At Los Angeles

If a young child, in a spirit of generosity or mischief, gives the garden rake to the neighbors, it is a simple enough matter for the father to drop in on them after supper and explain that the lad knew not what he did. If they are nice neighbors, they will surrender the implement without argument and the owner can whisk the leaves off the lawn next morning as planned. Not so simple is the Government's task of recovering its celebrated Oil Reserves, No. 1 and No. 3*, leased respectively by onetime Secretary of the Interior Fall, in a spirit commonly described as mischievous, to Edward L. Doheny and Harry F. Sinclair, oil merchants. Last week, Judge Paul J. McCormick mounted his U. S. District Court bench in the Federal Building at Los Angeles, and listened to the beginnings of US. v. the Pan-American Petroleum & Transport Co. (dominated by Mr. Doheny). There came before him: Lawyer Owen J. Roberts, for the plaintiff, who said he would show that the leases constituted a scheme between Messrs. Fall and Doheny, furtively and illegally contrived, and should therefore be canceled. Lawyer Frank J. Hogan, for the Doheny interests, who said he would show that no thought of profiteering lurked in the minds of Messrs. Fall and Doheny, but only a desire on Mr. Fall's part to protect the U. S. by securing to the Navy a hoard of fuel oil at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, as planned by far-sighted Navy officials. Lawyer Hogan said he would show further that Mr. Fall had played a "purely formal and perfunctory part" in carrying out these plans, which called for leasing Elk Hills to Doheny on condition that Doheny build and fill the Pearl Harbor fuel base.

Judge McCormick could also see, down in the witness row behind Lawyer Hogan, a man intensely interested in all that went on. Eager to catch every syllable from the lips of attorneys and witnesses, this man strained forward in his seat, cocked his head sideways, put his hand to his ear. Kindly of demeanor, spectacled, snowy-moustached, looking more like a mediocre dentist than a genius of finance, this listener was the Edward L. Doheny whose name kept constantly recurring in the testimony. To him the case meant much indeed -- Lawyer Roberts had said $100,000,000 in his (Doheny's) own estimate. To him, more than to any one in the room, the flickers of inter est passing now and again over Judge McCormick's inscrutable countenance were exceedingly important. Mr. Doheny heard Lawyer Roberts drone out his opening statements in a flat, conversational monotone, slowly, without gesture or marked emphasis. He heard Lawyer Hogan begin, smart, snappy -- Hogan of Washington, who beat the Government in its prosecution of Benedict Crowell for alleged graft in War con tracts. Hogan was louder in tone than Roberts, emphatic, gesturing as he warmed to his work. Perhaps Mr. Doheny recalled a newspaper article that had appeared last February, descriptive of the Hogan type of lawyer. That article had said: ". . . a first class fighting court lawyer, quick on his feet, clever before judge and jury, capable of profiting enormously by the slower wits of an antagonist. It is easy to name other lawyers of this type, such as Samuel Untermeyer and Max Steuer, Frank Daly, who conducted the prosecution against Senator Newberry in Michigan, and Frank P. Walsh [of Kansas City, now Candidate LaFollette's attorney in the "slush fund" inquiry]."

That article had continued: "When the Government proceeds against someone in an important action, especially if it involves an element of criminality, inevitably it encounters lawyers of this sort. And inevitably the Government is represented by some lawyer who might grace the Supreme Bench or at least would do for a district judgeship. Generally they are Presidents or ex-Presidents of the American Bar Association or at least of some state Bar Association; solid men, who know the law, who write excellent briefs and who perhaps are impressive before the United States Supreme Court.

"But you never notice the fellows who wish to escape the toils of the law hiring them. They turn instantly and surely to the Hogans . . . the Steuers, Dalys and the Untermyers. They never employ an ex-Judge or an ex-Governor, or an ex-Attorney General or a President of the Bar Association. They don't inquire about a lawyer's standing or his knowledge of the law; all they are interested in is his ability to fight a case through to victory in court."

* Reserve No. 1 is in the Elk Hills, near Bakersfield, Calif. Reserve No. 3 is near Casper, Wyo., on an elevation known as Teapot Dome. The Government's suit to recover No. 3 from the Mammoth Oil Co., to which corporation Sinclair gave it in consideration of $106,000,000 of stock, is to begin in the near future.