Page:The American Magazine volume LXIV.djvu/365

Rh "He'll come back," he said. "I'll go to my office, Calvert will come in, and you watch me throw him out."

Heney crossed the street to his office, laid off his coat, and, by and by, Calvert Wilson called. He invited Heney out into the hall, and demanded to know——

The next minute Heney was on the floor with Wilson on top of him. "And," says Heney, "when my friends came rushing in, they didn't see me throwing Wilson out; they saw me hanging on to him to keep him from throwing me out." The spectators made the two fighters stand up and fight. Again Wilson threw Heney, and again and again; six times the Harvard man downed the Westerner and each time Heney struck on the back of his head, "good and hard." Then the crowd stopped the fight. Heney was licked, and well licked too. He was sick, as well as humiliated.

Utterly disgusted with himself, he consulted a physician, who told him that he was in a bad way physically; if he wanted to live to lick Wilson or any other man he must stop drinking and go into training. A day or two after that the butcher and the baker met Heney at daybreak running and walking two or three miles out of town, and Tucson had it that Frank Heney was crazy. But when the story of the fight got out, everybody guessed that Frank was training to "come back" at Calvert Wilson. And this was the truth.

But the effect of the training was to put Heney in good condition for work. The energy that had gone to waste went into his business, and he handled it with such vigor that his practice was soon too important to permit of street fighting. He invited Calvert Wilson to meet him privately, and badgered the man when he refused, but he did not pick a public row. Wilson was handsome about it and, after a year or two, in the great crisis of Heney's life, this quarrel was settled.

For two years after his thrashing, Heney didn't drink at all, and never since has liquor interfered with his work. But he didn't stop fighting. On the contrary, he won quickly a reputation for good, sound, logical, legal ability, and his practice became early one of the largest and most lucrative in the territory. His success came to him as a fighter, as the fighting attorney of Tucson.

The best example of Heney's "nerve" and of some other of his traits is the socalled "Handy Case," which ended in the shooting of Dr. Handy—the crisis of Heney's fighting life. Dr. J. C. Handy was a splendid figure of a man, big, handsome, passionate and fearless. A frontier doctor, he was also a politician. Instinctively liberal, he was kind, in a rough, hearty, easy-going way, to the sick and unfortunate. "No charge," he would say to the poor; "I'll take it out of the lucky fellows." But Handy was a bully, too, selfish when he wasn't in the mood for charity, and wilful as a child. The stories told of his outbreaks of rage sound like insanity. His wife bore the brunt of them. He left her to live with another woman, and, not content with this offense, he used to take the other woman in his buggy and drive up and down in front of his wife's house, taunting and insulting her. Apparently he wanted Mrs. Handy to sue for a divorce, and when she didn't, he did.

Having sued for a divorce, Handy wouldn't even let his wife have counsel. She employed first a lawyer name Wright, but Handy meeting him at a funeral wound up some hot remarks with a threat to "pull his nose." Wright escaped, and shortly after threw up the brief. The next lawyer that Mrs. Handy retained was ex-Judge William H. Barnes. Him also Handy frightened off, and Heney happened to see it done. He was in Barnes's office one day when Handy came in to serve some papers. The Doctor walked up close to Barnes and, glaring at him, threw the paper down on the desk. It was all very insulting, and Barnes muttered a remonstrance at Handy's retreating back.

"What's that?" the Doctor demanded, wheeling about and returning. "What's that?"

With Handy bending over him, Judge Barnes explained that he had only expressed a preference for having such papers served by counsel, not by Handy. "That was all."

"It had better be all," said Handy. "Why, you ——, I've a mind to cut your throat right now." And then, changing his emphasis, he repeated: "It had better be all—all."

And it was all. Within two hours Barnes