awyer as there is at the bar, want me to believe you trusted
that work to a boy! If you did, you're a damn fool. If you didn't, you're
a damn scoundrel. There's no more doubt in my mind than in yours which of
those horns has you sticking on it."

"You are letting your quick temper get away with you, Mr. Blacklock," he
deprecated.

"Stop lying!" I shouted, "I knew you had been doing some skulduggery when
I first heard your voice on the telephone. And if I needed any proof, the
meek way you've taken my abuse would furnish it, and to spare."

Just then the telephone bell rang and I got the right department and asked
the clerk to read House Bill 427. It contained five short paragraphs. The
"joker" was in the third, which gave the State Canal Commission the right
"to institute condemnation proceedings, and to condemn, and to abolish, any
canal not exceeding thirty miles in length and not a part of the connected
canal system of the state."

When I hung up the receiver I was so absorbed that I had forgotten Saxe was
waiting. He made some slight sound. I wheeled on him. I needed a vent. If
he hadn't been there I should have smashed a chair. But there was he--and I
kicked him out of my private office and would have kicked him out through
the anteroom into the outer hall, had he not gathered himself together and
run like a jack-rabbit.

Since that day I have done my own calendar watching.

By this incident I do not mean to suggest that there are not honorable men
in the legal profession. Most of them are men of the highest honor, as are
most business men, most persons of consequence in every department of life.
But you don't look for character in the proprietors, servants, customers
and hangers-on of dives. No more ought you to look for honor among any of
the people that have to do with the big gilded dive of the dollarocracy.
They are there to gamble, and to prostitute themselves. The fact that they
look like gentlemen and have the manners and the language of gentlemen
ought to deceive nobody but the callow chaps of the sort that believes the
swell gambler is "an honest fellow" and a "perfect gentleman otherwise,"
because he wears a dress suit in the evening and is a judge of books and
pictures. Lawyers are the doorkeepers and the messengers of the big dive;
and these lawyers, though they stand the highest and get the biggest fees,
are just what you would expect human beings to be who expose themselves to
such temptations,