The Frame Up(圈套)

VIP免费

2024-12-26 1 0 80.42KB 22 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

The Frame Up

by Richard Harding Davis

The Frame Up

When the voice over the telephone promised to name the man who

killed Hermann Banf, District Attorney Wharton was up- town lunching at

Delmonico's. This was contrary to his custom and a concession to

Hamilton Cutler, his distinguished brother-in-law. That gentleman was

interested in a State constabulary bill and had asked State Senator Bissell

to father it. He had suggested to the senator that, in the legal points

involved in the bill, his brother-in-law would undoubtedly be charmed to

advise him. So that morning, to talk it over, Bissell had come from Albany

and, as he was forced to return the same afternoon, had asked Wharton to

lunch with him up-town near the station.

That in public life there breathed a man with soul so dead who, were

he offered a chance to serve Hamilton Cutler, would not jump at the

chance was outside the experience of the county chairman. And in so

judging his fellow men, with the exception of one man, the senator was

right. The one man was Hamilton Cutler's brother-in-law.

In the national affairs of his party Hamilton Cutler was one of the four

leaders. In two cabinets he had held office. At a foreign court as an

ambassador his dinners, of which the diplomatic corps still spoke with

emotion, had upheld the dignity of ninety million Americans. He was rich.

The history of his family was the history of the State. When the Albany

boats drew abreast of the old Cutler mansion on the cast bank of the

Hudson the passengers pointed at it with deference. Even when the search

lights pointed at it, it was with deference. And on Fifth Avenue, as the

"Seeing New York" car passed his town house it slowed respectfully to

half speed. When, apparently for no other reason than that she was good

and beautiful, he had married the sister of a then unknown up State lawyer,

every one felt Hamilton Cutler had made his first mistake. But, like every

thing else into which he entered, for him matrimony also was a success.

The prettiest girl in Utica showed herself worthy of her distinguished

husband. She had given him children as beautiful as herself; as what

Washington calls " a cabinet lady " she had kept her name out of the

newspapers; as Madame L'Ambassatrice she had put archduchesses at

The Frame Up

their ease; and after ten years she was an adoring wife, a devoted mother,

and a proud woman. Her pride was in believing that for every joy she

knew she was indebted entirely to her husband. To owe everything to him,

to feel that through him the blessings flowed, was her ideal of happiness.

In this ideal her brother did not share. Her delight in a sense of

obligation left him quite cold. No one better than himself knew that his

rapid-fire rise in public favor was due to his own exertions, to the fact that

he had worked very hard, had been independent, had kept his hands clean,

and had worn no man's collar. Other people believed he owed his

advancement to his brother-in-law. He knew they believed that, and it hurt

him. When, at the annual dinner of the Amen Corner, they burlesqued him

as singing to "Ham" Cutler, "You made me what I am to-day, I hope you're

satisfied," he found that to laugh with the others was something of an

effort. His was a difficult position. He was a party man; he had always

worked inside the organization. The fact that whenever he ran for an

elective office the reformers indorsed him and the best elements in the

opposition parties voted for him did not shake his loyalty to his own

people. And to Hamilton Cutler, as one of his party leaders, as one of the

bosses of the "invisible government," he was willing to defer. But while he

could give allegiance to his party leaders, and from them was willing to

receive the rewards of office, from a rich brother-in-law he was not at all

willing to accept anything. Still less was he willing that of the credit he

deserved for years of hard work for the party, of self-denial, and of

efficient public service the rich brother-in-law, should rob him.

His pride was to be known as a self-made man, as the servant only of

the voters. And now that ambition, now that he was district attorney of

New York City, to have it said that the office was the gift of his brother-in-

law was bitter. But he believed the injustice would soon end. In a month

he was coming up for re-election, and night and day was conducting a

campaign that he hoped would result in a personal victory so complete as

to banish the shadow of his brother-in-law. Were he re-elected by the

majority on which he counted, he would have the party leaders on their

knees. Hamilton Cutler would be forced to come to him. He would be in

The Frame Up

line for promotion. He knew the leaders did not want to promote him, that

they considered him too inclined to kick over the traces; but were he now

re-elected, at the next election, either for mayor or governor, he would be

his party's obvious and legitimate candidate.

The re-election was not to be an easy victory. Outside his own party, to

prevent his succeeding himself as district attorney, Tammany Hall was

using every weapon in her armory. The commissioner of police was a

Tammany man, and in the public prints Wharton had repeatedly declared

that Banf, his star witness against the police, had been killed by the police,

and that they had prevented the discovery of his murderer. For this the

wigwam wanted his scalp, and to get it had raked his public and private

life, had used threats and bribes, and with women had tried to trap him

into a scandal. But "Big Tim" Meehan, the lieutenant the Hall had detailed

to destroy Wharton, had reported back that for their purpose his record

was useless, that bribes and threats only flattered him, and that the traps

set for him he had smilingly side- stepped. This was the situation a month

before election day when, to oblige his brother-in-law, Wharton was up-

town at Delmonico's lunching with Senator Bissell.

Down-town at the office, Rumson, the assistant district attorney, was

on his way to lunch when the telephone-girl halted him. Her voice was

lowered and betrayed almost human interest.

From the corner of her mouth she whispered: "This man has a note for

Mr. Wharton--says if he don't get it quick it'll be too late--says it will tell

him who killed 'Heimie' Banf!"

The young man and the girl looked at each other and smiled. Their

experience had not tended to make them credulous. Had he lived,

Hermann Banf would have been, for Wharton, the star witness against a

ring of corrupt police officials. In consequence his murder was more than

the taking off of a shady and disreputable citizen. It was a blow struck at

the high office of the district attorney, at the grand jury, and the law. But,

so far, whoever struck the blow had escaped punishment, and though for a

month, ceaselessly, by night and day "the office" and the police had sought

him, he was still at large, still "unknown." There had been hundreds of

The Frame Up

clews. They had been furnished by the detectives of the city and county

and of the private agencies, by amateurs, by news- papers, by members of

the underworld with a score to pay off or to gain favor. But no clew had

led anywhere. When, in hoarse whispers, the last one had been confided to

him by his detectives, Wharton had protested indignantly.

"Stop bringing me clews!" he exclaimed. "I want the man. I can't

electrocute a clew!"

So when, after all other efforts, over the telephone a strange voice

offered to deliver the murderer, Rumson was skeptical. He motioned the

girl to switch to the desk telephone.

"Assistant District Attorney Rumson speaking," he said. "What can I

do for you?"'

Before the answer came, as though the speaker were choosing his

words, there was a pause. It lasted so long that Rumson exclaimed sharply:

"Hello," he called. "Do you want to speak to me, or do you want to

speak to me?"

"I've gotta letter for the district attorney," said the voice. "I'm to give it

to nobody but him. It's about Banf. He must get it quick, or it'll be too

late."

"Who are you?" demanded Rumson. "Where are you speaking from?"

The man at the other end of the wire ignored the questions.

"Where'll Wharton be for the next twenty minutes? "

"If I tell you, "parried Rumson, "will you bring the letter at once?" The

voice exclaimed indignantly:

"Bring nothing! I'll send it by district messenger. You're wasting time

trying to reach me. It's the LETTER you want. It tells----" the voice broke

with an oath and instantly began again: "I can't talk over a phone. I tell

you, it's life or death. If you lose out, it's your own fault. Where can I find

Wharton?"

"At Delmonico's," answered Rumson. "He'll be there until two

o'clock." "Delmonico's! That's Forty-fort Street?" "Right," said Rumson.

"Tell the messenger----" He heard the receiver slam upon the hook. With

the light of the hunter in his eyes, he turned to the girl.

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

TheFrameUp11TheFrameUpbyRichardHardingDavisTheFrameUp22WhenthevoiceoverthetelephonepromisedtonamethemanwhokilledHermannBanf,DistrictAttorneyWhartonwasup-townlunchingatDelmonico's.ThiswascontrarytohiscustomandaconcessiontoHamiltonCutler,hisdistinguishedbrother-in-law.ThatgentlemanwasinterestedinaStat...

展开>> 收起<<

The Frame Up(圈套).pdf

共22页,预览5页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

The Frame Up(圈套)

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: