CHAPTER XVII

The Discomfiture of Sebastien Squires

Rutgers Allstyn, attorney and specialist in the law of contract, snapped together the jaws of his traveling bag, and gazed speculatively about his luxuriously furnished office fronting on both the great stone esplanade of North Wacker Drive and the Chicago River, the latter body of water as green today as the inch-thick carpet which covered Allstyn’s floor. Then, deciding he was overlooking nothing on the eve of his trip out of town, he took up his derby hat, and his silk-lined driving gauntlets lying close by the hat, and with his other hand reached for his bag.

But at this juncture, Squires, the old antediluvian law clark and Cerberus who for years had maintained vigil over Allystyn’s outside chamber, entered the room, his thin black clothes flapping over his long gaunt frame. He closed the door carefully to behind him before he spoke.

“I—I don’t suppose, Mr. Allstyn,” he said deferentially, “that now, that you’re all in readiness to leave, you would even consider seeing a client.”

“A client?” asked Allstyn, surprised. “Somebody with an appointment—whom we overlooked!”

“Oh no, sir. This client just took a chance and came in—without any appointment.”

“Oh! Well, tell him—or her, as the case may be!—to come back some oth—but here—” Allstyn looked at his watch. Its hands were at 10 minutes to 1. “After all, I’m not making a train or a plane out of here. And I daresay I could spare a few min—but, on the other hand, I don’t want to encumber my mind today with bus—well, what kind of a client is it?”

“A very odd—ahem!—looking young man,” pronounced Squires, as one who had quite no realization that he himself resembled nothing so much as a gaunt old crow.

“Odd-looking?” exclaimed Allstyn. “In what way, Squires?”

“It—it would be extremely difficult, sir, for me to—to formulate a precise answer to that question,” pronounced Squires, gazing, for some reason, stolidly at the floor.

“Then,” commented the lawyer, “he must have three arms and two heads. Has he?”

“No, he has not,” declared Squires, looking up from the floor again. “Though I feel emboldened to say, sir, that it might be better were he thus encumbered, instead of being—ahem—what he—that is, as he is!”

“My gosh, Squires,” commented Allstyn. “Whatever he is—it’s plain to be seen that you don’t approve of him at all.”

“I do not approve, no—ahem—of young men who affect—that is, who use—” But Squires would not continue. “I get you, Squires! It’s plain he uses perfume or—God help us both—rouge! Well, that would make him—at least to me—more interesting. Only, alas, the last client I had in that general category—the fellow who wore high-heeled shoes—wanted to talk about four hours.”

“This young—ahem!—man, Mr. Allstyn, says he wants but five minutes of your time.”

“Five minutes?” laughed Allstyn. “Well, that would mean 15—at the very least! But all right. Your description of him, Squires—or rather, your utter failure to describe him—intrigues ‘meh’; and your several ‘ahems’ confirm him as indeed being worth the viewing. Show him in.”

“Yes sir. But before I do so—and in case he keeps you a bit too long, and you rush off—where, Mr. Allstyn, will this office be able to get in touch with you during the 3 or 4 days you expect to be gone?”

“Ah, Squires—that, I regret to say, is to remain the riddle supreme! For I haven’t yet forgotten how the reporters tricked and wormed out of you my whereabouts—back in the Custerball proceedings. And cost us the case! No reaction on you, though, old chap, because it’s your confounded natural sterling honesty which makes it impossible for you to meet them on their ground. I leave here—yes—when your young odd—ahem—man leaves—driving in my own car; but whether I shall be driving east, west, north or south—or how many hundred miles—will have to remain the most subterranean of state secrets. For I leave, Squires, to draw up a contract, for a client in a distant city—or might it maybe be just a town?—who knows?—and which contract is to be filed—though in quite another city!—within a few hours after it is drawn. Reporters who will sense that that contract is a type that is strictly up my alley—of all the lawyers in the Midwest—will come here immediately to find out where I went—thus to locate the client! Who happens to be an individual who has successfully dodged service now for one entire year in a court action. And by which dodging he protects a lady’s name. And the lady herself being at one time my friend. All a bit complicated, Squires, yes—but the point is that if you don’t know where on God’s green earth I am, you won’t be able to tell the reporters a confounded thing, will you?”

“I daresay not, sir. No. But now—supposing that the American Railway Express should call back here—as they thought they might possibly do during the next half hour—to tell us whether that packet with the missing address label which they located in Kalamazoo was the one containing the Striebel documents. You would want, I presume, to know—”

“Well, I’d rather know than not to know—yes!”

“Well then where, sir, could I get that information to you?”

“You can’t, Squires. For the simple reason that—but here—I am going to stop off at the old ancient decrepit Ulysses S. Grant Building on my way forth from the city, to see whether the elevator man there has picked up anything regarding the address of that former tenant there who witnessed the Haley will. And since I’m there, I think I’ll just run in to a certain tiny 2 by 4 office on the 10th floor and say hello to its lone occupant. And so you can leave any message coming in in the next half hour from the Railway Express company with this occupant—or maybe even catch me sitting there. The occupant will be, incidentally, Elsa Colby.”

“Elsa Colby?” ejaculated Squires, his seamed face lighting up. “And how is the child?”

“Child, Squires? Good—heavens! Elsa?—24 years old!—and a full-fledged criminal attorney?—and you call her a child?”

“I call her even, sir—begging your pardon—an infant.”

“Well, all I can say to that, Squires, is that if she heard you say that, her red hair would crackle—actually crackle; her blue eyes would flash zigzag streaks of high-tension electricity at you; and the freckles on her nose, Squires—they would pop right off at you like gatling-gun bullets. Elsa Colby—graduate criminal attorney—24 years old—an infant!”

“How is she doing at her profession!” asked Squires—though whether to change the angle of the subject or not, no one could know.

“Starving to death, of course, Squires. But since she weighs only 95 pounds or so anyway—the process isn’t nearly as painful as it probably was in the case of George ‘Fatty’ Burgerson, the embryonic land-tenure specialist, who really did die from starvation while waiting for business! And—but what does any lawyer do, Squires—just out of college?”

But Squires did not reply to the question to which everybody in the legal procession knew the answer. Instead he said: “Well, I will ring you at Elsa Colby’s office, then—in case the Railway Express reports. And after that—well, you will be gone indeed. And I—I don’t like it, not knowing where on earth you are. It—it isn’t good business.”

“No? And why on earth isn’t it? I have no wife. No child. Nothing. And my only brother, moreover, now touring India. It is a great relief to me, Squires, to play hookey from my own identity for a few days. A vacation, no less. So avaunt, now, Sebastien Squires. And let me hear the woes of this young—ahem—odd—ahem-looking client!”

And a moment later the visitor just under discussion entered the room.