Читать книгу The 13th District. A Story of a Candidate онлайн

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Jake Reinhardt, who never had money to buy bread or meat, seemed always able to procure beer and tobacco, an incongruity Emily could not understand at first. She learned afterwards that Jake knew a saloon-keeper who had a mixture of kind-heartedness and long-headedness, the first of which led him to trust Reinhardt for the beer and tobacco, while the second justified the course because Reinhardt’s presence at his bar made one consumer more when a round of drinks was ordered for the house. Then, one day, suddenly, just as Emily thought she was getting the family on its feet, Reinhardt felled a man in the saloon with a blow of a billiard cue, and was thrown into jail on a charge of assault with intent to kill. His victim was lying in a precarious state; possibly he might die; Reinhardt might yet be held to answer to a charge of murder.

Emily found Mrs. Reinhardt with a face bloated by tears, staring in mute anguish at this new calamity she could not comprehend. As Emily’s first thought in the former difficulties had been a doctor, now her first thought was a lawyer; but it seemed that one had already appeared, and Mrs. Reinhardt in her broken speech extolled him as a ministering angel. It was plain that he had taken up the cause out of pity for Reinhardt’s defenseless condition, perhaps in a belief in his moral innocence, which the blundering police could not or would not admit. As the affair turned out, Emily’s sympathies proved to have been as fully justified as the young lawyer’s, and what she then observed of the practical administration of justice in criminal courts only confirmed many of the sociological heresies that then were sprouting in her mind, quite as much, indeed, to her own distress as to her father’s.