ing eyes never left
for long his face. He feigned to be unconscious of her regard, but
nobody in the court-room was more sure of that look of enduring,
passionate hatred than its victim. He had made her a widow, and her
heart cried for revenge. That was the story the eyes told dumbly.

From first to last the case was bitterly contested, and always with the
realization among those present--except for that somber figure in
black, whose beady eyes gimleted the defendant--that it was another
move in the fight between the rival copper kings. The district attorney
had worked up his case very carefully, not with much hope of securing a
conviction, but to mass a total of evidence that would condemn the
Consolidated leader-before the world.

To this end, the foreman, Donleavy, had been driven by a process of
sweating to turn State's evidence against his master. His testimony
made things look black for Harley, but when Hobart took the stand, a
palpably unwilling witness, and supported his evidence, the Ridgway
adherents were openly jubilant. The lawyers for the defense made much
of the fact that Hobart had just left the Consolidated service after a
disagreement with the defendant and had been elected to the senate by
his enemies, but the impression made by his moderation and the fine
restraint of his manner, combined with his reputation for scrupulous
honesty, was not to be shaken by the subtle innuendos and blunt
aspersions of the legal array he faced.

Nor did the young district attorney content himself with Hobart's
testimony. He put his successor, Mott, on the stand, and gave him a bad
hour while he tried to wring the admission out of him that Harley had
personally ordered the attack on the miners of the Taurus. But for the
almost constant objections of the opposing counsel, which gave him time
to recover himself, the prosecuting attorney would have succeeded.

Ridgway, meeting him by chance after luncheon at the foot of the hotel
elevator--for in a town the size of Avalanche, Waring had found it
necessary to put up at the same hotel as the enemy or take second best,
an alternative not to his fastidious taste--rallied him upon the
predicament in which he had found himself.

"It's pretty hard to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but
the truth, without making indiscreet admissions about one's friends,
isn't it?" he asked, with his genial smile.

"Did I make any indiscreet admissions?"

"I don't say you did, t