href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@44633@[email protected]#the-coward-and-his-conscience">The Coward and His Conscience
XXXIII The Battle of the Headlines
XXXIV A Way That Women Have
XXXV On Preliminary Examination
XXXVI A Promise of Strength
XXXVII The Terms of Surrender
XXXVIII Sunday in All People's
XXXIX The Cup Too Full
XL The Elder in the Chair

HELD TO ANSWER

CHAPTER I

THE FACE THAT DID NOT FIT

Two well-dressed men waited outside the rail on what was facetiously denominated the mourners' bench. One was a packer of olives, the other the owner of oil wells. A third, an orange shipper, leaned against the rail, pulling at his red moustaches and yearning wistfully across at a wattle-throated person behind the roll-top desk who was talking impatiently on the telephone. Just as the receiver was hung up with an audible click, a buzzer on the wall croaked harshly,—one long and two short croaks.

Instantly there was a scuffling of feet upon the linoleum over in a corner, where mail was being opened by a huge young fellow with the profile of a mountain and a gale of tawny hair blown up from his brow. Undoubling suddenly, this rangy figure of a man shot upward with Jack-in-the-box abruptness and a violence which threatened the stability of both the desk before him and the absurdly small typewriter stand upon his left. Seizing a select portion of the correspondence, he lunged past the roll-top desk of Heitmuller, the chief clerk, and aimed toward the double doors of grained oak which loomed behind. But his progress was grotesque, for he careened like a camel when he walked. In the first stride or two these careenings only threatened to be dangerous, but in the third or fourth they made good their promise. One lurching hip joint banged the drawn-out leaf of the chief clerk's desk, sweeping a shower of papers to the floor.

"John—dammit!" snapped Heitmuller irritably. The other hip caracoled against the unopened half of the double doors as John yawed through. The door complained loudly, rattling upon its hinges and in its brazen sockets, so that for a moment there was clatter and disturbance from one end of the office to the other.

The orange shipper started nervously, and the chief clerk, cocking his head gander-wise, gazed in disgust at the confusion on the floor, while far within Robert Mitchell, the General Freight Agent of the California Consolidated Railway, lifted a massive face from his desk with a look of mild reproof in his small blue eyes.

Yet when the huge stenographer came back, and with another scuffling of clumsy feet stooped to retrieve the litter about Heitmuller's revolving chair, he seemed so regretful and his features lighted with such a helplessly apologetic smile that even his awkwardness appeared commendable, since it was so obviously seasoned with the grace of perfectly good intent.

Appreciation of this was advertised in the forgiving chuckle of the chief clerk who, standing now at the rail, remarked sotto voce to the orange shipper: "John is as good as a vaudeville act!"

At this the red moustaches undulated appreciatively, while the two "mourners" laughed so audibly that the awkward man, once more in his chair, darted an embarrassed glance at them, and the red flush came again to his face. He suspected they were laughing at him, and as if to comfort himself, a finger and thumb went into his right vest pocket and drew out a clipping from the advertising columns of the morning paper. Holding it deep in his hand, he read furtively:

ACTING TAUGHT. Charles Kenton, character actor, temporarily disengaged, will receive a few select pupils in dramatic expression at his studio in The Albemarle. Terms reasonable.

Then John looked across aggressively at the men who had laughed. They were not laughing now, but nodding in his direction, and whispering busily.

What were they saying? That he was a joke, a failure? That he had been in this chair seven years? That he was a big, snubbed, defeated, over-worked handy-man about this big, loosely organized office? That in seven years he had neither been able to get himself promoted nor discharged? No doubt!

As if to get away from the thought, John turned from his typewriter to the open window and looked out. There was the spire of the grand old First Church down there below him. Yonder were the sky-notching business blocks of the pushing city of Los Angeles, as it was in the early nineteen hundreds. There, too, were the villa-crowned heights to the north, shut in at last by the barren ridges of the Sierra Madre Mountains, some of which, in this month of January, were snow-capped.

But here were these foolish men still nodding and whispering. Good fellows, too, but blind. What did they know about him really?

They knew that he was a stenographer, but they did not know that he was a stenographer to the glory of God!—one who cleaned his typewriter, dusted his desk, opened the mail, wrote his letters, ate, walked, slept, all to the honor of his creator—that the whole of life to him was a sort of sacrament.

They thought he was beaten and discouraged, an industrial slave, drawn helplessly into the cogs. They, poor, purblind materialists, were without vision. They did not know that there were finer things than pickles and crude oil. They did not know that he was to soar; that already his wings were budding, nor that he lived in an inner state of spiritual exaltation as delicious as it was unsuspected. They pitied him; they laughed commiseratingly. He did not want their commiseration; he spurned their laughter and their pity. He was full of youth and the exuberance of hope. He was full of an expanding strength that made him stronger as his dream grew brighter. Only his eyes were tired. The cross lights were bad. For a moment he shaded his brow tenderly with his hand, reflecting that he must hereafter use an eye-shade by day as