ludicrously impossible, it was at once noised abroad in Canaan that Joe
had helped to swindle Judge Pike out of a large sum of money--it was
notorious that the shyster could bamboozle court and jury with his
tricks; and it was felt that Joe Louden was getting into very deep
waters indeed. THIS was serious: if the young man did not LOOK OUT, he
might find himself in the penitentiary.

The Tocsin paragraphed him with a fine regularity after this, usually
opening with a Walrus-and-the-Carpenter gravity: "The time has come
when we must speak of a certain matter frankly," or, "At last the time
has arrived when the demoralization of the bar caused by a certain
criminal lawyer must be dealt with as it is and without gloves." Once
when Joe had saved a half-witted negro from "the extreme penalty" for
murder, the Tocsin had declared, with great originality: "This is just
the kind of thing that causes mobs and justifies them. If we are to
continue to permit the worst class of malefactors to escape the
consequences of their crimes through the unwholesome dexterities and
the shifty manipulations and technicalities of a certain criminal
lawyer, the time will come when an outraged citizenry may take the
enforcement of the law in its own hands. Let us call a spade a spade.
If Canaan's streets ever echo with the tread of a mob, the fault lies
upon the head of Joseph Louden, who has once more brought about a
miscarriage of justice...."

Joe did not move into a larger office; he remained in the little room
with its one window and its fine view of the jail; his clients were
nearly all poor, and many of his fees quite literally nominal. Tatters
and rags came up the narrow stairway to his door--tatters and rags and
pitiful fineries: the bleared, the sodden, the flaunting and rouged,
the furtive and wary, some in rags, some in tags, and some--the
sorriest--in velvet gowns. With these, the distressed, the
wrong-doers, the drunken, the dirty, and the very poor, his work lay
and his days and nights were spent.

Ariel had told Roger Tabor that in time Joe might come to be what the
town thought him, if it gave him no other chance. Only its dinginess
and evil surrounded him; no respectable house was open to him; the
barrooms--except that of the "National House"--welcomed him gratefully
and admiringly. Once he went to church, on a pleasant morning when
nice girls wear pretty spring dresses; it gave him a thrill of delight
to see them,