"Oh, yes," said Leighton wearily, "I mean it. By the time he’s done with the case, he’ll see to it nobody knows anything. Why, man alive, that coroner’s the cousin of the ward leader."
"But you’ll try?" urged Luke. "You’ll fight?"
Leighton swung back in his swivel-chair. He put his feet on his desk and clasped his hands behind his head.
"No," he said, "I won’t. What’s the use? I’m getting tired of trying to do things with all the people taking no interest and a Democratic Mayor and Police Commissioner fighting against me." He spoke like a man at last driven to declare something he has long striven to conceal. "If ever I want to be re-elected," he continued, "this office has got to be more careful about taking up cases that are lost to begin with."
§4. Luke fought hard with the ugly doubt this incident raised. He tried to convince himself that Leighton had spoken only in a moment of passing weariness and discouragement; but he daily found this endeavor more difficult. What suddenly turned his mind to other things was the news that an aunt, his father’s widowed sister who lived in Philadelphia, had died, leaving him a hundred thousand dollars.
§1. Luke had never expected to be possessed of so much money. His father’s income was comfortable, but it was well understood that the family lived somewhat beyond it, and that what might be left at the Congressman’s death would go to his widow for life and, after that, to Luke’s sister Jane. The Philadelphia aunt had inherited her fortune from her husband, and her affection for her relatives was generally supposed to be slight. Luke, consequently, found himself in a position for which he was totally unprepared.
"I suppose," he said to Ruysdael, to whom he went for advice, "that I ought to invest it."
"You ought to lose no time," counseled Ruysdael. "A hundred thousand dollars is too much for a young man to have at his call in New York. It’s not enough to spend, and it’s too much to gamble with in the bucket-shops."
Ruysdael thought he knew a safe investment.
"There’s a man named Forbes," he said—"Wallace K. Forbes, who came to the offices of our estate the other day when I happened to be there. He wanted to borrow just the amount you name, and my agent says it’s a good thing; but we happened to have a bigger one on hand. His concern’s an old one, one of the oldest American firms in its line; this man’s the third generation of his family to be in it, so it’s well-established and has the good old-fashioned element of family pride behind it. Nowadays, you don’t find many men regard their businesses the way an English landed gentleman used to regard his estates and his family honor; but Forbes seems to be an exception."