Meet us at Hotel Iroquois, Buffalo, to-morrow six P. M.
Important letter follows. Wire answer. Do not fail.
Bank Le Boeuf,
J. K. W., Cashier.
"The Bank Le Boeuf of Buffalo! Sounds good; I hope it is good," mused Beekman. "If so, another big client added to my growing list."
Without hesitation he wrote an answering telegram, stating that he would be at the Hotel Iroquois at 6 P. M. the following night, took it downstairs, and left it in the office with instructions to send it as soon as possible.
And it was not until fifteen minutes later, in the midst of his speculations as to the nature of this business sent to him by the Bank Le Boeuf, that the thought of Leslie's yachting-party came to him.
"Confound it!" he muttered to himself. "I clean forgot all about it. What am I going to do?"
Yet Beekman was so consistent that he recognised at once that there was nothing to do save what he had done. He had built up his practice without pull, influence or money; and he had done it by religiously conserving the interests of his clients. He knew, therefore, that he must obey this summons. So, assuring himself that Leslie would understand it when he told her in the morning, he removed his evening dress, swathed himself in a dressing—gown, stepped into his library and began to work. An unfinished job lay upon his table—a job that, he knew, would take past dawn to finish, and early in the evening he had determined not to go to bed. So he started in.
There was a neat supply of law books in his rooms—a good working library, an average lawyer would call it. And from the hour that he donned his dressing—gown, Beekman nosed among these tan-coloured volumes, taking down one from its shelf, scanning the headnotes of a given case, reading the opinion, slapping the book together and replacing it. A hundred times, at least, he did this. Finally, weary of his search, and hopelessly downcast, for so far his search had been in vain, he found on the highest shelf a slender volume and opened it. And now, as he started to read, his eye brightened and he quickly seized pen and paper.
"Eureka!" he exclaimed. "On all fours—just in point. By George, this—this wins the trick!"
Half an hour was spent in jotting down the salient portions of the opinion of the Court of Appeals. Then, restoring the book to its accustomed place, he folded up his memorandum neatly and thrust it into a heavy brown envelope, labelled: Turner vs. Cooper. And now with considerable complacency he leaned back, saying to himself: