Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/326

 "He wasn't morbid, as McPhee Harris was," Arnett says. "He did it to protect young people from contamination. Harris did it because he was rotten himself—that's my idea, anyway—and his inward struggle with himself made him a crazy fanatic. He could see something nasty in any—in any naked innocence."

As McPhee Harris's junior partner, Wickson himself conducted some of the Purity Defense League's later cases against saloon-keepers and the owners of "dives." And when Harris became president of the local "Drys" Wickson succeeded him as attorney for the League, and so came to prosecute the "white-slave" cases that first made him notorious. His election to the office of District Attorney followed unexpectedly. He was carried into power on a reform wave that was blown up by a violent agitation against the "red-light district."

It was as District Attorney that his real career began—and his real difficulties. Both culminated together on the day whose incidents I wish to give. McPhee Harris has his own account of those incidents. Jack Arnett has another. And I have coaxed a third out of the detective, Tim Collins. Putting the three together, it is easy to reconstruct a dramatic story of the day.

It began in an interview with McPhee Harris, who came smiling into the District Attorney's