n Adamson said was to
call him nobody's son, and that's true enough, if he's her boy. If you
call the truth to a man, that ain't no deefamation of character. As to
'Rory Lane, everybody knows the truth about her. You can't deefame a
woman nohow, least of all her. We all know she had a baby when she was a
girl, and it was sent away, and it died. Leastways, we _thought_ we
knew. I ain't right shore what we've knew. It looks like that woman had
put up some sort of game on this town. What right had she to do that?"

"She was right white," said the other, somewhat irrelevantly. "Never
seen no one no whiter than she was when she went in that door right
now."

"I don't reckon we can get no seats any more--the room's plumb full."

They both were looking wistfully in at the packed assembly, when they
had occasion to make room for the dignified figure of a man who now
pushed his way through the throng.

"How do, Judge Henderson," said old Silas Kneebone, who knew everybody.

The newcomer nodded somewhat coldly. He nodded also, none too warmly,
to another man who stood near the door--a tall man, of loose and bulky
figure, with a fringe of red beard under his chin, a wide and smiling
mouth, blue eyes, and a broad face which showed shrewdness and humor
alike.

"How are you, Hod?" said Henderson carelessly; thus accosting the only
man at the Spring Valley bar for whom really he had much respect or
fear--Horace Brooks, popularly known in Spring Valley as "old Hod
Brooks," perhaps the most carelessly dressed man physically and the most
exactly appointed man mentally then practising before that bar. A little
sign far down the narrow hall betokened that the office of Horace Brooks
might thereabouts be found by any in search of counsel in the law.

"Oh, are you retained in this case, Hod?" Judge Hendenson spoke over his
shoulder.

"Not at all, Judge, not at all," said the other. None the less he
himself followed on into the crowded little room.

As Judge Henderson entered all eyes were turned upon him. Conscious of
the fact that he honored this assemblage, he comported himself with
dignity proper for a candidate. He was a man well used to success in any
undertaking, and he looked his part now. The full, florid face, the
broad brow, sloping back to a ridge of iron-gray hair, the full blue
eyes, the loose, easy lips, the curved chin, the large, white hands,
the full chest, the soft body, the reddening skin of the face--all of
the