Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/192



the school, and no breath of the purpose of that meeting ever leaked out.

The head of one of the public utility companies once marked Lindsey for defeat, and one of his executive staff remonstrated.

“Oh, no,” he said, “not Lindsey.”

“What!” exclaimed the magnate. “You, too ? Everywhere I turn it is, ‘ Oh, no, not Lindsey.’ My wife is for Lindsey, my mother is for Lindsey, my sisters are for Lindsey. And now you are for Lindsey. What is it that makes everybody and everything fight for this judge?”

Everybody doesn’t fight for Judge Lindsey; only those are for him who know how he has conspired with them in secret to help their little boy or their little girl. But these are legion. Poor and rich, “everybody” has knowledge of private calls made by this man; of hours, days, weeks spent on the case of somebody’s bad little boy whom they have seen afterward being “good” to “show ’em that th’ Jedge is dead right in bankin’ on th’ honour of a kid.” Opposition? That of the parents of Denver melted like one of Den- ver’s summer snows.

All the opposition to faith in mischievous boys soon disappeared, but there remained the fear of this treatment for “really