"Yes," answered Harry, slowly. "Why?"
"I've found one good thing in it: 'Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne.' Ho-ho!" he chuckled. "Reckon I'll ask old Coffin-Face to preach on it next Sunday in Chapel. I'd sure enjoy it. I had a lawyer once—damn him!"
The flare of evil passion in the closing epithet seemed to Harry like a wicked spurt of flame from some sudden crack in cooling lava, leaping out to sear him. His face was turned away—toward the little square of barred window—and his voice was hoarser than usual, as he asked:
"Why do you hate him so?"
Paddy the Brick hurled the Bible into the corner with an imprecation. He rose to a sitting posture, his features working.
"Because he did it for me!" he said. "He might have cleared me ... and he didn't try. And I never took the money they said I stole—never, so help me! It was a put-up job. They 'planted' the stuff on me, when I was drunk. It was a pay-day and I knew they were up to something, for they'd sworn they'd drive me out of the logging-camp—and yet I hadn't sense enough to keep sober!" He gave a harsh and bitter laugh, and his voice rose. "But it was my lawyer friend that really did the business! He was a dead swell—one of your la-de-das with money and automobiles—that played at lawyering. They told me he was a great man and I was fool enough to believe them. What did he care for my case—it was a little one to him! I was nothing but a lumberjack! Why should he soil his kid gloves with me?"
He turned to Harry's white face a livid countenance. "So now I'm here," he finished, "and I don't give a rip if I am, either!"
"Woe unto you also, ye lawyers!" Parallel with the wholesale indictment another text in that self-same book was flashing through Harry's mind: "For with what judgment ye judge ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again." Was that, after all, no trite generality applicable to a hypothetical hereafter, but a thing true in the minute and multinomial affairs of the present? Did chance, or fate—or whatever the human mind called the great Deus ex Machinâ—watch somewhere, with hand upon the lever, adjusting the nice balance to the subtle requirements of some occult law of retribution that, though hidden, was yet as certain as gravitation?
As Harry saw the reddened eyes glowing with hatred, the curving fingers, the crouching figure, he said to himself, "This is my work—mine and whisky's. He was a simple woodman who laboured six days of the week and on the seventh traded half his wages for 'moonshine' from some illicit mountain still. Whisky set his feet in the toils, yet but for me he might have lived there forever in the timber, treading his narrow groove like a blind horse on a ferry, not one whit worse than his fellows, with no agonised conscience, a simple product of his environment. But I—and whisky—fastened the bonds upon him. I did it. I sent him here. I gave him hatred of society, the warfare that has already marked him with the mark of the beast. This is what I did. And now I am plucked up from my place and planted here beside him, as soiled in the eyes of the world as he! Is it because I was the instrument of his demoralisation that the tables have now been turned?—because he who takes the sword shall perish by the sword? And in the last great evening-up, is it written that I shall become even as he?—that bars and chains shall have their will of me and I emerge at last, like this incorrigible ruiné, hard, debased, besotted, beyond hope or redemption in the world?" He shuddered. Better even that that shot in the library had gone home—that he now lay, innocent as he was, with the red mark on his throat, down in the horrible quick-lime!
He rose, and with his hands gripping the bars of the open door, drew a long breath. No! whatever this pent-house did to him, it should never drag him down! He would take his medicine. For what, in his egregious folly and egotism, he had done, he would pay—if fate demanded, to the uttermost farthing. But out of its prison his soul, sometime, should come unblanched, and unabashed!