The Seventh Bullet by Daniel D. Victor Read Free Book Online Page B

enjoyed an occasional after-dinner cigar.
    I had little desire for such amenities, however. Excluding my early-morning walks round the deck in the bracing cold and my encounters with the rowing machine in the ship’s gymnasium, I spent most of my time familiarising myself with the mind of the man whose murder we were about to investigate. Holmes had furnished me with a modest library: two novels by David Graham Phillips, The Cost and The Plum Tree, as well as a collection of all the articles in The Treason of the Senate. Moreover, before beginning my literary adventure, I was to peruse the biography of Phillips that Holmes had tucked between the pages of The Cost. Written on a folded piece of yellowing foolscap in Holmes’s meticulous script, this life of Phillips had been compiled by my friend once he had begun his index entry on the Victoria-Camperdown collision. He had revised it the first time after meeting Phillips in BakerStreet, but had not touched it again until after agreeing to help Mrs. Frevert investigate her brother’s death. Varied shades of ink differentiated the three instalments of Phillips’s history.
    In summary, Phillips had been born in Madison, Indiana, on 31 October, the eve of All Hallows Day, in 1867. He had three older sisters, one of whom we had met, and a younger brother. Instructed by his father—a bank cashier, Sunday School teacher, and occasional substitute for the Methodist pastor—young Graham was reading the Bible before he was four. By the time he was ten, he had been tutored in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and German; by the time he was twelve, he had read all of Hugo, Scott, and Dickens. In 1882 he attended Asbury University in Greencastle, Indiana, but spent his final two years of college life at Princeton. Following graduation, he was employed as a reporter first for the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, then for the New York Sun, and finally for the New York World. From 1901 until his death in 1911, he wrote primarily novels, completing more than twenty, including the two-volume Susan Lenox, Her Fall and Rise, which was published some six years after he was killed. *
    Enveloped in a steamer rug on a deck chair for the next few days, I immersed myself in the lives of the characters in The Cost and The Plum Tree, fictional inhabitants of the equally fictional St. Christopher, Indiana, a midwestern town much, I surmised, like Phillips’s birthplace. No-one in reality, however, could be expected to equal the moral stature of the protagonist of these two novels, Hampden Scarborough. Elected Governor in The Cost and President in The Plum Tree, he countered the exploiters who preyedupon the poor and helpless. With a handsome profile and piercing eyes, here was a powerful figure who must have embodied all that Phillips believed was good in the world. Exhibiting a pragmatic faith in man not as a “falling angel, but a rising animal,” Scarborough traced his ancestry back to those anti-Royalists who served with Cromwell and who enabled their descendant to champion a new kind of royalty, “the kings of the new democracy.” “Over him,” Phillips had written, “was the glamour of the world-that-ought-to-be in which he lived and had the power to compel others to live as long as they were under the spell of his personality.” Scarborough wore “the typical Western-American expression—shrewd, easygoing good humour.” He revealed a “magnetic something which we try to fix—and fail—when we say ‘charm.’ What’s more, like the sartorially elegant Phillips himself, this modern St. George, ready to engage the dragons of the plutocracy, was “dazzling to behold.”
    I confess to being moved by Scarborough’s impressive and noble political victories, but these fictional exploits could not prepare me for the direct assault Phillips himself made on the real American government in The Treason of the Senate. Holmes was right to suggest that I familiarise myself with the articles that had