against him,
each of which he must defend to the loss of time and money--and the tying
up of courts and their officials. Maintenance is the re-opening of the
same suit and its charges time after time in court after court. One need
only be sure of the attitude of the plaintiff to strike back; if he is
interested in heckling the defendant and this can be demonstrated in
evidence, the heckler is a dead duck. Such a response would surely damage
Paul Brennan's overt position as a responsible, interested, affectionate
guardian of his best friends' orphaned child.

Then to put the top on the bottle, James Holden had crossed state lines
in his flight from home. This meant that the case was not the simple
proposition of appearing before a local magistrate and filing an
emotional appeal. It was interstate. It smacked of extradition, and James
Holden had committed no crime in either state.

To Paul Brennan's qualifications for his henchmen, he now added the need
for flouting the law if the law could not be warped to fit his need.

Finding a man with ambition, with a casual disregard for ethics, is not
hard in political circles. Paul Brennan found his man in Frank Manison,
a rising figure in the office of the District Attorney. Manison had
gubernatorial ambitions, and he was politically sharp. He personally
conducted only those cases that would give him ironclad publicity; he
preferred to lower the boom on a lighter charge than chance an acquittal.
Manison also had a fine feeling for anticipating public trends, a sense
of the drama, and an understanding of public opinion.

He granted Brennan a conference of ten minutes, and knowing from long
experience that incoming information flows faster when it is not
interrupted, he listened attentively, oiling and urging the flow by
facial expressions of interest and by leaning forward attentively
whenever a serious point was about to come forth. Brennan explained about
James Holden, his superior education, and what it had enabled the lad to
do. He explained the education not as a machine but as a "system of
study" devised by James Holden's parents, feeling that it was better to
leave a few stones lying flat and unturned for his own protection.
Manison nodded at the end of the ten-minute time-limit, used his desk
interphone to inform his secretary that he was not to be disturbed until
further notice (which also told Paul Brennan that he was indeed
interested) and then said:

"You know y