At the door I said, “Listen, there’s a taxi-stand around the corner. You won’t mind if I don’t take you home?”
She put a hand on my arm. “I do mind. Please —” The street was badly lighted. Her face was like a child’s. She took her.hand off my arm. “But if you’d rather . . .”
“I think I’d rather.”
She said slowly, “I like you, Jack Bye, and I’m awfully grateful for —”
I said, “Aw, that’s all right,” and we shook hands and I went back into the speakeasy.
Toots was still behind the bar. He came up to where I stood. “You oughtn’t to do that to me,” he said, shaking his head mournfully.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“You oughtn’t to do it to yourself,” he went on just as sadly. “This ain’t Harlem, boy, and if old Judge Warner finds out his daughter’s running around with you and coming in here he can make it plenty tough for both of us. I like you, boy, but you got to remember it don’t make no difference how light your skin is or how many colleges you went to, you’re still nigger.”
I said, “Well, what do you suppose I want to be? A Chinaman?”
THE JUDGE LAUGHED LAST
“THE TROUBLE with this country,” Old Man Covey unexpectedly exploded, emphasizing his words with repeated beats of a gnarled forefinger on the newspaper he had been reading, “is that the courts have got a stranglehold on it! Law? There ain’t no law! There’s courts and there’s judges, and this thing you call the law is a weapon they use to choke human enterprise — to discourage originality and progress!”
The portion of the morning paper upon which the old man’s assault was concentrated, I saw with difficulty, held the report of a decision of the Supreme Court in connec-
tion with some labor difficulties in the West. Old Man Covey, I knew, couldn’t be personally interested in either side of the dispute. He had as little to do with capital as with labor, which was very little. For eight years now — since the day when a street preacher had turned “Big-dog” Covey from the ways of crime, to become plain John Covey and, later, Old Man Covey — he had subsisted upon the benevolence of a son-in-law.
His interest in this case was, then, purely academic. But his attitude was undoubtedly tinged by his earlier experience with the criminal courts, which had been more than superficial, and I suspected that some especially bitter memory had engendered this outburst.
So I rolled another cigarette and led him gently along the road of argumentation — the most direct path, I had learned, to the interior of his contrary old mind.
“Being a beak,” I said, using the vernacular term for judge in an attempt to do all I could to stir up the portions of his remembrance that had to do with his days of youth and lawlessness, “is a tough job. Laws are complicated and puzzling, and it isn’t easy to straighten them out so that they fit particular cases. Most of the beaks do very well, I
think.”
“You think so, do you?” the old scoundrel snarled at me. “Well, let me tell you, sonny, you don’t know a damned thing about it! I could tell you stories about beaks and their ways that would knock your eye out!”
I put all the skepticism I could summon into a smile, confident now that I had him.
“You look at things from your own side,” I replied,
“and in those days you were on the wrong side. Now I don’t say that judges don’t make mistakes now and then. They do. They’re only human. But I never heard of a case where you could say that a judge had positively twisted the law around to —”
That turned the trick. He cursed and snorted and glared at me, and I grinned my insincere doubts, and the story finally came out.
“Me and ‘Flogger’ Rork was on the road together some years ago, with a gun apiece and a couple big handkerchiefs to hide our mugs behind when we needed to. All-night grease-joints was our meat, and we done ourselves pretty well. We’d knock over a couple a night some nights. We’d drift into them separate at three or four in the morning, not letting on we knew each other, and stall over coffee and sinkers until we was alone with the guy behind the counter. Then we’d flash the rods on him, take what was in the damper, and slide on. No big hauls, you understand, but a steady, reliable income.