e silent
now--than AFTERWARDS. They know that I'm ready. But I can't keep this
up long; some time, you know, they're bound to improve in practice and
hit higher up! As far as I'm concerned," he added, with a grim glance
around the faded walls and threadbare furniture, "it don't mind; but
mine isn't the mouth to be stopped." He paused, and then abruptly, yet
with a sudden and pathetic dropping of his dominant note, said:
"Hathaway, you're young, and Hammersley liked you--what's to be done?
I thought of passing over my tools to you. You can shoot, and I hear
you HAVE. But the h--l of it is that if you dropped a man or two
people would ask WHY, and want to know what it was about; while, when I
do, nobody here thinks it anything but MY WAY! I don't mean that it
would hurt you with the crowd to wipe out one or two of these hounds
during the canvass, but the trouble is that they belong to YOUR PARTY,
and," he added grimly, "that wouldn't help your career."

"But," said Paul, ignoring the sarcasm, "are you not magnifying the
effect of a disclosure? The girl is an heiress, excellently brought
up. Who will bother about the antecedents of the mother, who has
disappeared, whom she never knew, and who is legally dead to her?"

"In my day, sir, no one who knew the circumstances," returned the
colonel, quickly. "But we are living in a blessed era of Christian
retribution and civilized propriety, and I believe there are a lot of
men and women about who have no other way of showing their own virtue
than by showing up another's vice. We're in a reaction of reform.
It's the old drunkards who are always more clamorous for total
abstinence than the moderately temperate. I tell you, Hathaway, there
couldn't be an unluckier moment for our secret coming out."

"But she will be of age soon."

"In two months."

"And sure to marry."

"Marry!" repeated Pendleton, with grim irony. "Would YOU marry her?"

"That's another question," said the young man, promptly, "and one of
individual taste; but it does not affect my general belief that she
could easily find a husband as good and better."

"Suppose she found one BEFORE the secret is out. Ought he be told?"

"Certainly."

"And that would imply telling HER?"

"Yes," said Paul, but not so promptly. "And you consider THAT
fulfilling the promise of the Trust--the pledges exchanged with that
woman?" continued Pendleton, with glittering eyes and a return to his
own dominant tone