jail you shall!”
As between Mrs. Crabb and jail, less hardened men might well have chosen the latter.
“All he has to do is to get a responsible party to go surety on his bond that he won’t go outside the jail limits—Mr. Fosdick can act as surety. And then he stays right here, and sleeps at home.”
“That’s a funny sort of law!” ventured Mr. Fosdick. “How do you know the sheriff would accept me as a surety on the bond? I haven’t a cent of my own!”
“He’ll have to accept you if you put up the right sort of security,” announced Mr. Lefkovitsky with authority.
“But where shall I get it?”
“Mrs. Crabb can loan it to you,” suggested the attorney. “She merely deposits fifty bonds, or an equivalent amount in any good securities convenient to her, and at the end of six months, when Mr. Crabb is released and the bond is discharged, she gets them back.”
“Are you sure I will?” she insisted doubtfully.
“Absolutely! I’ll show you the law if you want to see it. Your husband just gives bond and walks around New York for six months and then it’s all over. He can’t be arrested again.”
“Easiest way to save fifty thousand dollars I ever heard of!” beamed Fozzy. “Ain’t it grand to be a lawyer?”
“But suppose there was some slip-up? What would happen to the money?” Mrs. Crabb inquired. “I’m a bit leery of this law stuff.”
Mr. Lefkovitsky smiled with condescension.
“There won’t be any slip-up.”
“But if there should be?”
“Of course, if the bond was forfeited the securities would be used to satisfy the judgment.”
“You mean the Barringtons would get our—I mean my—money?”
“If the bond was forfeited, yes,” he replied rather impatiently. “But it wouldn’t be forfeited. There’s not a chance in the world. As I tell you, a man who has secured the liberties of the jail can go anywhere he wants in New York County. That’s why I say that being arrested for debt is a joke.”
“If that’s all being arrested amounts to,” pondered Mrs. Crabb, “why have any jail limits at all? The only thing I don’t like about it is that Otis can’t come down to Atlantic City over the week-ends.”
The Honorable Aaron looked knowing.
“Maybe I could fix that too,” he admitted modestly.
“Well, what do you think about that?” ejaculated Fozzy.
“Oh, if you can” brightened the lady.
“Listen,” said Lefkovitsky, helping himself to a cigar out of the silver box at his elbow on the strength of it. “I’ll tell you something. Very few lawyers know it, either. When a man’s arrested for debt and locked up—as when he isn’t able to give a bond to remain inside the jail limits—the sheriff becomes personally responsible for him; and if the debtor escapes the sheriff is liable to the creditor in damages. But—and here’s what most people aren’t wise to—if the debtor voluntarily returns before the creditor can begin an action for damages by serving his summons and complaint on the sheriff the law says that any harm that has been done by his escape has been undone by his return, and that the action no longer lies. Get me?”
“Sure, that’s easy!” assented T. Otis jauntily. “I should be a lawyer myself.”
“Well,” continued Lefkovitsky, “when a bond is given, conditioned on the debtor’s remaining within the jail limits, that lets the sheriff out. The bond takes his place, so to speak, and if the debtor escapes or goes outside the jail limits the creditor cannot sue the sheriff, but must sue the surety on the bond. Now freeze onto this: As any defense open to the sheriff in an action for an escape is likewise open to a surety in an action on the bond, if the debtor comes back before the action is begun the action falls; the creditor has lost his right to sue.”
He looked around triumphantly.
“Well, what of it?” asked Mrs. Crabb. “What are you driving at?”
“I’m driving at just this: No action can be commenced legally except by personal service of the summons and complaint upon the defendant, on a week day, within the state. Therefore in any event your husband could go away on a Sunday, and so long as he came back within the jail limits before midnight no action could be commenced against the surety, no matter where he went.”
“I see that,” she nodded. “But Otis can’t wait till Sunday comes to spend the week-end at Atlantic City with me and get back the same day. There would be nothing in that.”
“Of course not!” agreed Lefkovitsky. “He don’t have to wait for Sunday. Just let him take Mr. Fosdick with him when he goes, and he can leave New York on Thursday or Friday and come back Monday afternoon. Tutt can’t begin an action on the bond while Mr. Fosdick is outside the jurisdiction, and he can’t begin it at all after your husband has come back inside the jail limits. If they go away and come back on the same train everything will be all right.”
“Well, I’ll be danged!” ejaculated Mr. Fosdick in bewildered admiration.
“Certainly looks good to me!” said T. Otis. “What do you think, ma—my dear?”
Mrs. Crabb smiled appreciatively at Mr. Lefkovitsky, now entirely satisfied that she could keep her money and have her Otis, too, over the week-ends.
“I think,” she replied, pressing the bell with sudden decision, “that anything as slick as that is worth a round of drinks. Grape juice, Martin.”
While this distinguished group were engaged in the foregoing conversation upon Riverside Drive, Ephraim Tutt was sitting in one of the wards of Bellevue Hospital beside a cot upon which a human form was strapped immovably to an iron frame. Wallace Barrington was going to recover, but he would be a cripple for life; he, his mother and his children dependents upon public charity unless the law came to his aid. He was thirty-two, had been an expert in his line, a hard-working man of ideals. Now he was little more than an inanimate object. And the thought of what he had been and what now he was, the sudden collapse of his little universe, the crushing of all his hopes, were mirrored in the despairing eyes he fastened upon the old lawyer’s kindly face.
“So you’re not to worry,” said Mr. Tutt encouragingly as he felt beneath the chair for his stovepipe hat. “Your mother and the children are going right on living in the apartment, and there is a woman who comes in every day to do the cooking and take care of them.”
“But who pays her?” asked the man in the frame hoarsely. “I had practically nothing in the bank.”
“Oh, that’s all right!” Mr. Tutt assured him. “The money is being advanced against the fifty thousand dollars which T. Otis Crabb will eventually pay you.”
“How soon will that be?”
The lawyer wrinkled his nose and winked at the picture of one A. Lincoln upon the wall above the bed.
“I’m hoping he’ll arrange to pay it in about ten days,” said he cheerily.
“I shall never be able to thank you enough,” whispered Barrington, closing his eyes.
But by the time the old man had reached the elevator the cheerful expression upon his face had vanished.
“What did you tell him that for?” he muttered. “You’re a damned old liar, Tutt! Now, by thunder, you may have to support that family for the rest of their natural lives!”
He and Mr. Lefkovitsky passed—but did not recognize—each other on their way home.
IV
“And ten,” said Mr. Joshua Carman, just like that, with his forefinger advancing two blues into the field of battle. An unemotional person, Carman, general superintendent of one of the big railroad terminals. It was the regular Saturday-night session of the so-called Bible Class of the Colophon Club, 11.54, and six minutes to go.
“I run,” cravenly remarked Colonel H. Clay Jones, the next in order.
“Ich auch!” echoed M. d’Auriac, of Paris, who had run up from Washington.
“And even I!” squeaked the tiny little bear known as Peewee Cadwalader.
All laid down their hands and turned toward the Honorable Ephraim Tutt, whose elongated features expressed neither pain nor joy.
“I cal’late,” muttered the colonel to M. d’Auriac as he clipped a fresh cigar, “that if no one is shy there should be exactly five hundred and twenty-three bones in that cemetery.”
“Seven thousand eight hundred and forty-five francs—at to-day’s rate,” nodded the Frenchman.
“And ten,” echoed Mr. Tutt, placing two more blues—his last—upon the leaning tower in front of him. “Farewell, dear little ones!”
“Making in all five hundred and thirty-three,” murmured the Peewee.
Mr. Carman thrust his cards jauntily into his collar at a certain sanctified spot adjacent to his right ear. He had just two more blues. Nobody else had much of anything. It was all in the pot. He and Tutt had each drawn but one card.
“And ten,” he whispered as if in an ecstasy.
The minute hand of the clock on the mantel had slipped to within two minutes of midnight. Mr. Tutt pulled back his sleeves and deftly removed the huge circular onyx buttons ornamenting his cuffs.
“Are these good for a raise?” he inquired.
“Sure!” nodded his adversary.
Mr. Tutt placed each one upon the apex of a pile of blue chips.
“And ten!” concluded the railroad man, shoving in his last.
The circle formed by the players from the other games in different parts of the room drew closer about the green table. All had frequently seen Mr. Tutt depart minus everything but his clothes.
“Well,” moaned the old man, “though great is my faith in the hand which our distinguished military guest has dealt me, unfortunately I cannot walk home in the nude. However, I have one last resource. I will throw in my old tall hat and my ivory-handled cane—a sacrifice, you will admit, for I have used each of them over thirty years—as equivalent to a raise. And since you have no more chips, Carman, I will bet the entire lot against a favor.”
“A favor?” repeated the railroader, wrinkling his forehead.
“That’s a new one to me!” remarked the Peewee.
“Simple enough,” explained Mr. Tutt, as if playing for a favor were an ancient and familiar custom of the game, although he had invented it on the spot. “If he wins he gets my all—except my skin and bones; if I win he has to do me a favor.”
“What sort of a favor?”
“Oh, anything reasonable. Just a favor.”
“Done!” agreed Carman. “Take notice, gentlemen, the Honorable Ephraim Tutt and I are now playing for the pot, plus his cuff buttons, tall hat, and cane, with a phantasmagorical, diaphanous, and elusive thing y-cleped a favor on the side. I call! He calls! We call each other!”
He removed the cards from his collar with a beat-that-if-you-can gesture and spread them face up before the crowd.
“Marjorie, Minnie, Molly, and Maud!” he murmured exultantly.
Mr. Tutt bent over and examined the ladies with interest.
“Dear me! Dear me! Nice girls, very!” he commented, spreading his own hand. “Joshua, Jephthah, Japheth, and Jehoshaphat!” he chuckled, matching each queen with her own king.
There was a wild cheer from the onlookers as Mr. Tutt gathered in the pile upon the table. The clock was striking twelve.
“And now,” said Carman with a grimace, “what is this favor I’ve got to do you?”
The old lawyer slowly replaced his sleeve buttons.
“I haven’t lost you yet!” he whispered to them. “Why, I don’t know, Carman. It is Sunday morning. Whoso hath an ox or an ass which hath fallen into a pit is entitled to have him hauled out on that day, as I read the Scriptures. Let’s walk along together, and if you should care to stop in at my house maybe I could give you a drink of—h’m!—malt extract.”
“I sure will!” said Carman, who, as we said, was in the railroad business.
V
“Pray pardon the simplicity of my welcome, Carman,” remarked Mr. Tutt as he relieved his guest of his overcoat and hat, suspended them from one of the arms of the hat tree in the front hall, and preceded him up the rickety stairs to the library of the old house on West Twenty-third Street. “This being the Sabbath, my manservant and my maidservant are both resting.”
He turned on the gas and ignited it with a safety match. Mr. Carman who had played poker with Mr. Tutt every Saturday night for over fifteen years, but had never visited the old man at his home, looked round the study with interest. It was so just like Mr. Tutt himself! There was a sea-coal fire in the grate and a kettle steamed on the hearth; ancient engravings and a couple of colonial portraits hung upon the walls, which were covered with what Mr. Carman decided was the ugliest paper he had ever beheld; the carpet was threadbare—Turkey red; a horsehair sofa stood at one end of the room, and between the windows a high colonial secretary, while on each side of the marble mantel reposed two horsehair-covered walnut armchairs whose bottoms sagged to within an inch or so of the floor.
“Sit down, Carman,” directed Mr. Tutt.
The railroad man looked suspiciously at the hammock-like seat of the nearest armchair.
“Hanged if I think, if I once sit down, I shall ever be able to get up again!” said he simply.
“Sit down!” repeated Mr. Tutt. “Will you have hot toddy, port, Madeira or sparkling Burgundy?”
He turned to the escritoire, the glass doors of which were lined with faded green silk, and, unlocking it, disclosed a small but complete collection of bottles of all shapes and sizes. Mr. Carman sank instantly into his allotted hole.
“Burgundy!” he answered hoarsely with a light in his eyes.
Mr. Tutt, opening the lower half of the escritoire, took out two glasses with hollow stems, and, having placed these carefully upon the rug between the two chairs, excavated from the rear row a dusty bottle, the cork heavily wired and wrapped in scarlet tinfoil. Then he slowly lowered himself into the chair opposite Mr. Carman, which feat, owing to his own length and the nearness of his seat to the floor, gave him the appearance of a partially folded pocket knife, but enabled him to grasp the bottle firmly between his knees.
“Who’s doin’ the favor now?” inquired Mr. Carman significantly.
“Pop!” said the bottle. “I am!”
Mr. Tutt held it for an instant above the ashes as the contents creamed over the neck, and then carefully filled the glasses upon the rug.
“There are,” he remarked sadly, “exactly five glasses of wine in that bottle. However, I am not particularly thirsty, and—there is another bottle.”
“Here’s luck!” said Mr. Carman.
“Here’s misery, marital infelicity, chilblains, financial ruin, rheumatism, indigestion, sciatica, arteriosclerosis, and all the murrains, plagues, and evils known to ancient times and to modern man, upon one T. Otis Crabb!”
Mr. Tutt lifted his bubbling ruby glass, eyed it critically, and slowly emptied it.
“One!” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Ah—one!” echoed Mr. Carman. “Tutt, I’ll do you a favor every Saturday night if you press me.”
Mr. Tutt reached to the humidor on the near-by table and tendered his guest a cigar, and while Carman was lighting it filled the two glasses again.
“Well,” he remarked, “here’s to the favor!”
“The favor!” nodded Carman.
“I suppose,” said Mr. Tutt, “that being a railroad man you agree with Mr. Bumble that the law is an ass.”
“I don’t know the man, but he’s certainly got the right idea,” returned his guest.
“I’m up against a legal farce,” went on the old lawyer. “I’ve got a judgment of fifty thousand dollars against a miserable swine that ran down and nearly killed a client of mine, and I can’t make him pay a cent, although his wife has all kinds of money.”
“Can’t you arrest him for the debt?” asked Carman.
“I have! But he got a friend of his to go on his bond for the liberties of the jail. His wife put up the security and now he goes anywhere he wants.”
“You mean if you put a man in jail for debt he don’t have to stay there?”
“That is precisely what I mean. If a New York judgment debtor who has been arrested gives bond in the requisite amount and keeps within the boundaries of Manhattan Island he can disport himself freely from the Battery to the Harlem Canal, and from the Hudson to the East River, eating at Delmonico’s and sleeping at the Waldorf, spending his mornings in Central Park, his afternoons at the movies and his evenings at the theatre, and still technically be in prison, for he is within the jail limits as defined by law. And at the end of six months he’s free for good and all!”
“That’s a good thing to remember,” affirmed the railroader thoughtfully.
“Also this,” continued Mr. Tutt. “You might use it sometime. If the imprisoned debtor can induce his bondsman to leave the jurisdiction in his company and return at the same time that he does—or later—he can disregard the jail limits entirely and go to Atlantic City or anywhere else for a few days every week, just as my man is doing.”
“You don’t say! Is he now?” exclaimed Mr. Carman sympathetically.
“He is! But he takes his surety with him and brings him back on the same train, so that there is no way for me to begin an action on the bond until there is a good defense; namely, that the debtor has returned.”
“What wise guy worked all that out?”
“Mr. Aaron T. Lefkovitsky.”
“He’s a great man. I’d like his telephone number and office address,” said Mr. Carman. “Well, this is all very interesting, but what has it got to do with me?”
Mr. Tutt stroked his lean lantern jaw and gazed meditatively at the empty glasses.
“That remains to be seen,” he murmured. “That remains to be seen. How about that other bottle?”
Mr. Carman instantly showed new signs of life.
“Ah,” he exclaimed, “who is this miserable wretch? Tell me all about him!”
VI
“Oh, boy!” exclaimed T. Otis Crabb, elongating himself deliciously upon the sands in front of the Traymore at Atlantic City in a snappy, sleeveless, white-and-green one-piece bathing suit. “This is certainly some jail!”
Mrs. T. Otis, also in snappy bath attire, which, it must be confessed, exposed her limbs to great disadvantage, glanced coyly at him from under her purple-and-vermilion sunshade.
“You’ll come down again next week, dearie?”
“Right-o! Fozzy says he can leave town on Thursday and stay over until Tuesday. That right, Fozzy?”
“Surest thing you know!” replied his elegant associate, stretching in sympathy.
“Lefkovitsky’s a very clever fellow,” yawned T. Otis. “All samee he’s shown me a way to beat him out of his bill if he tries to do me.”
“I hope that he isn’t too smart,” said his lady. “I’d hate to lose fifty thou on a cripple.”
“Bet your life the cripple will never see a cent of your money!” assured Fozzy. “Even I, with my subatomical admixture of brains, am able to grasp the proposition that you can’t serve papers on a man in the State of New York if he isn’t there, and that, if the return of the dear departed to the jail limits before the papers are served is a good defense to an action, T. Otis and yours truly can ride up and down from town to Atlantic City all summer without anything to fear from that old geezer who tried the cases against you.”
“Old Tutt’s not much of a lawyer,” remarked T. Otis, lighting a cigarette.
“He got the verdict,” countered Fozzy.
“But not the money!” laughed Mrs. Crabb. “We’ve got that!”
“Any lawyer can get a verdict for the plaintiff in a damage suit,” declared T. Otis. “But it takes a real one to collect a judgment.”
“My idea of a real lawyer is Lefkovitsky,” said Fozzy. “If I ever get into trouble I’m going to him. Think of his being able to cook up a way for you to spend most of the summer down here and yet be in jail all the time! Yet it’s simple enough. Anybody might have thought of it. We go away together and we come back together, and your comin’ back makes it useless to serve papers on me. Ha-ha! Bean work! Bean work!”
“Only,” warned Mrs. Crabb, “you boys must be very careful to come back at the same time.”
“Oh, yes, ma—my dear!” her husband assured her. “We’ve got all that dope down cold. We go together and we return together, like Siamese Twins. In the words of the famous song by O. W. Holmes, ‘Nothing shall sever our friendship ever!’”
“That’s right, or it might cost me fifty thousand,” smiled Mrs. Crabb.
Number 1112 is the snappy train, leaving Atlantic City at 2.40 on Monday afternoons, that snappy fellows like T. Otis take back to New York City—when they are in jail for debt. It is a flyer—leaves Manhattan Transfer on the Jersey side, where you change for lower New York and Brooklyn, at 5.24 and then ducks down through the double-barrelled tunnel under the Hudson and shoots into the lower level of the big station on Thirty-fourth Street at 5.40. When there is a big rush of homing jailbirds No. 1112 runs ten cars, and—through the tunnel—two engines, for the grade beneath the river silt is heavy; a long train, a very long train, indeed; nearly, if not quite, a full quarter mile.
Number 1112 was the train T. Otis and his friend Fozzy took that same afternoon, and as usual they beat it for the forward smoker with two other dashing fellows for their regular game of bridge. T. Otis had lost only sixty-eight dollars of his wife’s money by the time they reached Manhattan Transfer, and the party were so engrossed in what they were doing that none of them noticed the strange little group of three who boarded the train just before it started across the devastated regions beyond Jersey City preparatory to plunging beneath the river. They still had sixteen minutes to play, and T. Otis wanted to win back Lucretia’s sixty-eight dollars if he could.
“Speed it up, boys!” directed Fozzy. “Gimme the pasteboards. It’s my deal.”
He dealt rapidly. Gaunt factories and piles of soft coal flicked by the windows. The porter turned on the lights.
“Sixteen minutes more!” said T. Otis as they picked up their hands. “I’ll make it. Two on hearts.”
At that precise instant a very elegantly dressed young gentleman touched him on the shoulder, almost as dashing a fellow as T. Otis himself, and bending over mysteriously whispered something out of the corner of his mouth.
“I’m going to play it alone,” announced Fozzy.
“Good!” laughed T. Otis, with an equal air of mystery. “I’ll be dummy the next couple of hands.” He grinned expansively. “Lady wants to speak to me back there.”
Thus like a lamb led to the slaughter did T. Otis trot after Bonnie Doon back even unto the uttermost car. For of all the words of tongue or pen there are none so irresistible to a dasher or a masher as “Say, there’s a girl in the last car who wants to know if you’re going to speak to her.” And, be it remembered, there were three long days—and nights—until Thursday.
Thus, as No. 1112 dropped beneath the cellars of the western bank of the Hudson, T. Otis worked his way at Bonnie Doon’s coat tails through the nine other cars, his heart beating with high expectancy.
Over in the terminal building, at his desk in Room 223, sat Mr. Joshua Carman, the general superintendent, obligated by his word of honor to do Mr. Tutt a favor. Mr. Carman represented the third, or “What-Then,” side of the old lawyer’s triangular problem, and without him this story would have remained unwritten. For no one else could have done what he, stifling his official conscience, was about to do for Mr. Tutt. Entombed like an Egyptian astrologer in the centre of a pyramid, he, nevertheless, had his finger on every train on the terminal system. What he said went, and what he stopped stopped.
“By the Lord,” he muttered, “I wonder if any other fellow in my place ever had the nerve to do a thing like this before! All the same,” he added to himself, “the rules say ‘emergency,’ and who’s to be the judge of what an emergency is if I’m not?”
All the time he had his eyes on the clock.
“Five-twenty-four—she’s just pulling out of the Transfer,” he remarked with what in a prima donna would have been described as a slight tremolo. He reached nervously for a cigarette and lighted it.
“Five-twenty-six—twenty-seven—twenty-eight” His heart was really thumping, for he felt like a school-boy about to pin something on the teacher’s back. “Charlie,” he shouted to a bald-headed youth, “get me Forty.”
Charlie unhooked the receiver.
“Line’s busy, chief,” he replied.
Mr. Carman felt a curious prickly sensation steal up his arms and over his shoulders.
“Forty” is the train locomotive despatcher, the official who directly controls train movements and through whom orders are customarily given by the supervisor, or on occasion by the general superintendent.
Five-twenty-nine! Number 1112 was well down in the tunnel by now. He would have to give the order directly to the train director in the A Tower if he was to be in time to help Mr. Tutt. There wasn’t a fraction of a minute to lose, either. Feverishly he grabbed the telephone.
“Give me A Tower,” he ordered. “And hurry!”
Johnny McNaughton, up in the big signal-bridge Tower A, on the “Island Platform” at the Manhattan opening of the tunnel, was sitting, pipe in mouth, his eyes fixed on the board which, like an animated cartoon, shows the movement of every train by a tiny green light that creeps along and stops and creeps along again. Johnny was the man who actually controlled every signal, could start or stop or deflect any train upon the system—the train director, the man at the switch—accountable to no one but the general superintendent, the supervisor, the despatcher—and God.
Evensong on a Monday afternoon is a busy moment for Johnny McNaughton, for trains are following one another both ways through the tunnel every few moments. The little green light that was 1112 moved to the spot that represented the Manhattan Transfer, stopped and started again.
Johnny knew her passing time was five-twenty-four, and that in another sixteen minutes the little green light would have slipped by all the tunnel signals on the diagram, and that he could look into the mouth of the eastbound tunnel and see her headlights as she came roaring through. Unconsciously he looked into it now—that round deep hole with the signal over its mouth—the signal repeated every thousand feet or so through the tunnel, by which he could control all trains. It showed red. That meant that the signals were set clear, green, against the trains coming toward him—toward the east—the terminal; set clear for Number 1112, now in the tunnel; and the little green light indicated that she was underneath the river—nearly halfway between New Jersey and New York—just passing Signal Number 904. Suddenly the telephone beside him shrilled.
“Hello, Johnny! This is Mr. Carman,” came the voice of Carman. “Throw all tunnel signals against east-bound traffic, and hold the movement three minutes. I want to stop 1112 before she reaches Signal 903.”
“Right!” snapped the towerman, grabbing his lever.
Coincidently the little green light on the diagram stopped between 904 and 903, exactly in the middle of the tunnel.
“Wonder what that’s for!” commented Johnny.
That identical phrase issued but a second later from the grimy lips of Sam Burke, engine-driver of Number 1112, as, having slid by Signal 904, he saw 903 an eighth of a mile ahead turn from green to red. Curious how men’s minds work in the same way!
“Wonder what that’s for!” he ejaculated as he jammed on the brakes and brought his train to a stand-still midway between the two signals.
“Hello!” remarked Algie to his partner in the smoker at the same moment. “Train’s stopped! Gives us time for another hand!”
Before he could deal the cards a red-headed youth with a large assortment of freckles bobbed up unexpectedly at his elbow as if from beneath the train.
“Say, are you Mr. Fosdick?” inquired Willie Toothaker, the ubiquitous office boy of Tutt & Tutt, with his usual ingratiating smile.
“That’s me, son!” nodded Algie. “What can I do for you?”
“Just let me serve you with these papers,” answered Willie, suddenly slapping a package of documents upon the dashing fellow’s shoulder. “It’s a summons and complaint in an action brought against you for fifty thousand dollars as surety on the bond of T. Otis Crabb.”
Mr. Fosdick laughed rudely.
“No use, young feller-me-lad! You can’t serve me when Crabb is already back in New York.”
“But he ain’t, young feller-me-lad!” grinned the irrepressible William. “See that signal—Number 903? Well, you’re in New York all right, but he’s still in New Jersey—back at the end of the train.”
T. Otis, following hard on the heels of Bonnie Doon, had just threaded his way through the last Pullman, stumbling inconsiderately against the passengers who were engaged in putting on their wraps and closing their bags, in his eagerness to see the lady who had sent for him. But T. Otis never bothered about how much he inconvenienced other people.
“She’s in that last chair on the left,” floated over Bonnie’s shoulder.
“I don’t see her!” replied T. Otis excitedly, hardly aware that the train had suddenly come to a stop.
“She’s got her back to you,” explained Bonnie, stepping to one side. “Go on ahead.”
T. Otis hurried on to the end of the car, and bending coquettishly over the back of the last chair found himself staring into the wrinkled face of old Mr. Tutt.
“How d’y’do?” remarked the lawyer.
“What sort of a game is this?” gasped T. Otis suddenly feeling very ill.
“Game, my dear sir?” murmured Mr. Tutt innocently. “Game? I don’t understand Oh, now I remember you! You’re the man who owes my client Barrington fifty thousand dollars, aren’t you? Oh, yes, of course!”
T. Otis sank weakly on the arm of the adjacent seat.
“What a wonderful tunnel this is, isn’t it?” rambled on Mr. Tutt. “Marvellous bit of engineering skill! Reaches all the way from New Jersey to New York. Now, if you’ll just look out of the end window there you can see Signal 904. You and I are still in the State of New Jersey, while the forward half of the train is already in New York.”
He glanced quizzically at the yellow features of the judgment debtor.
“By the way,” he said, “haven’t you been rather careless about violating your jail liberties? I feel quite sure that my process server has already served papers on your bondsman—in the State of New York.”
T. Otis collapsed into the chair and pressed his fists to his temples.
“Look here,” he gasped, “is that right?”
Mr. Tutt bowed punctiliously.
“Quite so,” said he.
“And is this going to cost my wife fifty thousand dollars?”
“Beyond the shadow of a doubt!” Mr. Tutt assured him.
“That fool Lefkovitsky!” wailed T. Otis. “I wish I’d stayed in jail!”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” answered Mr. Tutt. “The Barringtons need the money.”
“Well,” muttered Crabb as the train started and he staggered to his feet, “I know one thing: I won’t go back to Atlantic City! I’d rather stay in jail for the rest of my life!”