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"Dated 7th day of May, 1920.
"PATRICK ROONY, Police Officer,
"Police Precinct –,
"New York City.
"Attest: JOHN J. JONES,
"Chief City Magistrate."
"Well, I never!" she exploded. "What rubbish! Four miles an hour! And 'Maggie'—as if everybody didn't know my name was Edna!"
"The whole thing looks a bit phony to me!" muttered Pierpont, worried over the possibility of having wasted a slug of the real thing on an unreal police officer. "Perhaps that feller wasn't a cop at all!"
"And who's William Mul-kay-hay?" she continued. "I don't know any such person! You better call up Mr. Edgerton right away and see what the law is."
"I hope he knows!" countered Mr. Pumpelly. "Four miles an hour—that's a joke! A baby carriage goes faster than four miles an hour. You wouldn't arrest a baby!"
"Well, call him up!" directed Mrs. Pumpelly. "Tell him he should come right round over here."
The summons from his client interrupted Mr. Edgerton in the middle of an expensive dinner at his club and he left it in no good humor. He didn't like being ordered round like a servant the way Mrs. Pumpelly was ordering him. It wasn't dignified. Moreover, a lawyer out of his office was like a snail out of its shell—at a distinct disadvantage. You couldn't just make an excuse to step into the next office for a moment and ask somebody what the law was. The Edgertons always kept somebody in an adjoining office who knew the law—many lawyers do.
On the Pumpelly stoop the attorney found standing an evil-looking and very shabby person holding a paper in his hand, but he ignored him until the grilled iron cinquecento door swung open, revealing James, the retiring second man.
Then, before he could enter, the shabby person pushed past him and asked in a loud, vulgar tone: "Does Edna Pumpelly live here?"
James stiffened in the approved style of erect vertebrata.
"This is Madame Pierpont Pumpelly's residence," he replied with hauteur.
"Madam or no madam, just slip this to her," said the shabby one. "Happy days!"
Mr. Wilfred Edgerton beneath the medieval tapestry of the Pumpelly marble hall glanced at the dirty sheet in James' hand and, though unfamiliar with the form of the document, perceived it to be a summons issued on the application of one Henry J. Goldsmith and returnable next day, for violating Section Two Hundred and Fifteen of Article Twelve of Chapter Twenty of the Municipal Ordinances for keeping and maintaining a certain bird, to wit, a cockatoo, which by its noise did disturb the quiet and repose of a certain person in the vicinity to the detriment of the health of such person, to wit, Henry J. Goldsmith, aforesaid, and upon her failure to appear, and so on.
Wilfred had some sort of vague idea of a law about keeping birds, but he couldn't exactly recall what it was. There was something incongruous about Mrs. Pierpont Pumpelly keeping a cockatoo. What did anybody want of a cockatoo? He concluded that it must be an ancestral hereditament from Athens, Ohio. Nervously he ascended the stairs to what Edna called the saloon.
"So you've come at last!" cried she. "Well, what have you got to say to this? Is it against the law to go round a corner at more than four miles an hour?"
Now, whereas Mr. Wilfred Edgerton could have told Mrs. Pumpelly the "rule in Shelly's case" or explained the doctrine of cy pres, he had never read the building code or the health ordinances or the traffic regulations, and in the present instance the latter were to the point while the former were not. Thus he was confronted with the disagreeable alternative of admitting his ignorance or bluffing it through. He chose the latter, unwisely.
"Of course not! Utter nonsense!" replied he blithely. "The lawful rate of speed is at least fifteen miles an hour."
"Excuse me, madam," said James, appearing once more in the doorway. "A man has just left this—er—paper at the area doorway."
Mrs. Pumpelly snatched it out of his hand.
"Well, of all things!" she gasped.
"To 'Bridget' Pumpelly," it began, "said first name 'Bridget' being fictitious:
"You are hereby summoned to appear … for violating Section Two Hundred and Forty-eight of Article Twelve of Chapter Twenty of the Health Ordinances in that you did upon the seventh day of May, 1920, fail to keep a certain tin receptacle used for swill or garbage, in shape and form a barrel, within the building occupied and owned by you until proper time for its removal and failed to securely bundle, tie up and pack the newspapers and other light refuse and rubbish contained therein, and, further, that you caused and permitted certain tin receptacles, in the shape and form of barrels, containing such swill or garbage, to be filled to a greater height with such swill or garbage than a line within such receptacle four inches from the top thereof."
"Now what do you know about that?" remarked the vice president of Cuban Crucible to the senior partner of Edgerton & Edgerton.
"I don't know anything about it!" answered the elegant Wilfred miserably. "I don't know the law of garbage, and there's no use pretending that I do. You'd better get a garbage lawyer."
"I thought all lawyers were supposed to know the law!" sniffed Mrs. Pumpelly. "What's that you got in your hand?"
"It's another summons, for keeping a bird," answered the attorney.
"A bird? You don't suppose it's Moses?" she exclaimed indignantly.
"The name of the bird isn't mentioned," said Wilfred. "But very likely it is Moses if Moses belongs to you."
"But I've had Moses ever since I was a little girl!" she protested. "And no one ever complained of him before."
"Beg pardon, madam," interposed Simmons, parting the Flemish arras, upon which was depicted the sinking of the Spanish Armada. "Officer Roony is back again with two more papers. 'E says it isn't necessary for him to see you again, as once is enough, but 'e was wondering whether being as it was rather chilly—"
"Lead him to it!" hastily directed Pierpont, who was beginning to get a certain amount of enjoyment out of the situation. "But tell him he needn't call again."
"Give 'em here!" snapped Mrs. Pumpelly, grasping the documents. "This is a little too much! 'Lulu' this time. Fictitious as usual. Who's Julius Aberthaw? He says I caused a certain rug to be shaken in such place and manner that certain particles of dust passed therefrom into the public street or highway, to wit, East Seventy-third Street, contrary to
"What's the other one?" inquired her husband with a show of sympathy.
"For violating Section Fifteen of Article Two of Chapter Twenty, in that on May 7, 1920, I permitted a certain unmuzzled dog, to wit, a Pekingese brown spaniel dog, to be on a public highway, to wit, East Seventy-third Street in the City of New York. But that was Randolph!"
"Was Randolph muzzled?" inquired Mr. Edgerton maliciously.
"Of course not! He only weighs two pounds and a quarter!" protested Mrs. Pumpelly.
"He can bite all right, just the same!" interpolated Pierpont.
"But what shall I do?" wailed Mrs. Pumpelly, now thoroughly upset.
"Guess you'll have to take your medicine, same's other violators of the law," commented her husband.
"I never heard of such ridiculous laws!"
"Ignorance of the law excuses no one!" murmured Wilfred.
"It don't excuse a lawyer!" she snorted. "I have an idea you don't know much more about the law—this kind of law, anyway—than I do. I bet it is against the law to go round a corner at more than four miles! Do you want to bet me?"
"No, I don't!" snapped Edgerton. "What you want is a police-court lawyer—if you're goin' in for this sort of thing."
"My Lord! What's this now, Simmons?" she raved as the butler deprecatingly made his appearance again with another paper.
"I think, madam," he answered soothingly, "that it's a summons for allowing the house man to use the hose on the sidewalk after eight A.M. Roony just brought it."
"H'm!" remarked Mr. Pumpelly. "Don't lead him to it again!"
"But I wouldn't have disturbed you if it hadn't been for a young gentleman who 'as called with another one regardin' the window boxes."
"What about window boxes?" moaned Mrs. Pumpelly.
"'E says," explained Simmons, "'e 'as a summons for you regardin' the window boxes, but that if you'd care to speak to him perhaps the matter might be adjusted—"
"Let's see the summons!" exclaimed Wilfred, coming to life.
"'To Edna Pumpelly,'" he read.
"They're gettin' more polite," she commented ironically.
"'For violating Section Two Hundred and Fifty of Article Eighteen of Chapter Twenty-three in that you did place, keep and maintain upon a certain window sill of the premises now being occupied by you in the City of New York a window box for the cultivation or retention of flowers, shrubs, vines or other articles or things without the same being firmly protected by iron railings—'"
"Heavens," ejaculated Mr. Pumpelly, "there'll be somebody here in a minute complaining that I don't use the right length of shaving stick."
"I understand," remarked Mr. Edgerton, "that in a certain Western state they regulate the length of bed sheets!"
"What's that for?" asked Edna with sudden interest.
"About seeing this feller?" hurriedly continued Mr. Pumpelly. "Seems to me they've rather got you, Edna!"
"But what's the use seein' him?" she asked. "I'm summoned, ain't I?"
"Why not see the man?" advised Mr. Edgerton, gladly seizing this possibility of a diversion. "It cannot do any harm."
"What is his name?"
"Mr. Bonright Doon," answered Simmons encouragingly. "And he is a very pleasant-spoken young man."
"Very well," yielded Mrs. Pumpelly.
Two minutes later, "Mr. Doon!" announced Simmons.
Though the friends of Tutt & Tutt have made the acquaintance of Bonnie Doon only casually, they yet have seen enough of him to realize that he is an up-and-coming sort of young person with an elastic conscience and an ingratiating smile. Indeed the Pumpellys were rather taken with his breezy "Well, here we all are again!" manner as well as impressed by the fact that he was arrayed in immaculate evening costume.
"I represent Mr. Ephraim Tutt, who has been retained by your neighbor, Mrs. Rutherford Wells, in connection with the summons which you caused to be issued against her yesterday," he announced pleasantly by way of introduction. "Mrs. Wells, you see, was a little annoyed by being referred to in the papers as Jane when her proper name is Beatrix. Besides, she felt that the offense charged against her was—so to speak—rather trifling. However—be that as it may—she and her friends in the block are not inclined to be severe with you if you are disposed to let the matter drop."
"Inclined to be severe with me!" ejaculated Mrs. Pumpelly, bristling.
"Edna!" cautioned her husband. "Mr. Doon is not responsible."
"Exactly. I find after a somewhat casual investigation that you have been consistently violating a large number of city ordinances—keeping parrots, beating rugs, allowing unmuzzled dogs at large, overfilling your garbage cans, disregarding the speed laws and traffic regulations, using improperly secured window boxes—"
"Anything else?" inquired Pierpont jocularly. "Don't mind us."
Bonnie carelessly removed from the pocket of his dress coat a sheaf of papers.
"One for neglecting to have your chauffeur display his metal badge on the outside of his coat—Section Ninety-four of Article Eight of Chapter Fourteen.
"One for allowing your drop awnings to extend more than six feet from the house line—Section Forty-two of Article Five of Chapter Twenty-two.
"One for failing to keep your curbstone at a proper level—Section One Hundred and Sixty-four of Article Fourteen of Chapter Twenty-three.
"One for maintaining an ornamental projection on your house—a statue, I believe, of the Goddess Venus—to project more than five feet beyond the building line—Section One Hundred and Eighty-one of Article Fifteen of Chapter Twenty-three.
"One for having your area gate open outwardly instead of inwardly—Section One Hundred and Sixty-four of Article Fourteen of Chapter Twenty-three.
"And one for failing to affix to the fanlight or door the street number of your house—Section One Hundred and Ten of Article Ten of Chapter Twenty-three.
"I dare say there are others."
"I'd trust you to find 'em!" agreed Mr. Pumpelly. "Now what's your proposition? What does it cost?"
"It doesn't cost anything at all! Drop your proceedings and we'll drop ours," answered Bonnie genially.
"What do you say, Edgerton?" said Pumpelly, turning to the disgruntled Wilfred and for the first time in years assuming charge of his own domestic affairs.
"I should say that it was an excellent compromise!" answered the lawyer soulfully. "There's something in the Bible, isn't there, about pulling the mote out of your own eye before attempting to remove the beam from anybody's else?"
"I believe there is," assented Bonnie politely. "'You're another' certainly isn't a statutory legal plea, but as a practical defense—"
"Tit for tat!" said Mr. Edgerton playfully. "Ha, ha! Ha!"
"Ha, ha! Ha!" mocked Mrs. Pumpelly, her nose high in air. "A lot of good you did me!"
"By the way, young man," asked Mr. Pumpelly, "whom do you say you represent?"
"Tutt & Tutt," cooed Bonnie, instantly flashing one of the firm's cards.
"Thanks," said Pumpelly, putting it carefully into his pocket. "I may need you sometime—perhaps even sooner. Now, if by any chance you'd care for a highball—"
"Lead me right to it!" sighed Bonnie ecstatically.
"Me, too!" echoed Wilfred, to the great astonishment of those assembled.
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
"For twelve honest men have decided the cause,Who are judges alike of the fact and the laws."—The Honest Jury."Lastly," says Stevenson in his Letter to a Young Gentleman Who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art, "we come to those vocations which are at once decisive and precise; to the men who are born with the love of pigments, the passion of drawing, the gift of music, or the impulse to create with words, just as other and perhaps the same men are born with the love of hunting, or the sea, or horses, or the turning lathe. These are predestined; if a man love the labor of any trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him."
Had anybody told Danny Lowry that the gods had called him he would have stigmatized his informant as a liar—yet they had. For apart from any question of success or fame he had loved horses from the day when as a baby he had first sprawled in the straw of his Uncle Mike Aherne's livery and hitching stable in Dublin City. He had grown up to the scrape and whiffle of the currycomb, breathing ammonia, cracking the skin of his infantile knuckles with harness soap. Out of the love that he bore for the beautiful dumb brutes grew an understanding that in time became almost uncanny. All the jockeys and hostlers said there was magic in the lad's hands. He could ride anything on hoofs with a slack rein; and the worst biter in the stable would take a bridle from him as it were an apple.
"Oft, now, I hear him talkin' to 'em, so I do." Mike Aherne was wont to say between spits. "An' they know what he says, I'm tellin' ye. He's a charmer, he is; like the Whisperin' Blacksmith. You've heard tell of him, belike? Well, Danny can spake to 'em widout even a whisper, so he can that!"
That was near seventy years agone, and now Danny was a shrunken little white-haired old wastrel who haunted Mulqueen's Livery over on Twenty-fourth Street near Tenth Avenue, disappearing in and out of the cellar and loft and stalls like a leprechaun haunts a hollow tree. Nobody knew where he had come from or where he lived except that he could always be found wherever there was a suffering animal, be it dog, cat or squirrel, and the rest of the time at Mulqueen's, with whom he had an understanding about the telephone. He was short, wiry, unshaven, with the legs of a jockey; and when he could get it he drank. That, however, was not why he had left Ireland, which had had something to do with Phoenix Park; nor was it the cause of the decline of his fortunes, which had been the coming of the motor.
Some day a story must be written called The Hitching Post, about those thousands of little cast-iron negro boys who stand so patiently on the green grass strips along village streets waiting to hold long-forgotten bridle reins. They lost their usefulness a decade or more ago, and so, by the same token and at the same time, did all that army of people who lived and moved and had their being by ministering to the needs of the horse. The gas engine was to them what the mechanical bobbin was to the spinners of Liverpool and Belfast. With the coming of the motor the race of coachmen, grooms and veterinaries began to perish from the earth. Among the last was Danny Lowry, at the very zenith of his fortunes an unofficial vet to most of the swell stables belonging to the carriage people of Fifth Avenue. One by one these stables had been converted into garages, and the broughams and C-spring victorias, the landaus and basket phaetons had been dragged to the auction room or shoved into dim corners to make room for snappy motors; and the horses Danny knew and loved so well had been sold or turned out to grass.
But there was nobody to turn Danny out to grass. He had to keep going. So he had drifted lower and lower, passing from the private stable to the trucking stable, and from the trucking stable to the last remaining decrepit boarding and liveries of the remote West Side. The tragedy of the horse is the tragedy of all who loved them. Danny was one of these tragedies, but he still picked up a precarious living by doing odd jobs at Mulqueen's and acting as a veterinary when called upon, and he could generally be found either loafing in the smelly little office or smoking his T D pipe on the steps outside.
He and Mr. Ephraim Tutt, the lawyer, who lived in the rickety old house with the tall windows and piazzas protected by railings of open ironwork round which twisted the stems of extinct wistarias, had long been friends. Many a summer evening the two old men had sat together and discoursed of famous jockeys and still more famous horses, of Epsom and Ascot, until Mr. Tutt's cellaret was empty and never a stogy left in the box at all. Probably no one save the odd lanky old attorney, who himself seemed to belong to a bygone era, knew the story of Danny's glorious past—how he had risen from his Uncle Aherne's livery in Dublin first to being paddock groom to Lord Ashburnham and then to jockey, finally to ride the Derby under the Farringdon gold and crimson, and to carry away Katherine Brady, the second housemaid, as Mrs. Lowry when he went back to Dublin with a goodly pile of money to take over his uncle's business; and how thereafter had come babies, and fever, and the epizootic, and hard times; and Danny, a heartbroken man, had fled from bereavement and pauperism and possibly from prison to seek his fortune in America. And then the motor! Lastly, now, a hand-to-mouth, furtive, ignorant old age, a struggle for bare existence and to keep the tiny flat going for his seventeen-year-old granddaughter, Katie, who kept house for him and of whose existence few, even of Danny's friends, were aware excepting Mr. Tutt.
There was, in fact, a striking parallel between these two old men, the one so ignorant, the other so essentially a man of culture, in that they were both humanitarians in a high sense. It is improbable that Ephraim Tutt was conscious of what drew him to Danny Lowry, but drawn he was; and the reason for it was that the fundamental mainspring of the life of each was love—in the case of the man of law for those of his fellow men who suffered through foolishness or poverty or weaknesses or misfortune; and in that of his more humble counterpart, whose limitations precluded his understanding of more endowed human beings, for the dumb animals, who must mutely suffer through the foolishness or poverty or weakness or misfortune of their owners and masters.
Danny had sat up all night with only a horse blanket drawn over his legs, taking care of a roan mare with the croup. The helpless thing had lain flat on her side in the straw struggling for breath, and Danny, his heart racked with pity, had sat in the stall beside her, every hour giving her steam and gently pouring his own secret mixture down her throat. Nobody but Danny cared what became of the mare, left there two weeks before by a stranger who had not returned for it; stolen, probably. Cramped, stiff with rheumatism, half dead from fatigue and suffering from a bad cough himself, he left the stable at eight o'clock next morning, hopeful that the miserable beast would pull through, and stepped round to Salvatore's lunch cart for a bowl of coffee and a hot dog. He was just lighting his pipe preparatory to going back to the stable when a stranger pulled up to the curb in a mud-splashed depot wagon.
"'Morning," he remarked pleasantly. "Can you tell me if Mulqueen's livery stable is anywhere about here?"
Danny removed his pipe and spat politely.
"Sure," he replied, taking in the horse, which besides being lame and having a glaring spavin on its off hind leg was a mere bone bag fit only for the soap factory. "'Tis just forninst the corner. I'm after goin' there meself."
The stranger, a heavy-faced man with a thick neck, nodded.
"All right. You go along and I'll follow."
Mulqueen was not yet at the stable and Danny helped unharness the animal, which, as soon as relieved of the shafts, hung its head between its legs, evidently all in. The stranger handed Danny a cigar.
"I'm lookin' for a vet," said he. "My horse ought to have something done for him."
"I can well see that!" agreed Danny. "He needs a poultice and hot bandages. A bit of rest wouldn't do him no harm, neither."
"Well, I'm no vet," returned the stranger with an apologetic grin, "but it don't take much to know that he's a sick horse. I'm a doctor, myself, but not a horse doctor. Have you got one here?"
"Some calls me a horse doctor," modestly answered Danny. "I can treat a spavin and wind a bandage as well as the next. How long will you be leavin' him?"
"Oh, a day or two, I guess. Well, if you're a veterinary I leave him in your care. My name's Simon—Dr. Joseph R. Simon, of Hempstead, Long Island."
Danny worked all the morning over the horse, doing his best to make it comfortable. Indeed, before he had concluded his treatment the animal was probably more comfortable than he, for the night in the cold stall had given him a chill and when he left the stable to go home for lunch he was in a high fever. Doctor Simon was outside on the sidewalk talking to Mulqueen.
"Well, doctor," said he, "what did you find was the matter with my horse?"
"Spavin, lame in three legs, sore eyes, underfed," replied Danny, shivering. "Sure an' he's a sick animal."
"How much do I owe you?" inquired Doctor Simon.
Danny was about to answer that a couple of dollars would be all right when the thought occurred to him that here was an opportunity to secure medical treatment for himself.
"If you'll give me something to stop a fever we'll call it even," he suggested.
"That's easy!" returned Doctor Simon heartily. "Come into the office and I'll take your temperature and write you out a prescription."
So they sat down by the stove and the doctor took Danny's pulse and put a thermometer under his tongue, chatting amicably meanwhile, and when he had completed his examination he wrote something on a piece of paper.
"How long have you been practicing veterinary medicine?" he inquired.
"All my life," answered Danny truthfully. "But I don't get near so much to do as I used. These be hard times for those as have to do with horses."
He got up painfully.
"Well, now," said Doctor Simon, "I'd feel better if I paid you for treating my horse. Just put this five-dollar bill in your pocket. I guess you need it more than I do."
Danny shook his head. "That's all right!" he said weakly, for he was feeling very ill. "It's a stand-off."
"Oh, go ahead, take it!" urged Doctor Simon, shoving the bill into the pocket of Danny's overcoat. "By the way, have you got your card? I might be able to send a little business your way."
When his magic skill with horses was matter of common knowledge among the upper circle of Long Island grooms and coachmen Danny had had a few cards struck off by a friendly printer. A couple of fly-blown specimens still lingered in the drawer of Mulqueen's desk. Danny searched until he found one: