Page:Weird Tales Volume 35 Issue 04 (1940-07).djvu/10

power, were phenomenal, and extended in a dozen different directions. He could turn his hand, even his mechanical hand, to anything, and become a master. His air of entire assurance was no mere braggadocio. It held something overwhelming. We became real friends on that trip, and Carter talked to me like a father.

"With this damnable gift of yours, Bronson, you'll have to keep a tight check-rein on yourself. If you fell into the wrong hands, if you became a tool for unscrupulous crooks, you could make a raft of money; watch out! God knows I'm no angel, and I don't believe in much of anything, but this is something that frightens me."

"You should worry," I said with youthful cynicism.

He gave me a hard look. "You don't get it. Bronson, whatever powers there may be in heaven or hell keep an eye on such things. Of this I'm convinced. I can't explain it; you're a farmer, but you can't explain how a blade of corn comes up out of a seed kernel. Still, you know it does. There's a strange and terrible certainty in the law of compensation, young man. If you should turn yourself to illegal uses, look put! I don't know what would happen, but I'd hate to be in your shoes. You can make money, and make it straight. Remember that, always."

Over and over the lawyer harped on this theme, and drove it heavily into me. He was a fine man, the squarest man I had ever known, even if he was full of legal tricks. Square in a man's sense of the word. Angular, hard, straight as a die—foursquare.

He admitted freely that he did not serve the law, but made it serve him, and at times ran pretty close to the wind. He handed out none of the old blarney about legal ethics, which is something designed merely to help rook the sucker. On that drive he gave me a liberal education in the cold, ugly, hard-rock racket of lawyers; and more, he showed me how definitely a man must live by his own code of ethics if he is to come out on top.

If Earl Carter is still alive and reads this story I want him to realize how deeply his words sank into me, and what fruit they bore. I owe that man a great deal.

Before reaching the city that was our destination, we had a week's drive. In this time I came to learn a lot about Carter's business. He was not a mouthpiece for crooks, as he had little or no criminal practice, and wanted none. He did specialize in helping people who were in a jam—and who could pay heavily for the help.

He drilled into me that the prime business of a lawyer is to get his client's money, and that plenty of big-time legal lights with wealthy clients simply made use of the law to serve the wishes of those clients. This was only, a tiny corner of the racket, but Earl Carter had turned it into a mighty big corner, for himself. No matter how respected or innocent a person might be, the law could trap him and squeeze him—unless he happened to have an attorney who could outsmart the law.

"And I'm the outsmarter, you bet," Carter told me quite frankly. We drew pretty close together in those days. "I get the sucker off the hook, and he pays through the nose for it. Thirty per cent of all business in America is run on the principle that the fool and his money might as well be parted now. We've passed the age of simple honesty; it went out with muttonchop whiskers. Only, I get his money by saving him from his folly."

"Where do I come in?" was my question.

He grinned at me. "You just obey orders. Right now, I've got a whopping big case on hand that should never come into court. That's why I took a long trip by myself; I need to cool off my brain and get ideas. When I found you, I got 'em.