And wrapping his ulster about him and cocking his hat rakishly, he went
with some pride into the street. He was thirty-four years old and was
accounted as men go a handsome dog, with a figure just turning from the
litheness of youth into a slight rotundity of very early middle age. He
carried his shoulders well, walked with a firm, straight gait--perhaps a
little too much upon his toes for candor, but, with all, he was a
well-groomed animal and he knew it. So he passed Margaret Fenn again on
the street, lifted his hat, hunted for her eyes, gave them all the
voltage he had, and the smile that he shot at her was left over on his
face for half a block down the street. People passing him smiled back
and said to one another:
"What a fine, good-natured, big-hearted fellow Tom Van Dorn is!"
And Mr. Van Dorn, not oblivious to the impression he was making, smiled
and bowed and bowed and smiled, and hellowed Dick, and howareyoued
Hiram, and goodmorninged John, down the street, into his office. There
he found his former partner busy with a laudable plan of defending a
client. His client happened to be the Wahoo Fuel Company, which was
being assailed by the surviving relatives of something like one hundred
dead men. So Mr. Calvin was preparing to show that in entering the mine
they had assumed the ordinary risks of mining, and that the neglect of
their fellow servants was one of those ordinary risks. And as for the
boy ten years old being employed in the mines contrary to law, there
were some details of a trip to Austria for that boy and his parents,
that had to be arranged with the steamship company by wire that very
morning. The Judge sat reading the law, oblivious--judicially--to what
was going on, and Joseph Calvin fell to work with a will. But what the
young Judge, who could ignore Mr. Calvin's activities, could not help
taking judicial notice of in spite of his law books, were those eyes out
there on the street. They were indeed beautiful eyes and they said so
much, and yet left much to the imagination--and the imagination of Judge
Van Dorn was exceedingly nimble in those little matters, and in many
other matters besides. Indeed, so nimble was his imagination that if it
hadn't been for the fact that at Judge Van Dorn's own extra-judicial
suggestion, every lawyer in town, excepting Henry Fenn, who had retired
from the law practice, had been retained by the Company an hour after
the accident, no one knows how many holes might have been found in Mr.
Joseph Calvin's unaided brief.
As the young Judge sat poring over his law book, Captain Morton came in
and after the Captain's usual circumlocution he said:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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