Truesdale picked his way choicely through the office, with the urbane affectation of never having seen the place before. One or two of the clerks recognized him, and a hurried word, passed from desk to desk, effected an immediate establishment of his identity throughout the room. Those who had never seen him had at least heard about him. Some of them had visited his pictures at the Art Institute, and, as devotees of the old school, if of any, had mildly guyed them. Others had read paragraphs in the "Chappie Chat" of the newspapers about his trousers and cravats—those genial paragraphs which may so easily endow a young man of parts and peculiarities with a quasi-celebrity. One of them now smiled broadly, and another so far forgot himself and his dignity as to wink; but all the rest, as American freemen by birth or adoption, united in a stolid determination to refrain from seeing, or at least from acknowledging, any distinguishing peculiarity, any differentiation—above all, any savor of superiority. The one of whom Truesdale inquired for his father was so Spartan in his brusqueness that Truesdale, despite himself, smiled in his face.
In the private office he found his father closeted with Roger. Crumpled and trampled on the floor, and with the effect of a matter abandoned or at least superseded, lay a large sheet of paper printed with the outlines of a real-estate subdivision, while a hundred similar sheets rested in a roll on the end of the old man's desk. Marshall himself lay back in his chair, with marks of the exhaustion that follows intense indignation and exasperation, while Roger paced the floor with all the vehemence and choler of younger blood.
"Yes," Roger was saying, explosively, "the bond was opened, and all they found was a blank paper—the alderman's name, and nothing more. Why do you blame me? What more can I do? What more could you do? What more could any decent man do? And if you wanted to find out how things are run here, you're doing it."
"What's the trouble?" asked Truesdale. He sat down with an engaging disposition to show himself interested.
Marshall passed his hand feebly over his forehead. "It's that police affair of your mother's," he said, in a tired voice.
"Well, I hope those two scamps have been sent to jail, or to Bridewell, or wherever they belong. August will carry that scar to his dying day."
"Jail!" cried Roger. "No ward-worker need ever go to jail. They sent for their alderman the minute they were caught. Our ward hasn't elected anything but crime-brokers for the last ten years."
"Well, what did the present crime-broker do?"
"He went bail for them. He made out the bond himself—inside of thirty seconds. He marked it so on the envelope, and the police-captain took it for what he called it. So when these fellows jumped their bail—"
"Our alderman lost—his autograph. A bad take-in for the police, wasn't it?" queried Truesdale, impartially.