f Hendricks after he was
forty--for he was not a man about whom anecdotes would hang well,
though the town is full of them about John Barclay. So Hendricks lived
a strong reticent man, who succeeded in business though he was honest,
and who won in politics by choosing his enemies from the kind of noisy
men who make many mistakes, and let every one know it. The time came
when he did not avoid Molly Brownwell; she felt that he was not afraid
to see her in any circumstances, and that made her happy. Sometimes
she went to him in behalf of one of her father's charges,--some poor
devil who could not pay his note at the bank and keep the children in
school, or some clerk or workman at the power-house who had been
discharged. At such times they talked the matter in hand over frankly,
and it ended by the man giving way to the woman, or showing her simply
that she was wrong.

Only once in nearly a score of years did a personal word pass between
them. She had come to him for his signature to a petition for a pardon
for a man whose family suffered while he was in the penitentiary.
Hendricks signed the paper and handed it back to her, and his blue
eyes were fixed impersonally upon her, and he smiled his curious,
self-deprecatory smile and sighed, "As we forgive our debtors." Then
he reached for a paper in his desk and seemed oblivious to her
presence. No one else was near them, and the woman hesitated a moment
before turning to go and repeated, "Yes, Bob--as we forgive our
debtors." She tried to show him the radiance in her soul, but he did
not look up and she went away. When she had gone, he pushed aside his
work and sat for a moment looking into the street; he began biting his
mustache, and rose, and went out of the bank and found some other
work.

That night as Hendricks and Dolan walked over the town together, Dolan
said: "Did you ever know, Robert"--that was as near familiarity as
the elder man came with Hendricks--"that Mart Culpepper owed his
son-in-law a lot of money?"

"Well," returned Hendricks, "he borrowed a lot fifteen years ago or
such a matter; why?"

"Well," answered Dolan, "I served papers on Mart to-day in a suit
for--I dunno, a lot of money--as I remember it about fifteen
thousand dollars. That seems like a good deal."

Hendricks grunted, and they walked on in silence. Hendricks knew from
Brownwell's overdraft that things were not going well with him, and he
believed that matters must have reached a painful