He got up painfully.
"Well, now," said Doctor Simon, "I'd feel better if I paid you for treating my horse. Just put this five-dollar bill in your pocket. I guess you need it more than I do."
Danny shook his head. "That's all right!" he said weakly, for he was feeling very ill. "It's a stand-off."
"Oh, go ahead, take it!" urged Doctor Simon, shoving the bill into the pocket of Danny's overcoat. "By the way, have you got your card? I might be able to send a little business your way."
When his magic skill with horses was matter of common knowledge among the upper circle of Long Island grooms and coachmen Danny had had a few cards struck off by a friendly printer. A couple of fly-blown specimens still lingered in the drawer of Mulqueen's desk. Danny searched until he found one:
DANIEL LOWRY
VETERINARY
212 WEST 53D STREET
NEW YORK CITY
"Here, sor," said he, his head swimming, "that's my name, but the address is wrong."
Doctor Simon put it in his pocketbook.
"Thanks," he remarked. "Much obliged for fixing up my horse." Then in a businesslike manner, he threw back his coat and displayed a glittering badge. "Now," he added brusquely, "I must arrest you for practising veterinary medicine without a license. Just come along with me to the nearest police station."
When Mr. Tutt returned home that evening after attending one of the weekly sessions at the Colophon Club, where he had reluctantly contributed the sum of fifty-seven dollars to relieve the immediate needs of certain impecunious persons gathered there about a green-baize-covered table in a remote corner of the card room, he perceived by the light of an adjacent street lamp that someone was sitting upon the top of the steps leading to his front door.
"Are you Mr. Tutt?" inquired Katie Lowry, getting up and making a timid curtsy. "The great lawyer?"
"That is my name, child," he answered. "What do you want of me?"
She was but a wisp of a girl and her eyes shone like a cat's from under a gray shawl gathered over a pair of narrow, pinched shoulders.
"They've taken grandfather away to prison," she replied with a catch in her throat. "He didn't come in to lunch nor to supper, and when I went to the stable Mr. Mulqueen said a detective had arrested grandfather for doctoring horses without a license and he had pleaded guilty and they'd locked him up. I went to the police station, but they said he wasn't there any more, but that he was in the Tombs."
"Who is your grandfather?" demanded Mr. Tutt as he unlocked the door.
"Danny Lowry," she replied. "Oh, sir, won't you try to do something for him, sir? He thinks so much of you! He often has told me what a grand man you were and so kind, besides being such a clever lawyer and all the judges afraid of you!"
"Danny Lowry in the Tombs!" cried Mr. Tutt. "What an outrage! Of course I'll do what I can for him. But first come inside and warm yourself. Miranda!" he shouted to the colored maid of all work. "Make us some hot toast and tea and bring it up to the library. Now, my dear, take off your shawl and sit down and tell me all about it."
So with her frayed kid shoes upturned on the fender, little Katie Lowry, confident that she had found an all-powerful friend in this queer long man who smoked such queer long cigars, sipping her tea only when she had to pause for breath, poured out the story of her grandfather's fight with poverty and misfortune, while her auditor's wrinkled face grew soft and hard by turns as he watched her through the gray clouds from his stogy. An hour later he left her at the door of her flat, happy and encouraged, with a twenty-dollar bill crumpled in her hand.
"But what do you expect me to do about it?" retorted District Attorney Peckham in his office next morning when Mr. Tutt had explained to him the perversion of justice to accomplish which the law had been invoked. "I'm sorry! No doubt he's a good feller. But he's guilty, isn't he? Admitted it in the police court, didn't he?"
"I expect you to temper justice with mercy," replied Mr. Tutt earnestly. "This old man's whole life has been devoted to relieving the sufferings of animals. He's a genuine Samaritan."
"That's like saying that a thief has done good with his plunder, isn't it?" commented Peckham. "Look here, Tutt, of course I hope you get your man off and all that, but if I personally threw the case out I'd have all the vets in the city on my neck. You see the motors have pretty nearly put 'em all out of business. There aren't enough sick horses to go round, so they've been conducting a sort of crusade. Tough luck—but the law is the law. And I have to enforce it—ostensibly, anyway."
"Very well," answered the old lawyer amiably but defiantly. "Then if you've got to enforce the law against a fine old chap like that I've got to do my darnedest to smash that law higher than a kite. And I'll tell you something, Peckham—which is that the human heart is a damn sight bigger than the human conscience."
Danny Lowry had lived for years in fear of the blow which had so suddenly struck him down, for there had never been any blinking of the obvious fact that in acting as an unlicensed veterinary he was brazenly violating the law. On the other hand, not being able to read or write, and having no technical knowledge of medicine, all his experience, all his skill, all his love of animals could avail him nothing so far as securing a license was concerned. He could not read an examination paper, but he could interpret the symptoms seen in a trembling neck and a lack-luster eye. Danny had no choice but to break the law or abandon the only career for which he had an aptitude, or by which he could hope to earn a living at his age. His crime was malum prohibitum, not malum in se, but it was, nevertheless, a violation of a most necessary law. Certainly none of us wish to be doctored by tyros or humbugs, or to have our animals treated by them. Only Danny was neither a tyro nor a humbug, and had he not been a lawbreaker the world would have been to some extent the loser.
Yet by all the canons of ethics and justice it was most improper for Mr. Tutt to hurry off to the Tombs and bail out old Danny Lowry, a self-confessed lawbreaker, giving his own bond and the house on Twenty-third Street as security. Still more so, as more unblushingly ostentatious, was his taking the criminal over to Pont's and giving him the very best dinner that Signor Faccini, proprietor of that celebrated hostelry, could purvey.
Hard cases are said to make bad law; I wonder if they make bad people. If "conscience makes cowards of us all" does human sympathy play ducks and drakes with conscience? Does it blind the eye of reason? Rather, does it not illumine and expose the fallacies of logic and the falsities of the syllogism? Do two and two make four in human polity as in mathematics? Sometimes it would not seem so.
Certainly you would have picked Mr. Bently Gibson, of The Gibson Woolen Mills, as a model juror. One look at him as a prospective talesman in a murder case and you would have unhesitatingly murmured, "The defense challenges peremptorily!" His broad forehead, large well-shaped nose, firm chin and clear calm eye evidenced his common sense, his conscientiousness and his uncompromising adherence to principle. His customs declarations were complete to the smallest item, his income-tax returns models of self-sacrifice, he was patriotic and civic, he belonged to the Welfare League and the Citizens' Union, and—I hesitate to confess it—he subscribed to the annual deficit of the Society for the Suppression of Sin. On the face of it, he was the kind of man the district attorney tries to select as foreman of a jury when he has to prosecute a woman who had kidnaped her own child out of a foundling asylum.
The heelers and hangers-on of the criminal courts would have described him as a highbrow and as a holier-than-thou; perhaps he might in a moment of jocularity have even so described himself—for he had his human—perhaps I should have said, his weaker—side. Surely he seemed human enough when he kissed Eleanor good-by at the door of their country place on the Sound the morning he had been subpoenaed to serve as a juryman in Part Five of the General Sessions. He had planned to take a week's holiday that spring, and he had gone to infinite trouble to arrange his business in order to have it, for they had become engaged eleven years before at the moment when the apple blossoms and the dogwoods were at the height of their glory, even as they were