or another, there had been a peppery protest
entered by the good Doctor Bertie--transformed for the moment into an
exasperated Doctor Bertie. If Broffin did not quit his annoying
espionage upon the house in Lake Boulevard, and upon the visitors
thereto, there was going to be trouble, and he, Doctor Bertie, would be
the trouble-maker. For a third untoward thing, he had found that Wahaska
as a community was beginning to look a little askance at him. The
village consciousness which had made it so easy for him to find out all
he wished to know about everybody was turning against him, and now, as
it seemed, everybody was wishing to know more than he cared to tell
about the past, present, and future concerns of one Matthew Broffin: in
short, he was becoming a suspicious character.

Broffin the pertinacious, again with an unlighted cigar between his
teeth, was ruminating thoughtfully over these things when he came in
sight of the closed gates and smokeless chimneys of the Foundry and
Machine Works. Once more the scent had grown cold. Miss Grierson's story
had seemed to clear Griswold--if anything short of a court acquittal
could clear him; and in the peppery interview Doctor Farnham had told
him plainly that, if Mr. Griswold were the object of his attentions, he
was barking up the wrong tree; that Miss Farnham would, if necessary, go
into court and testify that Mr. Griswold was not the man whom she had
seen in the Bayou State Security. Also, Griswold was doing something for
himself. It was he who had pulled Mr. Galbraith out of the lake little
better than a dead man, and had brought him to life again; and now he
was taking an active part in the foundry fight--about the last thing
that might be expected of a man dodging the police.

In spite of all these buffetings the man from Tennessee was only
bruised; not beaten. It is possible to be convinced without evidence; to
believe without being able to prove. Also, convincement may grow into
certainty as the evidence to support it becomes altogether incertitude.
Broffin was as sure now that Griswold was his man as he was of his own
present inability to prove it. Which is to say that he had discounted
Miss Farnham's refusal to help, and President Galbraith's refusal to
remember; was discounting Miss Grierson's skilfully told story, and
Griswold's breaking of all the criminal precedents by staying on in
Wahaska after he had been warned. For Broffin made no doubt that the
warning had