“If you join the organization, if you are a hail-fellow-well-met with all the Pat McCanns of the city,” retorted the Judge, sternly—“if you sink to that level, you would certainly leave your children something very different from what your father left you. If you do, I doubt whether the organization will go out of its way to offer inducements to your son. It will expect to get him cheap.”
The young lawyer flushed again, and then he laughed uneasily.
“You are hard on me, Judge,” he said at last.
“I want you to be hard on yourself now,” the older man returned. “I know you, Curtis; I know the stock you come of, and I am sure you will be hard enough on yourself—when it is too late.”
“I’m not going to rob a bank, am I?” urged the younger man.
“You are going to rob yourself,” was the swift answer. “You are going to rob your children, if you ever have any, of what your father left you—the priceless heritage of an honored name.”
“Come, now, Judge,” said Van Dyne, “is that quite fair? You speak as if I were going to enroll in the Forty Thieves.”
“If I thought you capable of doing that I should not be speaking to you at all,” was the reply.
“Pat McCann isn’t a bad fellow really,” the young man declared. “He means well enough. And the rest of them are not rascals, either; they are not the crew of pirates the papers call them. They are giving the city as good a government now as our mixed population will stand. They have their ambition to do right; and I sincerely believe that they mean to do the best they know how.”
“That’s it precisely,” the Judge asserted. “They mean to do the best they know how. But how much do they know?”