Any
criminal lawyer must have begun investigation by insisting,
rigorously, that no such man, in such a position, could be
permitted to plead that he had taken, and pursued, such a course,
without assurances which did satisfy him. The plea was
professionally inadmissible.
This meant that any criminal lawyer would have been bound to
start an investigation by insisting that Gould had assurances
from the White House or the Treasury, since none other could have
satisfied him. To young men wasting their summer at Quincy for
want of some one to hire their services at three dollars a day,
such a dramatic scandal was Heaven-sent. Charles and Henry Adams
jumped at it like salmon at a fly, with as much voracity as Jay
Gould, or his ame damnee Jim Fisk, had ever shown for Erie; and
with as little fear of consequences. They risked something; no
one could say what; but the people about the Erie office were not
regarded as lambs.
The unravelling a skein so tangled as that of the Erie Railway
was a task that might have given months of labor to the most
efficient District Attorney, with all his official tools to work
with. Charles took the railway history; Henry took the so-called
Gold Conspiracy; and they went to New York to work it up. The
surface was in full view. They had no trouble in Wall Street, and
they paid their respects in person to the famous Jim Fisk in his
Opera-House Palace; but the New York side of the story helped
Henry little.
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