Free Time Will Darken It by William Maxwell

elms. It had been Judge King’s office. Partly out of respect for his father’s memory and partly so that his father’s friends could come here and smoke a cigar and perhaps feel his loss less keenly, Austin had kept the office the way it was during Judge King’s lifetime. But the big slant-topped desk, the green and red carpet, the stuffed prairie dog and the framed photograph of the old Buttercup Hunting and Fishing Club were not enough. Something was gone from the room and these memorials only made the old men sad. When they came at all, it was generally on business.
    Judge King was the nearest the town of Draperville had come to producing a great man. During the last years of his life, honours had been heaped upon him. He was twice judgeof the circuit court and several times a director of the country fair association. In 1880 he was a delegate to the Republican National Convention at Chicago, and four years later he was one of the presidential electors for the State of Illinois. In 1896 he was asked to run for governor and declined (the offer had strings attached to it). And shortly after the conclusion of his most celebrated case,
The Citizens of Dunthorpe County v. James Long
, he was publicly presented with the gold watch which Austin now carried.
    Judge King’s largeness of mind, his legal talent, and his wisdom in political affairs were balanced and made human by his fund of stories, his love of good living, and the pleasure he took in people of all kinds, especially women. He preferred them to be young and pretty, but whatever they were like, he rose to meet them as if they were, entirely in themselves, an object of pleasure and an occasion for ceremony. He made them little complimentary speeches and with his own eyes dancing, looked deeply into theirs, to see what was there. They were always charming to him. Refusing to recognize what everyone knew to be a melancholy fact, he went on notes for friends and made a number of loans of which his executors could find no written record. But in a place where gossip and scandal flourished, Judge King left a good name.
    It was never his intention that Austin should become a lawyer. He died in 1901 before Austin knew what profession he wanted to follow. His father’s memory, tenaciously preserved in the minds of the people who loved him, the sense of personal loss, and perhaps most of all the realization that he had never really known his father made Austin choose law as a career.
    After seven years of practising in his father’s office, he still did not feel that it was his own. But when he arrived in the morning, there was usually someone waiting to see him. He was not consulted about political appointments or asked to serve on honorary committees, but men who wanted to besure that, in the event of their death, their families would not be taken advantage of had Austin King draw up their wills and appointed him sole executor. He could spot a trick clause in a contract far more quickly than his father ever could. He had read more widely and was better at preparing briefs. On the other hand, there were things that Judge King had learned as a lean and hungry young man in the offices of Whitman, James, and Whitlaw in Cincinnati that no law school has ever learned how to teach. Judge King had been a brilliant trial lawyer of the old school. Austin settled cases, whenever he could, out of court; settled them ably and without fanfare. This was not wholly the difference between father and son. The times were changing.
    During the period between 1850 and 1900, when Draperville was still a pioneering community, the ownership of land was continually and expensively disputed. The Government extinguished the Indian title to the prairie, and the land was subject to settlement either before or after it was surveyed. The settler had no paper title—merely the right to possession, which he got by moving onto the land and raising a crop. The amount of the crop was not legally