lawyers to get the best counsel in the nation. He did not ask,
"How much?" He asked, "How good?" Every technical ruse that could be
employed to thwart the prosecution he employed. He bribed everybody
bribable whose silence or speech had value. Dangerous witnesses were
shipped to places whence they could not be summonsed. Blackmailers and
blackguards fattened on his generosity and his fear.

The son, Stephen Coburn, had gone to the city, warm-hearted, young,
venturesome, not vicious, had learned life in a heap, sowed his wild
oats all at once, fallen among evil companions, and drifted by easy
stages into an affair of inexcusable ugliness, whence he seemed unable
to escape till a misplaced chivalry whispered him what to do. He had
found himself like Lancelot with "his honor rooted in dishonor" and
"faith unfaithful kept him falsely true." But Stephen Coburn was no
Lancelot, any more than his siren was a Guinevere or her slain husband a
King Arthur. He was simply a well-meaning, hot-headed, madly enamoured
young fool. The proof of this last was that he took a revolver to his
Gordian knot. Revolvers, as he found too late, do not solve problems.
They make a far-reaching noise, and their messengers cannot be recalled.

His parents had not known the city phase of their son. They had known
the adorable babe he had been, the good boy weeping over a broken-winged
robin tumbled from a nest, running down-stairs in his bare feet for one
more good-night kiss, crying his heart out when he must be sent away to
school, remembering their birthdays and abounding in gentle graces. This
was the Stephen Coburn they had known. They believed it to be the real,
the permanent, Stephen Coburn; the other was but the victim of a
transient demon. They could not believe that their boy would harm the
world again. They could not endure the thought that his repentance and
his atonement should be frustrated by a dishonorable end.

The public knew only the wicked Stephen Coburn. His crime had been his
entrance into fame. All the bad things he had done, all the bad people
he had known, all the bad places he had gone, were searched out and
published by the detectives and the reporters. To blacken Stephen
Coburn's repute so horribly that the jurors would feel it their
inescapable duty to scavenge him from the offended earth, that was the
effort of the prosecution. To prevent that blackening was one of the
most vital and one of the most costly features of th