Tutt and Mr. Tutt Part 30

"But I didn't know the tramp would get Mr. Tutt to defend him,"

expostulated the captain. "Anyhow, ain't it a crime to go to sleep in another man's bed?"

"If it ain't it ought to be!" declared his plain-clothes man sententiously. "Can't you indict him for burglary?"

"You can indict all day; the thing is to convict!" snapped Peckham.

"It's up to you, O'Brien, to square this business so that the law is vindicated--somehow It must be a crime to go into a house on Fifth Avenue and use it as a hotel. Why, you can't cross the street faster than a walk these days without committing a crime. Everything's a crime."

"Sure thing," agreed the captain. "I never yet had any trouble finding a crime to charge a man with, once I got the nippers on him."

"That's so," interjected the plain-clothes man. "Did you ever know it was a crime to mismanage a steam boiler? Well, it is."

"Quite right," agreed Mr. Magnus, the indictment clerk. "The great difficulty for the perfectly honest man nowadays is to avoid some act or omission which the legislature has seen fit to make a crime without his knowledge. Refilling a Sarsaparilla bottle, for instance, or getting up a masquerade ball or going fis.h.i.+ng or playing on Sunday or loitering about a building to overhear what people are talking about inside--"

"That's no crime," protested the captain scornfully.

"Yes, it is too!" retorted Mr. Magnus, otherwise known to his fellows as Caput, because of his supposed cerebral inflation. "Just like it is a crime to have any kind of a show or procession on Sunday except a funeral, in which case it's a crime to make a disbursing noise at it."

"What's a disbursing noise?" demanded O'Brien.

"I don't know," admitted Magnus. "But that's the law anyway. You can't make a disbursing noise at a funeral on Sunday."

"Oh, h.e.l.l!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the captain. "Come to think of it, it's a crime to spit. What man is safe?"

"It occurs to me," continued Mr. Magnus thoughtfully, "that it is a crime under the law to build a house on another man's land; now I should say that there was a close a.n.a.logy between doing that and sleeping in his bed."

"Hear! Hear!" commented O'Brien. "Caput Magnus, otherwise known as Big Head, there is no doubt but that your fertile brain can easily devise a way out of our present difficulty."

"Well, I've no time to waste on tramp cases," remarked District Attorney Peckham. "I've something more important to attend to. Indict this fellow and send him up quick. Charge him with everything in sight and trust in the Lord. That's the only thing to be done. Don't bother me about it, that's all!"

Meantime Mr. Hepplewhite became more and more agitated. Entirely against his will and, so far as he could see, without any fault of his own, he suddenly found himself the center of a violent and acrimonious controversy respecting the fundamental and sacred rights of freemen which threatened to disrupt society and extinguish the supremacy of the dominant local political organization.

On the one hand he was acclaimed by the conservative pulpit and press as a public-spirited citizen who had done exactly the right thing--disinterestedly enforced the law regardless of his own convenience and safety as a matter of principle and for the sake of the community--a moral hero; on the other, though he was president of several charitable organizations and at least one orphan asylum he was execrated as a heartless brute, an oppressor of the poor, an octopus, a soulless capitalist who fattened on the innocent and helpless and who--Mr. Hepplewhite was a bachelor--probably if the truth could be known lived a life of horrid depravity and crime.

Indeed there was a man named Tutt, of whom Mr. Hepplewhite had never before heard, who publicly declared that he, Tutt, would show him, Hepplewhite, up for what he was and make him pay with his body and his blood, to say nothing of his money, for what he had done and caused to be done. And so Mr. Hepplewhite became even more agitated, until he dreamed of this Tutt as an enormous bird like the fabled roc, with a malignant face and a huge hooked beak that some day would nip him in the abdomen and fly, croaking, away with him. Mrs. Witherspoon had returned to Aiken, and after the first flood of commiserations from his friends on Lists Numbers One, Two, Three and Four he felt neglected, lonely and rather fearful.

And then one morning something happened that upset his equanimity entirely. He had just started out for a walk in the park when a flashy person who looked like an actor walked impudently up to him and handed him a piece of paper in which was wrapped a silver half dollar. In a word Mr. Hepplewhite was subpoenaed and the nervous excitement attendant upon that operation nearly caused his collapse. For he was thereby commanded to appear before the Court of General Sessions of the Peace upon the following Monday at ten a.m. as a witness in a criminal action prosecuted by the People of the State of New York against Hans Schmidt.

Moreover, the paper was a dirty-brown color and bore the awful name of Tutt. He returned immediately to the house and telephoned for Mr.

Edgerton, his lawyer, who at once jumped into a taxi on the corner of Wall and Broad Streets and hurried uptown.

"Edgerton," said Hepplewhite faintly as the lawyer entered his library, "this whole unfortunate affair has almost made me sick. I had nothing to do with the arrest of this man Schmidt. The police did everything. And now I'm ordered to appear as a witness! Why, I hardly looked at the man.

I shouldn't know him if I saw him. Do I have to go to court?"

Mr. Edgerton smiled genially in a manner which he thought would encourage Mr. Hepplewhite.

"I suppose you'll have to go to court. You can't help that, you know, if you've been subpoenaed. But you can't testify to anything that I can see. It's just a formality."

"Formality!" groaned his client. "Well, I supposed the arrest was just a formality."

Mr. Edgerton smiled again rather unconvincingly.

"Well, you see, you can't always tell what will happen when you once start something," he began.

"But I didn't start anything," answered Mr. Hepplewhite. "I had nothing to say about it."

At that moment Bibby appeared in the doorway.

"Excuse me, sir," he said. "There is a young man outside who asked me to tell you that he has a paper he wishes to serve on you--and would you mind saving him the trouble of waiting for you to go out?"

"Another!" gagged Mr. Hepplewhite.

"Yes, sir! Thank you, sir," stammered Bibby.

Mr. Hepplewhite looked inquiringly at Mr. Edgerton and rose feebly.

"He'll get you sooner or later," declared the lawyer. "A man as well known as you can't avoid process."

Mr. Hepplewhite bit his lips and went out into the hall.

Presently he returned carrying a legal-looking bunch of papers.

"Well, what is it this time?" asked Edgerton jocosely.

"It's a suit for false imprisonment for one hundred thousand dollars!"

choked Mr. Hepplewhite.

Mr. Edgerton looked shocked.

"Well, now you've got to convict him!" he declared.

"Convict him?" retorted Mr. Hepplewhite. "I don't want to convict him.

I'd gladly give a hundred thousand dollars to get out of the--the--darn thing!"

Which was as near profanity as he had ever permitted himself to go.

Upon the following Monday Mr. Hepplewhite proceeded to court--flanked by his distinguished counsel in frock coats and tall hats--simply because he had been served with a dirty-brown subpoena by Tutt & Tutt; and his distress was not lessened by the crowd of reporters who joined him at the entrance of the Criminal Courts Building; or by the flashlight bomb that was exploded in the corridor in order that the evening papers might reproduce his picture on the front page. He had never been so much in the public eye before, and he felt slightly defiled. For some curious reason he had the feeling that he and not Schmidt was the actual defendant charged with being guilty of something; nor was this impression dispelled even by listening to the indictment by which the Grand Jury charged Schmidt in eleven counts with burglary in the first, second and third degrees and with the crime of entering his, Hepplewhite's, house under circ.u.mstances not amounting to a burglary but with intent to commit a felony, as follows:

"Therefore, to wit, on the eleventh day of January in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and nineteen in the night-time of the said day at the ward, city and county aforesaid the dwelling house of one John De Puyster Hepplewhite there situate, feloniously and burglariously did break into and enter there being then and there a human being in said dwelling house, with intent to commit some crime therein, to wit, the goods, chattels, and personal property of the said John De Puyster Hepplewhite, then and there being found, then and there feloniously and burglariously to steal, take and carry away one silver tea service of the value of five hundred dollars and one pair of opera gla.s.ses of the value of five dollars each with force and arms----"

"But that silver tea service cost fifteen thousand dollars and weighs eight hundred pounds!" whispered Mr. Hepplewhite.

"Order in the court!" shouted Captain Phelan, pounding upon the oak rail of the bar, and Mr. Hepplewhite subsided.

Yet as he sat there between his lawyers listening to all the extraordinary things that the Grand Jury evidently had believed Schmidt intended to do, the suspicion began gradually to steal over him that something was not entirely right somewhere. Why, it was ridiculous to charge the man with trying to carry off a silver service weighing nearly half a ton when he simply had gone to bed and fallen asleep. Still, perhaps that was the law.

However, when the a.s.sistant district attorney opened the People's case to the jury Mr. Hepplewhite began to feel much more at ease. Indeed O'Brien made it very plain that the defendant had been guilty of a very grievous--he p.r.o.nounced it "gree-vious"--offense in forcing his way into another man's private house. It might or might not be burglary--that would depend upon the testimony--but in any event it was a criminal, illegal entry and he should ask for a conviction. A man's house was his castle and--to quote from that most famous of orators and statesmen--Edmund Burke--"the wind might enter, the rain might enter, but the King of England might not enter!" Thus Schmidt could not enter the house of Hepplewhite without making himself amenable to the law.

Hepplewhite was filled with admiration for Mr. O'Brien, and his drooping spirits reared their wilted heads as the prosecutor called Bibby to the stand and elicited from him the salient features of the case. The jury was vastly interested in the butler personally, as well as his account rendered in the choicest c.o.c.kney of how he had discovered Schmidt in his master's bed. O'Brien bowed to Mr. Tutt and told him that he might cross-examine.