“Yes, or Epaminondas–the cat–eh?” cut in the old man. Then he added, indignantly, “Well, how about this singing Jasper Adams–who’s he coming to see? Or Amos–he comes around here sometimes Saturday night after G. A. R. meeting, with me–what say? Would you want us all to clear out and leave you the front room with him?” demanded the perturbed Captain.
Then the father put his arm about his child tenderly: “Twenty-five years old–twenty-five years–why, girl, in my time a girl was an old maid laid on the shelf at twenty-five–and 343here you are,” he mused, “just thinking of your first beau and here I am needing your mother worse than I ever did in my life. Law-see’ girl–how do I know what to do–what say?” But he did know enough to draw her to him and kiss her and sigh. “Well–maybe I can do something–maybe–we’ll see.” And then she left him and he went to his work. And as he worked the thought struck him suddenly that if he could put one of his sprockets in the Judge’s automobile where he had seen a chain, that it would save power and stop much of the noise. So as he worked he dreamed that his sprocket was adopted by the makers of the new machines, and that he was rich–exceedingly rich and that he took the girls to visit the Ohio kin, and that Emma had her trip to the Grand Canyon, that Martha went to Europe and that Ruthie “took vocal” of a teacher in France whose name he could not pronounce.
As he hammered away at his bench he heard a shuffling at the door and looking up saw Dr. Nesbit in the threshold.
“Come in, Doctor; sit down and talk,” shrilled the Doctor before the Captain could speak, and when the Doctor had seated himself upon the box by the workbench, the Captain managed to say: “Surely–come right in, I’m kind of lonesome anyhow.”
“And I’m mad,” cried the Doctor. “Just let me sit here and blow off a little to my old army friend.”
“Well–well, Doctor, it’s queer to see you hot under the collar–eh?” The Doctor began digging out his pipe and filling it, without speaking. The Captain asked: “What’s gone wrong? Politics ain’t biling? what say?”
“Well,” returned the Doctor, “you know Laura works at her kindergarten down there in South Harvey, and she got me to pass that hours-of-service law for the smelter men at the extra session last summer. Good law! Those men working there in the fumes shouldn’t work over six hours a day–it will kill them. I managed by trading off my hide and my chances of Heaven to get a law through, cutting them down to eight hours in smelter work. Denny Hogan, who works on the slag dump, is going to die if he has to do it another year on a ten-hour shift. He’s been up and down for two years now–the Hogans live neighbors to Laura’s school and I’ve 344been watching him. Well,” and here the Doctor thumped on the floor with his cane, “this Judge–this vain, strutting peacock of a Judge, this cat-chasing Judge that was once my son-in-law, has gone and knocked the law galley west so far as it affects the slag dump. I’ve just been reading his decision, and I’m hot–good and hot.”
The Captain interrupted:
“I saw Violet Hogan and the children–dressed like princesses, walking out to-day–past the Judge’s house–showing it to them–what say? My, how old she looks, Doctor!”
“Well–the damned villain–the infernal scoundrel–” piped the Doctor. “I just been reading that decision. The men showed in their lawsuit that the month before the law took effect the company, knowing the law had been passed, went out and sold their switch and sold the slag dump, to a fake railroad company that bought a switch engine and two or three cars, and incorporated as a railroad, and then–the same people owning the smelter and the railroad, they set all the men in the smelter that they could working on the slag dump, so the men were working for the railroad and not for the smelter company and didn’t come within the eight hour law. And now the Judge stands by that farce; he says that the men working there under the very chimney of the smelter on the slag dump where the fumes are worst, are not subject to the law because the law says that men working for the smelters shall not work more than eight hours, and these men are working for a cheating, swindling subterfuge of a railroad. That’s judge-made law. That’s the kind of law that makes anarchists. Law!” snorted the Doctor, “Law!–made by judges who have graduated out of the employ of corporations–law!–is just what the Judge on the bench dares to read into the statute. I tell you, Cap, if the doctors and engineers and preachers were as subservient to greed and big money as the lawyers are, we would soon lose our standing. But when a lawyer commits some flagrant malpractice like that of Tom Van Dorn’s–the lawyers remind us that the courts are sacred institutions.”