demanded.

"What's right got to do with it?" he demanded back. "You see all those
books." He moved his hand over the array of volumes on the walls of his
tiny office. "All my reading and studying of them has taught me that
law is one thing and right is another thing. Ask any lawyer. You go to
Sunday-school to learn what is right. But you go to those books to learn
. . . law."

"Do you mean to tell me that Jackson had the right on his side and yet
was beaten?" I queried tentatively. "Do you mean to tell me that there
is no justice in Judge Caldwell's court?"

The little lawyer glared at me a moment, and then the belligerence faded
out of his face.

"I hadn't a fair chance," he began whining again. "They made a fool out
of Jackson and out of me, too. What chance had I? Colonel Ingram is
a great lawyer. If he wasn't great, would he have charge of the law
business of the Sierra Mills, of the Erston Land Syndicate, of the
Berkeley Consolidated, of the Oakland, San Leandro, and Pleasanton
Electric? He's a corporation lawyer, and corporation lawyers are not
paid for being fools.* What do you think the Sierra Mills alone give him
twenty thousand dollars a year for? Because he's worth twenty thousand
dollars a year to them, that's what for. I'm not worth that much. If
I was, I wouldn't be on the outside, starving and taking cases like
Jackson's. What do you think I'd have got if I'd won Jackson's case?"

* The function of the corporation lawyer was to serve, by
corrupt methods, the money-grabbing propensities of the