The Schemer's Trap

From the Stray Papers of a Legal Friend

by Sylvanus Cobb, Jr.

This story is of my first client; and amid all the successes of later years there is not one that has given me more pleasurable satisfaction than did the success which attended this effort,—that is if I may claim it as an effort, when the result was thrown into my hands from a source least expected.

I had finished my preparatory studies, and been admitted to the bar. This was late in June. For five years I had studied hard—in college and in the law-office—and, as I was not entirely without money, I determined to take a trip to the White Mountains, and spend the season in true recreation. I went up the Hudson; stopped for a time on the shores of Lake Champlain; then crossed Vermont; spent the season at the mountains; and came home by the Atlantic board. Of a boy, in the cars, on the way from Boston to Fall River, I bought a New York paper, in which among the legal items, I read that B. Frank Weaver had been apprehended and indicted for theft—the grand jury having returned a true bill against him—and he was now held for trial.

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