The 13th District: A Story of a Candidate — John Shaqi
The 13th District: A Story of a CandidateWhitlock, Brand
General
The 13th District: A Story of a Candidate
Whitlock, Brand
Didactic fiction; Elections -- Fiction; Political campaigns -- Fiction; Political fiction; Social problems -- Fiction
One of the families Emily visited had been frugal so long that it had
lost the strength to be industrious. It was a German family that had
come from the province of Pomerania, and the yellow hair of the mother
framed a face that Emily loved to picture in its girlish prettiness
among the fields of her native land and happier childhood. Her husband
was a man with a delicious dialectal speech, and he could tell famous
tales of his service in the German army. He had worked in the "Boakeye
Bre'erie," as he called the Buckeye Brewery, and for some reason that
Emily never properly grasped had lost his job. When she discovered the
family they were patiently living on the remnant of a side of pork the
man had bought with his last money.
Emily had pictured herself meeting, in the course of her charitable
work, some interesting young doctor, with a Van Dyck beard; but all
the doctors in Grand Prairie, like most of the other workers in that
depleted vineyard, were old men; she met instead, what is universal, a
young lawyer.
Jake Reinhardt, who never had money to buy bread or meat, seemed
always able to procure beer and tobacco, an incongruity Emily
could not understand at first. She learned afterwards that Jake
knew a saloon-keeper who had a mixture of kind-heartedness and
long-headedness, the first of which led him to trust Reinhardt for
the beer and tobacco, while the second justified the course because
Reinhardt's presence at his bar made one consumer more when a round
of drinks was ordered for the house. Then, one day, suddenly, just as
Emily thought she was getting the family on its feet, Reinhardt felled
a man in the saloon with a blow of a billiard cue, and was thrown into
jail on a charge of assault with intent to kill. His victim was lying
in a precarious state; possibly he might die; Reinhardt might yet be
held to answer to a charge of murder.
Emily found Mrs. Reinhardt with a face bloated by tears, staring
in mute anguish at this new calamity she could not comprehend. As
Emily's first thought in the former difficulties had been a doctor,
now her first thought was a lawyer; but it seemed that one had already
appeared, and Mrs. Reinhardt in her broken speech extolled him as a
ministering angel. It was plain that he had taken up the cause out of
pity for Reinhardt's defenseless condition, perhaps in a belief in his
moral innocence, which the blundering police could not or would not
admit. As the affair turned out, Emily's sympathies proved to have been
as fully justified as the young lawyer's, and what she then observed
of the practical administration of justice in criminal courts only
confirmed many of the sociological heresies that then were sprouting in
her mind, quite as much, indeed, to her own distress as to her father's.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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