The rubber rattle of an impromptu assignment, usually thrown the teething tyro, given to the very leader of the bar!
His Honour was indeed facetious.
Wallace, engaged in an undertone confab with a court clerk, looked up, converted the instinctive gesture of impatience into one of good-natured acquiescence, and stepped forward. The crowd’s tribute to supremacy: a hush so distinct as to seem almost audible.
The Judge assumed due solemnity.
“Mr. Wallace, we have here a knight-errant of most distinguished parts. He has sojourned in many public institutions. A most cosmopolitan citizen and of unquestioned social standing; having met some of the best wardens in the country. Some twenty years ago he committed a little indiscretion up in Montour County, dwelling there subsequently for a period of six months. That being your own native heath, Mr. Wallace, would it not be chivalric and neighbourly upon your part to volunteer your professional services!”
The crowd enjoyed the speech and scene. In all his years at the bar no one had ever seen William R. K. Wallace nonplussed. Now his Honour had succeeded in “putting one over” on him. His “Certainly, your Honour,” was but instinctive. Of the purport of a possible plea Wallace had no remote idea. So he turned and indulged in a critically professional survey of his client.
As he took in the sullen figure, unshaven, unkempt, and hard, the forbidding aspect painfully accentuated by the patch over one sightless eye—what came of a sudden to the attorney? Masterful and adroit though he was, did he feel the utter futility of it all? It certainly seemed that Wallace—William R. K. Wallace—trembled through an acute second of actual stage fright, the horrible unnerved instant when the mind gropes and finds no substance of thought. Yes, his Honour had scored.
Then, himself again, he addressed the Court. Quietly, almost conversationally and entirely away from the subject at hand; but this was Wallace, and no one stayed him.
“I was born in Centre County, your Honour, not Montour, but so close to the county line that your Honour’s impression is to all intents and purposes correct. So close, in fact, that right down the driveway, scarcely a hundred yards away, one could step into Montour County by crossing the railroad tracks, for they were the county line at that corner.”
Then for a few seconds he indulged in memory’s visualization of early days. Still in a desultory way he continued: