PAGE 6
As deep as the sea
by
There was a silence, in which the gross impostor shifted heavily in his seat, while a hand twitched across the mouth and then caught at the breast of the threadbare black coat abstractedly.
Rawley leaned forward, one elbow on a knee, the cheroot in his fingers. He spoke almost confidentially, as to some ignorant and misguided savage–as he had talked to Indian chiefs in his time when searching for the truth regarding some crime.
“I’ve had a lot of revelations in my time. A lawyer and a doctor always do. And though there are folks who say I’m no lawyer, as there are those who say with greater truth that you’re no doctor, speaking technically, we’ve both had ‘revelations.’ You’ve seen a lot that’s seamy, and so have I. You’re pretty seamy yourself. In fact, you’re as bad a man as ever saved lives–and lost them. You’ve had a long tether, and you’ve swung on it–swung wide. But you’ve had a lot of luck that you haven’t swung high, too.”
He paused and flicked away the ash from his cheroot, while the figure before him swayed animal-like from side to side, muttering.
“You’ve got brains, a great lot of brains of a kind–however you came by them,” Rawley continued; “and you’ve kept a lot of people in the West from passing in their checks before their time. You’ve rooked ’em, chiselled ’em out of a lot of cash, too. There was old Lamson–fifteen hundred for the goitre on his neck; and Mrs. Gilligan for the cancer–two thousand, wasn’t it? ‘Tincture of Lebanon Leaves’ you called the medicine, didn’t you? You must have made fifty thousand or so in the last ten years.”
“What I’ve made I’ll keep,” was the guttural answer, and the talon-like fingers clawed the table.
“You’ve made people pay high for curing them, saving them sometimes; but you haven’t paid me high for saving you in the courts; and there’s one case that you haven’t paid me for at all. That was when the patient died–and you didn’t.”
The face of the old man became mottled with a sudden fear, but he jerked it forward once or twice with an effort at self-control. Presently he steadied to the ordeal of suspense, while he kept saying to himself, “What does he know–what–which?”
“Malpractice resulting in death–that was poor Jimmy Tearle; and something else resulting in death–that was the switchman’s wife. And the law is hard in the West where a woman’s in the case–quick and hard. Yes, you’ve swung wide on your tether; look out that you don’t swing high, old man.”
“You can prove nothing; it’s bluff!” came the reply in a tone of malice and of fear.
“You forget. I was your lawyer in Jimmy Tearle’s case, and a letter’s been found written by the switchman’s wife to her husband. It reached me the night he was killed by the avalanche. It was handed over to me by the post-office, as the lawyer acting for the relatives. I’ve read it. I’ve got it. It gives you away.”
“I wasn’t alone.” Fear had now disappeared, and the old man was fighting.
“No, you weren’t alone; and if the switchman and the switchman’s wife weren’t dead and out of it all, and if the other man that didn’t matter any more than you wasn’t alive and hadn’t a family that does matter, I wouldn’t be asking you peaceably for two thousand dollars as my fee for getting you off two cases that might have sent you to prison for twenty years, or, maybe, hung you to the nearest tree.”
The heavy body pulled itself together, the hands clinched. “Blackmail–you think I’ll stand it?”
“Yes, I think you will. I want two thousand dollars to help a friend in a hole, and I mean to have it, if you think your neck’s worth it.”
Teeth, wonderfully white, showed through the shaggy beard. “If I had to go to prison–or swing, as you say–do you think I’d go with my mouth shut? I’d not pay up alone. The West would crack–holy Heaven, I know enough to make it sick. Go on and see! I’ve got the West in my hand.” He opened and shut his fingers with a grimace of cruelty which shook Rawley in spite of himself.