Part 70

ENLISTING A KNIGHT-ERRANT

On his way down the stairs to the street the Honorable Archer Converse, moving more rapidly than was his wont, overtook and passed Kate Kilgour. He was too absorbed to notice even a pretty girl. She had finished her work for the day and was on her way home.

When she reached the street she observed something which interested her immensely: Mr. Converse suddenly flourished his cane to attract the attention of a man on the opposite side of the street. Then Mr. Converse called to him from the curb with the utmost friendliness in his tones. The girl passed near him and heard what he said. It was not a mere hail to an inferior. The eminent lawyer very politely and solicitously asked the tall young man across the way if he could not spare time to come to the Converse office.

She cast a look over her shoulder. The young man came across the street promptly. He was the man who had served her in her time of need!

She went on, but turned again. An uncontrollable impulse prompted her.

They were entering the door of the office-building, and the aristocratic hand of the Honorable Archer Converse was patting the shoulder of this stranger. Her cheeks flushed and she turned away hastily, for the young man caught her backward glance and returned an appealing smile.

“Who is he?” she asked herself, knowing well the chill reserve of Mr. Converse in the matter of mankind.

“Who are you?” demanded Mr. Converse, planting himself in front of the young man when they were in the private office.

The other met the lawyer's searching look with his rare smile. “The same man I was last time we met--Walker Farr.”

“I have no right to pry into your private affairs, sir, but I have special reasons for wanting you to volunteer plenty of information about yourself.”

For reply the young man spread his palms and silently, by his smile, invited inspection of himself.

“Yes, I see you. But the outside of you doesn't tell me what I want to know.”

“It will have to speak for me.”

“Look here, I have let myself be tied up most devilishly by a train of circumstances that you started, young man. I was minding my own private business until a little while ago.”

“So was I, Mr. Converse.”

“You're a moderately humble citizen, judged from outside looks just now. How did I allow myself to be pulled in as I've been?”

The young man's smile departed. “I asked myself that question a little while ago, sir, after I was pulled in, for I am a stranger--not even a voter here.”

“Well, did you decide how it was?”

“I was led in by the hand of a helpless child--a poor little orphan girl whom I carried to the cemetery on my knees--a martyr--poisoned by that Consolidated water.”

The lawyer was stirred by the intensity of feeling which the man's tones betrayed.

“And it was borne in upon me afresh, Mr. Converse, that the philosophy of the causes by which God moves this world of ours will never be understood by man.”

“See here,” snapped the son of the war governor, “take off your mask, Walker Farr! There's something behind it I want to see. You are an educated gentleman! What are you? Where did you come from?”

Again Farr spread out his palms and was silent.

“You are right about causes. You are one in my case. There may be some fatalism in me--but I'm impelled to use you in a great fight that I feel honor-bound to take up. Now be frank!”

“For all use you can make of me, Mr. Converse, my life starts from the minute I picked that little girl up from the floor of a tenement-house in this city. For what I was before is so different from what I am now that I cannot mix that identity with my affairs.”

“But I cannot take a man into a matter like this unless I know all about him.”

Farr rose and bowed. “I'm sorry you can't accept me at face value, sir. I'm very sorry, because I'd like to serve under such a commander as you. However, I understand your position. I don't blame you. The rule of the world is pretty binding: know a man before you associate with him. But I am as I am. There's nothing more to be said.”

“You sit down,” commanded Converse. “This is a case where rules of the world can be suspended. For I need the kind of man who dares to face even Symonds Dodd in his office and tell him what he is. Oh, I have just come from there,” he explained in reply to Farr's stare. “He told me.”