“By the by, your honor, I forgot about the Mayor’s miners’ relief fund. How is it now?” asked Van Dorn.
“Something past ten thousand here in the county.”
“Any one beat my subscription?” asked Van Dorn.
Brotherton turned around and replied: “Yes–Amos Adams was in here five minutes ago. He has mortgaged his place and so long as he and Grant can’t find kith or kin of Chopini, and Mrs. Herdicker would take nothing–Amos has put $1,500 into the fund. Done it just now–him and Grant.”
The Judge took the paper, looked at the scrawl of the Adamses, and scratching out his subscription, put two thousand where there had been one thousand. He showed it to Brotherton, and added with a smile:
“Who’ll call that–I wonder.”
And wrapping his ulster about him and cocking his hat rakishly, he went with some pride into the street. He was thirty-four years old and was accounted as men go a handsome dog, with a figure just turning from the litheness of youth into a slight rotundity of very early middle age. He carried his shoulders well, walked with a firm, straight gait–perhaps a little too much upon his toes for candor, but, with all, he was a well-groomed animal and he knew it. So he passed Margaret Fenn again on the street, lifted his hat, hunted for her eyes, gave them all the voltage he had, and the smile that he shot at her was left over on his face for 192half a block down the street. People passing him smiled back and said to one another:
“What a fine, good-natured, big-hearted fellow Tom Van Dorn is!”
And Mr. Van Dorn, not oblivious to the impression he was making, smiled and bowed and bowed and smiled, and hellowed Dick, and howareyoued Hiram, and goodmorninged John, down the street, into his office. There he found his former partner busy with a laudable plan of defending a client. His client happened to be the Wahoo Fuel Company, which was being assailed by the surviving relatives of something like one hundred dead men. So Mr. Calvin was preparing to show that in entering the mine they had assumed the ordinary risks of mining, and that the neglect of their fellow servants was one of those ordinary risks. And as for the boy ten years old being employed in the mines contrary to law, there were some details of a trip to Austria for that boy and his parents, that had to be arranged with the steamship company by wire that very morning. The Judge sat reading the law, oblivious–judicially–to what was going on, and Joseph Calvin fell to work with a will. But what the young Judge, who could ignore Mr. Calvin’s activities, could not help taking judicial notice of in spite of his law books, were those eyes out there on the street. They were indeed beautiful eyes and they said so much, and yet left much to the imagination–and the imagination of Judge Van Dorn was exceedingly nimble in those little matters, and in many other matters besides. Indeed, so nimble was his imagination that if it hadn’t been for the fact that at Judge Van Dorn’s own extra-judicial suggestion, every lawyer in town, excepting Henry Fenn, who had retired from the law practice, had been retained by the Company an hour after the accident, no one knows how many holes might have been found in Mr. Joseph Calvin’s unaided brief.
As the young Judge sat poring over his law book, Captain Morton came in and after the Captain’s usual circumlocution he said: