CHAPTER II
THE BUBBLE REPUTATION

Despite its thirty thousand population – “Forty thousand, and growing, sir!” loyally declared those disinterested citizens engaged in the sale of remote fields of ragweed as building lots – Westville was still but half-evolved from its earlier state of an overgrown country town. It was as yet semi-pastoral, semi-urban. Automobiles and farm wagons locked hubs in brotherly embrace upon its highways; cowhide boots and patent leather shared its sidewalks. There was a stockbroker’s office that was thoroughly metropolitan in the facilities it afforded the élite for relieving themselves of the tribulation of riches; and adjoining it was Simpson Brothers & Company, wherein hick’ry-shirted gentlemen bartered for threshing machines, hayrakes, axle grease, and such like baubles of Arcadian pastime.

There were three topics on which one could always start an argument in Westville – politics, religion, and the editor of the Express. A year before Arnold Bruce, who had left Westville at eighteen and whom the town had vaguely heard of as a newspaper man in Chicago and New York but whom it had not seen since, had returned home and taken charge of the Express, which had been willed him by the late editor, his uncle. The Express, which had been a slippered, dozing, senile sheet under old Jimmie Bruce, burst suddenly into a volcanic youth. The new editor used huge, vociferous headlines instead of the mere whispering, timorous types of his uncle; he wrote a rousing, rough-and-ready English; occasionally he placed an important editorial, set up in heavy-faced type and enclosed in a black border, in the very centre of his first page; and from the very start he had had the hardihood to attack the “established order” at several points and to preach unorthodox political doctrines. The wealthiest citizens were outraged, and hotly denounced Bruce as a “yellow journalist” and a “red-mouthed demagogue.” It was commonly held by the better element that his ultra-democracy was merely a mask, a pose, an advertising scheme, to gather in the gullible subscriber and to force himself sensationally into the public eye.

But despite all hostile criticism of the paper, people read the Express– many staid ones surreptitiously – for it had a snap, a go, a tang, that at times almost took the breath. And despite the estimate of its editor as a charlatan, the people had yielded to that aggressive personage a rank of high importance in their midst.

Bruce stepped forth from his stairway, crossed Main Street, and strode up the shady Court House walk. On the left side of the walk, a-tiptoe in an arid fountain, was poised a gracious nymph of cast-iron, so chastely garbed as to bring to the cheek of elderly innocence no faintest flush. On the walk’s right side stood a rigid statue, suggesting tetanus in the model, of the city’s founder, Col. Davy West, wearing a coonskin cap and leaning with conscious dignity upon a long deer rifle.

Bruce entered the dingy Court House, mounted a foot-worn wooden stairway, browned with the ambrosial extract of two generations of tobacco-chewing litigants, and passed into a damp and gloomy chamber. This room was the office of the prosecuting attorney of Calloway County. That the incumbent might not become too depressed by his environment, the walls were cheered up by a steel engraving of Daniel Webster, frowning with multitudinous thought, and by a crackled map of Indiana – the latter dotted by industrious flies with myriad nameless cities.

Three men arose from about the flat-topped desk in the centre of the room, the prosecutor, the Reverend Doctor Sherman, and a rather smartly dressed man whom Bruce remembered to have seen once or twice but whom he did not know. With the first two the editor shook hands, and the third was introduced to him as Mr. Marcy, the agent of the Acme Filter Company, which had installed the filtering plant of the new water-works.

Bruce turned in his brusque manner to the prosecuting attorney.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“Suppose we all sit down first,” suggested the prosecutor.

They did so, and Kennedy regarded Bruce with a solemn, weighty stare. He was a lank, lantern-jawed, frock-coated gentleman of thirty-five, with an upward rolling forelock and an Adam’s-apple that throbbed in his throat like a petrified pulse. He was climbing the political ladder, and he was carefully schooling himself into that dignity and poise and appearance of importance which should distinguish the deportment of the public man.

“Well, what is it?” demanded Bruce shortly. “About the water-works?”

“Yes,” responded Kennedy. “The water-works, Mr. Bruce, is, I hardly need say, a source of pride to us all. To you especially it has had a large significance. You have made it a theme for a continuous agitation in your paper. You have argued and urged that, since the city’s new water-works promised to be such a great success, Westville should not halt with this one municipal enterprise, but should refuse the new franchise the street railway company is going to apply for, take over the railway, run it as a municipal – ”

“Yes, yes,” interrupted Bruce impatiently. “But who’s dead? Who wants the line of march changed to go by his grocery store?”

“What I was saying was merely to recall how very important the water-works has been to us,” the prosecutor returned, with increased solemnity. He paused, and having gained that heightened stage effect of a well-managed silence, he continued: “Mr. Bruce, something very serious has occurred.”

For all its ostentation the prosecutor’s manner was genuinely impressive. Bruce looked quickly at the other two men. The agent was ill at ease, the minister pale and agitated.

“Come,” cried Bruce, “out with what you’ve got to tell me!”

“It is a matter of the very first importance,” returned the prosecutor, who was posing for a prominent place in the Express’s account of this affair – for however much the public men of Westville affected to look down upon the Express, they secretly preferred its superior presentment of their doings. “Doctor Sherman, in his capacity of president of the Voters’ Union, has just brought before me some most distressing, most astounding evidence. It is evidence upon which I must act both as a public official and as a member of the Arrangements Committee, and evidence which concerns you both as a committeeman and as an editor. It is painful to me to break – ”

“Let’s have it from first hands,” interrupted Bruce, irritated by the verbal excelsior which the prosecutor so deliberately unwrapped from about his fact.

He turned to the minister, a slender man of hardly more than thirty, with a high brow, the wide, sensitive mouth of the born orator, fervently bright eyes, and the pallor of the devoted student – a face that instantly explained why, though so young, he was Westville’s most popular divine.

“What’s it about, Doctor Sherman?” the editor asked. “Who’s the man?”

There was no posing here for Bruce’s typewriter. The minister’s concern was deep and sincere.

“About the water-works, as Mr. Kennedy has said,” he answered in a voice that trembled with agitation. “There has been some – some crooked work.”

“Crooked work?” ejaculated the editor, staring at the minister. “Crooked work?”

“Yes.”

“You are certain of what you say?”

“Yes.”

“Then you have evidence?”

“I am sorry – but – but I have.”

The editor was leaning forward, his nostrils dilated, his eyes gleaming sharply behind their thick glasses.

“Who’s mixed up in it? Who’s the man?”

The minister’s hands were tightly interlocked. For an instant he seemed unable to speak.

“Who’s the man?” repeated Bruce.

The minister swallowed.

“Doctor West,” he said.

Bruce sprang up.

“Doctor West?” he cried. “The superintendent of the water-works?”

“Yes.”

If the editor’s concern for the city’s welfare was merely a political and business pose, if he was merely an actor, at least he acted his part well. “My God!” he breathed, and stood with eyes fixed upon the young minister. Then suddenly he sat down again, his thick brows drew together, and his heavy jaws set.

“Let’s have the whole story,” he snapped out. “From the very beginning.”

“I cannot tell you how distressed I am by what I have just been forced to do,” began the young clergyman. “I have always esteemed Doctor West most highly, and my wife and his daughter have been the closest friends since girlhood. To make my part in this affair clear, I must recall to you that of late the chief attention of the Voters’ Union has naturally been devoted to the water-works. I never imagined that anything was wrong. But, speaking frankly, after the event, I must say that Doctor West’s position was such as made it a simple matter for him to defraud the city should he so desire.”

“You mean because the council invested him with so much authority?” demanded Bruce.

“Yes. As I have said, I regarded Doctor West above all suspicion. But a short time ago some matters – I need not detail them – aroused in me the fear that Doctor West was using his office for – for – ”

“For graft?” supplied Bruce.

The minister inclined his head.

“Later, only a few weeks ago, a more definite fear came to me,” he continued in his low, pained voice. “It happens that I have known Mr. Marcy here for years; we were friends in college, though we had lost track of one another till his business brought him here. A few small circumstances – my suspicion was already on the alert – made me guess that Mr. Marcy was about to give Doctor West a bribe for having awarded the filter contract to his company. I got Mr. Marcy alone – taxed him with his intention – worked upon his conscience – ”

“Mr. Marcy has stated,” the prosecutor interrupted to explain, “that Doctor Sherman always had great influence over him.”

Mr. Marcy corroborated this with a nod.

“At length Mr. Marcy confessed,” Doctor Sherman went on. “He had arranged to give Doctor West a certain sum of money immediately after the filtering plant had been approved and payment had been made to the company. After this confession I hesitated long upon what I should do. On the one hand, I shrank from disgracing Doctor West. On the other, I had a duty to the city. After a long struggle I decided that my responsibility to the people of Westville should overbalance any feeling I might have for any single individual.”

“That was the only decision,” said Bruce. “Go on!”

“But at the same time, to protect Doctor West’s reputation, I decided to take no one into my plan; should his integrity reassert itself at the last moment and cause him to refuse the bribe, the whole matter would then remain locked up in my heart. I arranged with Mr. Marcy that he should carry out his