The Confessions of Artemas Quibble: Being the Ingenuous and Unvarnished History of Artemas Quibble, Esquire, One-Time Practitioner in the New York Criminal Courts, Together with an Account of the Divers Wiles, Tricks, Sophistries, Technicalities, and Sundry Artifices of Himself and Others of the Fraternity, Commonly Yclept "Shysters" or "Shyster Lawyers"Train, Arthur Cheney
General
The Confessions of Artemas Quibble: Being the Ingenuous and Unvarnished History of Artemas Quibble, Esquire, One-Time Practitioner in the New York Criminal Courts, Together with an Account of the Divers Wiles, Tricks, Sophistries, Technicalities, and Sundry Artifices of Himself and Others of the Fraternity, Commonly Yclept "Shysters" or "Shyster Lawyers"
Train, Arthur Cheney
Attorney and client -- Fiction; Legal stories; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction
There was a train just leaving for Boston and my companion insisted
upon taking it, saying that he proposed to spend the money that
Dillingham had so kindly furnished him with. I never knew how he
discovered the part Dillingham was playing in this strange drama;
but if no one told him, he at any rate divined it somehow, and from
this moment he assumed the lead and directed all our movements.
It is true that I persuaded him to go to one of the smaller and
less conspicuous hotels, but he at once sent for another tailor,
ordered an elaborate meal for supper, with champagne, and procured
a box at one of the theatres, whither I was obliged to escort him.
Neither would he longer permit me to occupy the same room with him
--precious privilege!--but engaged a palatial suite for himself,
with a parlor, while I had a small and modest room farther down
the hall. In some respects this suited me well, however, since I
was now able to induce him to have his meals served upstairs. Yet
I began to see the foolishness of thinking that we could elude the
police should they set out to seek seriously for us, since, apart
from changing our names, we were making no effort at disguising
ourselves.
The day after our arrival, Hawkins slept late and I slipped out
about ten o'clock and wandering aimlessly came to Barristers' Hall,
where twenty years before old Tuckerman Toddleham had his office.
The day was warm and humid, like that upon which so long ago I had
visited the old lawyer when a student at Harvard and had received
from him my sentence. Even as then, some birds were twittering
around the stone window-ledges. An impulse that at the moment was
beyond my control led me up the narrow, dingy stairs to the landing
where the lawyer's office had been. A green-baize door, likely
enough the same one, still hung there--where the lawyer's office
had been. Naught about the room was altered. There were the
bookcases, with their glass doors and green-silk curtains; the
threadbare carpet, the portrait of the Honorable Jeremiah Mason
over the fireplace; the old mahogany desk; the little bronze paper-
weight in the shape of a horse; the books, brown and faded with
years; and at the desk--I brushed my hand across my eyes--at the
desk sat old Tuckerman Toddleham himself!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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