“There’s one thing I don’t understand yet,” observed Mr. Leg. “I’ve got to believe you when you say you thought it was Judge Manton all the time, because I saw you carrying his photograph around. And you say you found that slip of paper was in his handwriting by comparing it with his signature and the postscript on the letter he sent me assigning me to the case. But what the dickens made you compare it with his handwriting? What made you suspect him in the first place?”
“You remember what I quoted from Montaigne,” replied Dan, with a smile. “ ‘The passions smothered by modern civilization are doubly ferocious when awakened.’ ”
“Yes; but what made you suspect him?”
“What’s the difference, sir, so long as we got him? It certainly made a fuss, didn’t it?” Dan grinned with delight as he glanced at a pile of morning papers on his desk, the front page of each of which carried under scare headlines pictures of Manton, the murderer, and Dan, his boy Nemesis, side by side.
“There’s no doubt about his being convicted,” Dan went on, “unless he manages to find some way of committing suicide before his trial, which is likely. We have a dozen corroborative items for Cummings’s story. By the way, I’m glad the district attorney has offered him immunity.”
“So am I,” Mr. Leg agreed; “but don’t try to change the subject, young man. Clever as you are, you can’t evade me. What made you first suspect Judge Manton?”
“I see I’ll have to tell you, sir,” grinned Dan. “Well, it was on account of you.”
“On account of me?”
“Yes, sir. I wondered about it from the very first, when you called me in that morning and told me the judge had assigned you to the case. I couldn’t understand it, because I know the practice in such cases is to give it to a man fairly well up in the profession. And men, especially judges, don’t play jokes in murder cases. So I knew there must be some good reason why he assigned you to Mount’s defense, and the most probable one was that he wanted him convicted.”
“But I don’t see—”
Again Dan grinned. “You know I think you’re a mighty fine man, Mr. Leg. You’ve been awfully good to me, sir. But you hadn’t had a case in ten years, and you certainly are a bum lawyer.”
Mr. Leg frowned. A peal of mischievous laughter came from behind him in Miss Venner’s silvery voice. And Dan, because he was looking at her dancing eyes and parted lips and wavy hair, and found it such an agreeable and delightful sight, began to laugh with her. Mr. Leg looked from one to the other, trying hard to maintain his frown; but who can frown at a boy and a fun-loving girl when they are looking at and laughing with each other?
And so Mr. Leg joined in and began to laugh, too.
It’s Science that Counts
“I guess I never could learn to do that,” Peter Boley, the grocer, declared admiringly. Jone Simmons, to whom the remark was addressed, paused to clear his brow of perspiration, which came from the strenuous exercise of knocking a leather punching bag from one side to another of an inverted board platform about four feet square, suspended from the ceiling.
“It ain’t half as hard as hittin’ a man,” he observed, as one who should know.
“I’m not so sure about that,” Boley objected. “I guess you wouldn’t have much trouble hittin’ me.”
Jone Simmons seemed to find this observation absurd. “I meant a fightin’ man,” he explained. “Of course I could probably floor you maybe once a minute. But you take a man that’s had training and studied the science, and maybe I could hit him and maybe I couldn’t. I’m not what I used to be.”
“Well, you’re mighty quick at knockin’ that bag around,” declared the grocer, moving his cigar from the right corner of his mouth to the left. “I wish you’d teach me some day. I was saying to Harry Vawter last week, it’s too bad there’s not somebody in town could put on the gloves with you, and we could have a regular match at the Annual Picnic.”
“Huh!” Simmons snorted. “I guess there’s nobody would want to take that job. I’m not what I used to be, but you can see I’m still a little too lively for anybody in Holtville.”
He hauled off and gave the punching bag a smash that caused it to rebound madly back and forth against the boards.
In order to avoid a misconception, it is best to explain at once that Jone Simmons was not, and never had been, a pugilist. He ran the only hardware store in Holtville, Ohio, whither he had come three or four years before from some town up the river, and in action he was the most peaceful and easy-going citizen imaginable. Within two weeks after his coming to Holtville everybody in town knew him and liked him — all me more because his predecessor in the hardware store had been the most unpopular member of the community.
Jone Simmons had only one weakness in conversation, and that a mild one. The subject was fistic prowess, or more correctly, fistic science; and particularly the fistic science of Jone Simmons. No sooner had he got the stock inventoried and in place in the hardware store than he put up a punching bag in the back room; and Peter Boley, the grocer next door, led to investigate by mysterious and insistent thumpings which he could not logically connect with the hardware trade, had been me first to discover this curious fad of the new inhabitant of Holtville.
He found, as all Holtville did later, that Jone was anything but averse to talk on the subject. He told stories of himself. It appeared that in his youth he had been a pretty bad customer. He wished he had a nickel for every nose he’d broke before he was twenty. Now that he was twice that age, of course he wasn’t as spry as formerly, but still it was science that counted — bang! against the punching bag.
Then Jone would produce an old number of the Police Gazette containing an article by Bob Fitzsimmons on the relative merits of the uppercut and the half-swing.
When midsummer came Jone’s fame was such that he was invited to give a punching bag exhibition at the Eleventh Annual Picnic of the Holtville Merchants’ Association, and the performance had proven so popular that it was repeated the two following summers.
It must not be thought that Jone made use of his prowess in any unjust or cruel manner. He was no bully. Two or three of his fellow townsmen had at one time or another put on the gloves with him to learn something of the defensive art, but they had frankly been scared half to death by Jone’s professional attitudes and gestures, and he had merely dealt them gentle taps on the chest as they danced around with their hands waving frantically to and fro in front of their faces.
Nobody in Holtville wanted to “go up against” Jone Simmons.
One afternoon in the early part of July Pete Boley, the grocer, entered Simmon’s hardware store with his face alight with the excitement of discovery.
“Hello, Pete, where you been since noon?” called Simmons from the rear of the store, where he was wrapping up a package of nails for Mrs. Pearl’s little boy.
When the customer had gone the grocer approached and said with the importance of one who brings news:
“Jonas, our picnic is going to be a bigger success this year than ever before.”
“What’s up?” demanded Simmons, stopping to pick up a nail and throw it in the bin.
“Something new and good,” declared the grocer. “I guess they won’t be sorry they chose me chairman of the entertainment committee.”
“You goin’ to have a circus?”
“No. Wait till I tell you. I was just down to Bill Ogilvy’s store. Went down to get some muslin for the Missis. You know, Bill has a new fellow in there clerkin’ for him, a fellow named Notter that he got from Columbus about a week ago. Well, this Notter waited on me, and I noticed he lifted down a big bolt of muslin, must have weighed thirty pounds, just like it was a feather.