Edgar Rice Burroughs

“ Ogden Secor had always known nice girls, pretty girls, rich girls. He did not succumb to the wiles of Sophia Welles at first sight, for she had nothing new to offer him; but she had that way with her which some women have of suggesting to a man a manner of proprietorship over them--a something that appeals to the protective instinct of the male.
It is done insidiously; you cannot put your finger on a single act that typifies it; yet before long the man comes to feel, without thinking about it, perhaps, that the woman belongs to him in a way. ”

“ It is not the man who falls who receives the censure of his fellows; it's the man who falls and won't get up--who lies wallowing in the filth of his degradation. The world admires the man who can 'come back'--it hates a quitter.
"You have told me that you love me." She was speaking rapidly, as though everything in the world hinged upon the element of time. "You have asked me to love you. Do you expect me to love a quitter? You are thinking this minute of adding the final ignominy to your downfall; you are thinking this minute, Ogden Secor, of taking your own life. ”

“ As she passed him a sudden impulse prompted Ogden Secor to stop her. He could not have explained why he did so, but before he realized it he had asked the girl to wait in the witness-room without until he came.
A great and sudden pity for her had welled within him at her last words: "There are no good men." To have spoken to such a woman as she would have seemed an utter impossibility to Ogden Secor a brief half-hour before, and now he had asked her to wait for him, and in his mind was a determination to help her--to save her from the hideous life she had chosen. ”

“ To what awful depths of self-abasement must Ogden Secor have sunk to voice such a sentiment as this! June felt the tears coming to her eyes.
"You mustn't say that," she said. "The sheriff told me all about it, and that you--it was in self-defence."
"It isn't that," said Secor. "It's that I was there at all--gambling in a saloon--and drunk. Drunk! I should have thought that would have killed whatever natural sympathy a woman might feel for a man who had killed another, even in self-defence. And," he continued, "do you remember the warning that you gave me the first day that I was in Goliath?" ”

“ She was convinced that the "swell job at the Beverly Club " would not be for her, even though the grand jury failed to indict Farris.
A thousand times during the past bitter months she had thrashed out the problem of her life; a thousand times she had determined to seek other employment when she could leave Farris's; and a thousand times she had realized that her life was already ruined past redemption, and that never again could she live among decent people with the constant fear hanging over her that the horrible secret of her past might at any moment be discovered. ”

“ I couldn't believe that a girl like you belonged in the underworld. It was not because of the fact that you are a very beautiful girl, but that your face and expression reflect a sweetness of character that seemed entirely out of place in the life you have been leading. There must have been a sudden, subconscious appeal to the protective instinct that is supposed to have been very strong in primitive man--in no other way can I account for the immediate desire I had to save you. Those are my reasons, if you can call them reasons, for asking you to wait here for me. ”

“ I am wanting to shake hands with an entirely new girl, and to prove that you intend to be a new girl you must let me."
He smiled the clean, wholesome smile that made his strong young face doubly attractive. There was no refusing Ogden Secor anything that he asked when he smiled, and so the girl placed her hand in his.
"This is the ratification of your pledge," he said. "I shall never doubt for a moment that you are keeping it. Until I return, then," and bowing he left her there, a new hope and a great happiness in her heart.
If one good man could forgive her her past, there must be others. ”

“ Secor," said Doarty. "Her name ain't Lathrop--it's Lynch, Maggie Lynch, and when I first seen her she was an inmate of Abe Farris's joint on Dearborn."
Secor looked at June questioningly. There was an expression of disbelief in his eyes. The girl dropped her own before his steady gaze.
The horror of it! If he could know--if Ogden Secor of all other men on earth could but know the truth--the truth that not even the shrewd Mr. Doarty had guessed. ”

“ She did not say what else Mr. Doarty had told her, principally by innuendo. Self was forgotten in the real affliction she felt at sight of her employer's pitiable condition. Secor looked up at her, his old, pleasant smile lighting his features.
"Oh, I guess it's not so bad," he said. "They ought to have me out of here in no time."
Miss Welles came closer to the bedside. Instinctively she guessed why Doarty had brought the girl here. Secor alone seemed to realize no connection between Mr. Stickler's recent hint and the coming of June Lathrop with the plain clothes man. ”

“ The grand jury, while not quite the tool of the State attorney's office, is considered by them a more or less harmless impediment to the transaction of the business of their office--a burden to be borne, but lightened in the most expeditious manner.
"I, as foreman, am a dummy; the secretary is a dummy; the sergeant-at-arms is a dummy. We look to the assistant State attorney for direction in our every move. We come from businesses in which we have never, in all probability, come in contact with criminal law, and we are expected to grasp the machinery of our new duties on a moment's notice. ”

“ He grew to take a keen pleasure in his physical fitness, and with renewed health of body came a return of his former mental efficiency--what the surgeons, tinkering with his hurt skull, had been unable to accomplish, nature did; slowly, it is true, but none the less effectively.
As his vigor of mind increased, his memory returned in part, so that he was constantly haunted by a growing conviction that somewhere, some place far from Goliath, he had known June Lathrop, and that she had been intimately associated with that other life that was once again taking concrete form in his recollections. ”

“ It was Sammy, the one-time office-boy of the corporation known as John Secor & Co.
"Miss Lathrop," he whispered. "Miss Lathrop, I've been trying to find you for years. I'm a regular detective now; but the best job I ever did I did for you and nobody never knew anything about it. Don't you remember me?"
She shook hands with him, and he followed her from the court-room. There was another who followed her, too. A sun-tanned young man whose haggard features bore clear witness to the mental suffering he had endured. ”

“ Pursen stifled his true emotions, and with a sorrowful shake of his head turned sadly from his thankless task; and, indeed, why should a shepherd waste his valuable time upon a worthless sheep that preferred to stay astray? It was evident that he had lost sight entirely of the greater good that would follow the conviction of Farris, for he had not even mentioned the case to the girl or attempted to encourage her to make the most of this opportunity to bring the man to justice. ”

“ It was neither fear nor horror--the sheriff could not have interpreted it, for he knew not to what heights pride of name, of family, of station, birth, and breeding may lift a man above the sordid crimes, nor how awful is the plunge from such a pinnacle to the bottomless pit of shame which Ogden Secor's naked soul was plumbing that instant. ”

“ All that he knew at first was that she had been an inmate of the house where John Secor had dropped dead of heart disease. The State, to establish a motive brought a slender, gray-haired woman from a little village fifty miles south of the metropolis.
She was sprung as a surprise upon the defense, and as she was called to the witness chair from the antechamber, June Lathrop half rose from her chair--her lips parted and her face dead white. ”

“ There is something about the usual plain clothes man--whether his build, his carriage, or the way be wears his clothes, is difficult to say--that tags him almost as convincingly as would a uniform.
"Ah, Mr. Doarty, good morning," purred Mr. Pursen. He recognized June with an inclination of his head--very slight indeed.
The girl crossed directly to Secor's side.
"Oh, Mr. Secor," she exclaimed, her voice trembling with emotion. "It is awful. I had not seen a paper this morning and did not know until Mr. Doarty came for me, and told me." ”

“ I couldn't see it, but from what happened after I knew it held the combination to your safe, for I seen the robber that was shot when he was put on trial, and he was one of the guys that Stickler met in Farris's. I was so scared I didn't dare tell nobody."
Ogden turned toward June with a faint smile. "You see," he said, "that one by one your defenses are reduced--aren't you about ready to capitulate?"
"I guess there is no other way," she sighed; "but it seems that the world must be all awry when hope of happiness appears so close within my grasp!" ”

“ Ogden Secor, friends with all the world now, entered into conversation with him.
"Wish I was back in Idaho," remarked the stranger, "where I could get thawed out and see that the sun was doing business at the same old stand."
Idaho! It awakened something in Secor's memory.
"I thought that it was usually pretty cold there," he said.
"Not where I come from," replied the stranger. "I got a little fruit-ranch down in the South-Western corner of the State. Greatest little climate in the world, sir; never gets anywheres near zero; and sunshine! ”

“ When Secor's time in the chain-gang was up, June was waiting for him outside the jail.
Love had given her the power to read in the humiliation of the man she loved something of the stern resolve that had found lodgment in his mind. ”

“ The sudden sickly pallor which overspread the face of the office manager did not pass unnoticed by either June or Sammy.
"Did they say what they wanted of me?" asked Mr. Stickler, controlling his voice with an effort.
Sammy lowered his own to a mysterious whisper. "They want you," he said, "to buy some tickets to the annual policemen's benefit at the Auditorium."
"Show them in," commanded Mr. Stickler in evident relief--even the best of men are often obsessed with an inexplicable terror of the minions of the law. ”

“ For an instant a little girl had looked into the eyes of the Rev. Mr. Pursen, prepared to do and be whatever Mr. Pursen, out of the fulness of brotherly love, should counsel and guide her to do and be; but Mr. Pursen saw only a woman of the town, and to such were his words addressed with an argument which he imagined would appeal strongly to her kind. ”

“ Involuntarily Ogden Secor's mouth opened but whether in surprise or because of a terrible shock to his love and pride it would have been difficult to say. Miss Welles attributed it to the latter. At last he found words.
"My dear Sophia," he said, "you know perfectly well that if you love Mr. Pursen I shall be the last person on earth to stand in the way of your realizing to the full every happiness that may be found at his disposal. ”

“ To June Lathrop it meant nothing. It was what she had expected; but though it freed her from an unjust charge, it could never right the hideous wrong that had been done her, first by an individual in conceiving and perpetrating the wrong, and then by the community, as represented by the police, in dragging the whole hideous fabric of her shame before the world.
As is customary upon the acquittal of a defendant in a criminal case, a horde of the morbidly curious thronged about June to offer their congratulations. She turned from them wearily, seeking her mother ”

“ Only the people who elect them and whose money pays them can force them. We must keep the horrors of the underworld constantly before the voters and tax-payers until they rise and demand that the festering sore in the very heart of their magnificent city be cured forever. ”

“ Before those three awful days were over, Ogden Secor was more thoroughly sober than ever he had been in all his life--even in the days that he did not drink. He worked with eyes bent upon the ground, never once raising them. Through his mind ran four words--the words of hope and encouragement that June Lathrop had spoken: " There's the river." ”

“ He paled a little at the thought of the ordeal which faced him; but he would go through with it, as to that he was determined, and if he could help the girl to a better life he would do so. Had he guessed the interpretation the girl put upon his request to speak with her outside the jury-room he would have flushed rather than paled. To her all men were hunters--all women quarry.
The jurors were discussing the wisdom of voting a true bill. All seemed to harbor not the slightest doubt that the girl had been held against her will in Farris's place. ”

“ I am sorry that it had to be so, but it is, and we must make the best of it, just as we must make the best of the memory of what I became here in Goliath--the town drunkard. I want you, June, and now there is nothing more to keep you from me. Tell me, dear, that there is nothing more."
She was about to reply when a broad-shouldered man arose from a table behind them. As he approached June was the first to see his face. At sight of him she turned deathly pale--it was Doarty. He stepped to her side and laid his hand upon her shoulder. ”