renched property, he had reached his present state. It was
not very far along, at that. His salary was only six thousand dollars
a year. His little fame did not extend beyond the meager realm of local
lawyers and judges. But the sight of his name quoted daily as being
about his duties, or rendering such and such a decision, was a great
satisfaction to him. He thought it made him a significant figure in
the world. "Behold I am not as other men," he often thought, and this
comforted him. He was very much flattered when a prominent case came to
his calendar; and as he sat enthroned before the various litigants and
lawyers he felt, as a rule, very significant indeed. Now and then some
subtlety of life would confuse his really limited intellect; but in all
such cases there was the letter of the law. He could hunt in the reports
to find out what really thinking men had decided. Besides, lawyers
everywhere are so subtle. They put the rules of law, favorable or
unfavorable, under the judge's thumb and nose. "Your honor, in the
thirty-second volume of the Revised Reports of Massachusetts, page so
and so, line so and so, in Arundel versus Bannerman, you will find,
etc." How often have you heard that in a court of law? The reasoning
that is left to do in most cases is not much. And the sanctity of the
law is raised like a great banner by which the pride of the incumbent is
strengthened.

Payderson, as Steger had indicated, could scarcely be pointed to as an
unjust judge. He was a party judge--Republican in principle, or rather
belief, beholden to the dominant party councils for his personal
continuance in office, and as such willing and anxious to do whatever he
considered that he reasonably could do to further the party welfare and
the private interests of his masters. Most people never trouble to look
into the mechanics of the thing they call their conscience too closely.
Where they do, too often they lack the skill to disentangle the tangled
threads of ethics and morals. Whatever the opinion of the time
is, whatever the weight of great interests dictates, that they
conscientiously believe. Some one has since invented the phrase "a
corporation-minded judge." There are many such.

Payderson was one. He fairly revered property and power. To him Butler
and Mollenhauer and Simpson were great men--reasonably sure to be right
always because they were so powerful. This matter of Cowperwood's and
Stener's defalcation he had long heard