Lawyers -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918 -- Fiction
Uhler looked helplessly at Luke. Luke, now enough of a lawyer to
believe that this was no more than a clever ruse to secure an unjust
acquittal, sprang to his feet and shook an angry finger under the nose
of the witness murderer, whose confession, had it been expected, would
have been prevented.
"So," he cried, "not satisfied with cheating justice in your own case,
you come back here to taunt it, do you?"
"Oh, I don’t know as I’m taunting anything," replied the witness. He
was a big man with the frame of a blacksmith and the eyes of a
ruminating cow.
"Then," thundered Luke, "you really mean to tell this court that you
actually killed that man?"
The faintest shadow of a smile brushed the murderer’s lips.
"They buried him, didn’t they?" he inquired.
That answer lost Luke’s case.
§2. Luke’s enthusiasm long resisted these miscarriages of justice and
the undeniably slow progress of his chief to secure indictments against
the Democratic politicians whose drastic punishment Leighton had
promised in his ante-election speeches. It resisted even the
callousness of the participants in the legal game, and the discovery
that the best minds at the Bar, of course seeking the most lucrative
field for their practice, were in the position of advisers to the great
financiers, their incomes, which far exceeded those of their more active
fellows, being composed almost entirely of the annual retaining fees and
"tips" for speculation. It required more and more resistance, but Luke
continued to hug tightly the faith that the wrongs of the world could be
set right through honest laws administered by honest men.
As he loved his work, so also he came to love the scene of it. The
vortex of the city fascinated him. Broadway, one color by day and
another by night, one spot of color uptown, a second at its middle, and
a third below the street that lies across New York like a gorged but
devouring anaconda; the dark passages full of tenements; the quiet
pavements bordered by prosperous dwellings; the roar of every sort of
business and the crackle of all sorts of pleasure; the joy and suffering
eternally intermingled, yet so intermingled that he could not tell which
caused the other, or whether they were independent; the whole tremendous
whirlpool whirled him, a straw among uncounted straws, now on its
surface and now sucked below beyond all plummets’ soundings, and
intoxicated him by its dizzy revolutions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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