Arthur Train

“ If a New York judgment debtor who has been arrested gives bond in the requisite amount and keeps within the boundaries of Manhattan Island he can disport himself freely from the Battery to the Harlem Canal, and from the Hudson to the East River, eating at Delmonico’s and sleeping at the Waldorf, spending his mornings in Central Park, his afternoons at the movies and his evenings at the theatre, and still technically be in prison, for he is within the jail limits as defined by law. ”

“ Crabb in dudgeon. “It may be a joke to you, but a nice thing for me to have it in all the papers just as I’m going away for the summer! I’d almost rather pay the fifty thousand dollars and be done with it!”
“Not much you won’t!” asserted the lawyer grandly. “And your husband won’t go to jail, either; that is, really go to jail. All he has to do is to give a bond for the amount of the judgment, and under the law he gets the liberties of the jail. At the end of six months the bond is automatically discharged and that’s the end of it. Nobody need ever know he’s even been arrested.” ”

“ Thus, as No. 1112 dropped beneath the cellars of the western bank of the Hudson, T. Otis worked his way at Bonnie Doon’s coat tails through the nine other cars, his heart beating with high expectancy.
Over in the terminal building, at his desk in Room 223, sat Mr. Joshua Carman, the general superintendent, obligated by his word of honor to do Mr. Tutt a favor. Mr. Carman represented the third, or “What-Then,” side of the old lawyer’s triangular problem, and without him this story would have remained unwritten. ”

“ There’s not a chance in the world. As I tell you, a man who has secured the liberties of the jail can go anywhere he wants in New York County. That’s why I say that being arrested for debt is a joke.”
“If that’s all being arrested amounts to,” pondered Mrs. Crabb, “why have any jail limits at all? The only thing I don’t like about it is that Otis can’t come down to Atlantic City over the week-ends.” ”

“ Crabb. “We’ve got that!”
“Any lawyer can get a verdict for the plaintiff in a damage suit,” declared T. Otis. “But it takes a real one to collect a judgment.”
“My idea of a real lawyer is Lefkovitsky,” said Fozzy. “If I ever get into trouble I’m going to him. Think of his being able to cook up a way for you to spend most of the summer down here and yet be in jail all the time! Yet it’s simple enough. Anybody might have thought of it. We go away together and we come back together, and your comin’ back makes it useless to serve papers on me. Ha-ha! Bean work! Bean work!” ”

“ Tutt encouragingly as he felt beneath the chair for his stovepipe hat. “Your mother and the children are going right on living in the apartment, and there is a woman who comes in every day to do the cooking and take care of them.”
“But who pays her?” asked the man in the frame hoarsely. “I had practically nothing in the bank.”
“Oh, that’s all right!” Mr. Tutt assured him. “The money is being advanced against the fifty thousand dollars which T. Otis Crabb will eventually pay you.” ”

“ Tutt. “Meantime just you call up this Crabb animal and inform him that unless he sidles over here with twenty thousand dollars by to-morrow morning at ten o’clock we’ll bring suit against him and his wife for one hundred thousand, and that it’s going to cost them exactly five thousand more for every week he holds back. Meantime tell Barrington’s mother to send us the bills for the rent and household expenses. It isn’t exactly ethical for us to pay ’em, but what’s a little ethics when an old woman and four children are starving? Eh, Tutt? Did you say you wanted to kill a man? ”

“ Tutt innocently. “Game? I don’t understand—— Oh, now I remember you! You’re the man who owes my client Barrington fifty thousand dollars, aren’t you? Oh, yes, of course!”
T. Otis sank weakly on the arm of the adjacent seat.
“What a wonderful tunnel this is, isn’t it?” rambled on Mr. Tutt. “Marvellous bit of engineering skill! Reaches all the way from New Jersey to New York. Now, if you’ll just look out of the end window there you can see Signal 904. You and I are still in the State of New Jersey, while the forward half of the train is already in New York.” ”

“ Like seeks like. A smart-Aleck client is apt to engage a smart-Aleck lawyer, much as men are said, out of personal vanity, to marry women who in general resemble them. Thus it was natural that T. Otis should have retained Aaron T. to defend the damage suits brought on behalf of the Barringtons against him and his wife. It was also natural that after Aaron had blustered around for several months, loudly asserting that Tutt & Tutt could never get a verdict against his clients, the several juries interested should have soaked the latter an aggregate of fifty thousand dollars in damages. ”

“ She might just as well have married her dancing teacher, but, as it happened, she ran into T. Otis at a thé dansant; thought him a dashing fellow. She had always wanted a dashing husband, and now she had one—gave him three thousand a year pin money. On their return from the honeymoon at Miami he developed influenza, had to give up work and lost all interest in girth control. After a month or so he got on Lucretia’s nerves, sitting around the house and doing nothing but take the little white dog out in the afternoon. ”

“ Number 1112 is the snappy train, leaving Atlantic City at 2.40 on Monday afternoons, that snappy fellows like T. Otis take back to New York City—when they are in jail for debt. It is a flyer—leaves Manhattan Transfer on the Jersey side, where you change for lower New York and Brooklyn, at 5.24 and then ducks down through the double-barrelled tunnel under the Hudson and shoots into the lower level of the big station on Thirty-fourth Street at 5.40. When there is a big rush of homing jailbirds No. ”

“ He stood quaking with rage, his fist shaking in mid-air.
“U-r-r-h!” he roared. “And, by heck, I will!”
III “There are two kinds of lawyers,” said Joseph H. Choate—“the one who knows the law and the one who knows the judge.” ”