The Exiles and Other Stories | Page 3

that
proved the excellence of a rule. Holcombe would defend the lowest
creature or the most outrageous of murderers, not because the man was
a human being fighting for his liberty or life, but because he wished to
see if certain evidence would be admitted in the trial of such a case. Of

one of his clients the judge, who had a daughter of his own, said, when
he sentenced him, "Were there many more such men as you in the
world, the women of this land would pray to God to be left childless."
And when some one asked Holcombe, with ill-concealed disgust, how
he came to defend the man, he replied: "I wished to show the
unreliability of expert testimony from medical men. Yes; they tell me
the man was a very bad lot."
It was measures, not men, to Holcombe, and law and order were his
twin goddesses, and "no compromise" his watchword.
"You can elect your man if you'll give me two thousand dollars to refit
our club-room with," one of his political acquaintances once said to
him. "We've five hundred voters on the rolls now, and the members
vote as one man. You'd be saving the city twenty times that much if
you keep Croker's man out of the job. You know that as well as I do."
"The city can better afford to lose twenty thousand dollars," Holcombe
answered, "than we can afford to give a two-cent stamp for corruption."
"All right," said the heeler; "all right, Mr. Holcombe. Go on. Fight 'em
your own way. If they'd agree to fight you with pamphlets and circulars
you'd stand a chance, sir; but as long as they give out money and you
give out reading-matter to people that can't read, they'll win, and I
naturally want to be on the winning side."
When the club to which Holcombe belonged finally succeeded in
getting the Police Commissioners indicted for blackmailing
gambling-houses, Holcombe was, as a matter of course and of public
congratulation, on the side of the law; and as Assistant District
Attorney--a position given him on account of his father's name and in
the hope that it would shut his mouth--distinguished himself nobly.
Of the four commissioners, three were convicted--the fourth, Patrick
Meakim, with admirable foresight having fled to that country from
which few criminals return, and which is vaguely set forth in the
newspapers as "parts unknown."
The trial had been a severe one upon the zealous Mr. Holcombe, who
found himself at the end of it in a very bad way, with nerves unstrung
and brain so fagged that he assented without question when his doctor
exiled him from New York by ordering a sea voyage, with change of
environment and rest at the other end of it. Some one else suggested the
northern coast of Africa and Tangier, and Holcombe wrote minute

directions to the secretaries of all of his reform clubs urging continued
efforts on the part of his fellow-workers, and sailed away one cold
winter's morning for Gibraltar. The great sea laid its hold upon him,
and the winds from the south thawed the cold in his bones, and the sun
cheered his tired spirit. He stretched himself at full length reading those
books which one puts off reading until illness gives one the right to do
so, and so far as in him lay obeyed his doctor's first command, that he
should forget New York and all that pertained to it. By the time he had
reached the Rock he was up and ready to drift farther into the lazy,
irresponsible life of the Mediterranean coast, and he had forgotten his
struggles against municipal misrule, and was at times for hours together
utterly oblivious of his own personality.
A dumpy, fat little steamer rolled itself along like a sailor on shore
from Gibraltar to Tangier, and Holcombe, leaning over the rail of its
quarter-deck, smiled down at the chattering group of Arabs and Moors
stretched on their rugs beneath him. A half-naked negro, pulling at the
dates in the basket between his bare legs, held up a handful to him with
a laugh, and Holcombe laughed back and emptied the cigarettes in his
case on top of him, and laughed again as the ship's crew and the deck
passengers scrambled over one another and shook out their voluminous
robes in search of them. He felt at ease with the world and with himself,
and turned his eyes to the white walls of Tangier with a pleasure so
complete that it shut out even the thought that it was a pleasure.
The town seemed one continuous mass of white stucco, with each flat,
low-lying roof so close to the other that the narrow streets left no trace.
To the left of it