He strode away, cursing at his workmen as he tramped along the side of the ditch.
Farr knocked at the garret room of Etienne early that evening.
“I want you to come with me,” he commanded.
The old man obeyed without questions. As they walked along the streets Farr did not volunteer information. He was grimly sure that if Etienne should receive an inkling of what was expected of him the old man would not stop running until he had crossed the Canadian border.
They were ten minutes worming their way through the press that packed the corridors of City Hall. Groups were bulked at the doors admitting to the aldermen's room--men thatched against each other and overlapping like bees in a swarm at the door of a hive.
But the young man was tall and his shoulders were broad and he kept uttering the magic words, “Room for witnesses!” In his own consciousness he knew that what he should attempt to testify to that night was not on the slate, but the crowd accepted him as one of those from whom they anticipated entertainment, and allowed him to pass--and Etienne, holding to his young friend's coat, followed close and made his way before the throng could close in again.
The hearing began and progressed, and there was much laughter when the delinquencies of certain fat policemen were related--it was a free-and-easy affair--a sort of midsummer fantasy in municipal politics--a squabble between ward bosses who had become jealous in matters of the distribution of police patronage.
Walker Farr, standing against the wall of the audience-chamber, did not laugh. He was busy with thoughts of his own. This bland fooling in municipal matters while stealthy death, protected by city franchise, dripped, so he believed, from every faucet in the tenement-house district, stirred his bitter indignation. Etienne Provancher stood beside him, and the old man did not laugh, either, because he did not understand in the least what those men were talking about. And he was very uneasy, wistfully awe-stricken, hardly daring to touch with his hands the polished oak at his back. He was in the great _hotel de ville_ whose exterior he had stared at many times without presuming or daring to enter the broad portals.
Then there came a recess while the mayor examined papers at his desk. The aldermen leaned back in their chairs with lighted cigars.