orney for the company, mastered
them; and when Mrs. Varnum, through Hawk, her counsel, sued for five
thousand dollars damages, he was able to get a continuance, knowing from
long experience that the jury would certainly find for the plaintiff if
the case were then allowed to go to trial.

And at the succeeding term of court, which was the one that adjourned on
the day of Kent's transfer to the capital, two of the company's witnesses
had disappeared; and the one bit of company business Kent had been
successful in doing that day was to postpone for a second time the coming
to trial of the Varnum case.

It was while Kent's head was deepest in the flood of reorganization that a
letter came from one Blashfield Hunnicott, his successor in the local
attorneyship at Gaston, asking for instructions in the Varnum matter.
Judge MacFarlane's court would convene in a week. Was he, Hunnicott, to
let the case come to trial? Or should he--the witnesses still being
unproducible--move for a further continuance?

Kent took his head out of the cross-seas long enough to answer. By all
means Hunnicott was to obtain another continuance, if possible. And if,
before the case were called, there should be any new developments, he was
to wire at once to the general office, and further instructions would
issue.

It was about this time, or, to be strictly accurate, on the day preceding
the convening of Judge MacFarlane's court in Gaston, that Governor Bucks
took a short vacation--his first since the adjournment of the Assembly.

One of the mysteries of this man--the only one for which his friends could
not always account plausibly--was his habit of dropping out for a day or a
week at irregular intervals, leaving no clue by which he could be traced.
While he was merely a private citizen these disappearances figured in the
local notes of the Gaston _Clarion_ as business trips, object and
objective point unknown or at least unstated; but since his election the
newspapers were usually more definite. On this occasion, the public was
duly informed that "Governor Bucks, with one or two intimate friends, was
taking a few days' recreation with rod and gun on the headwaters of Jump
Creek"--a statement which the governor's private secretary stood ready to
corroborate to all and sundry calling at the gubernatorial rooms on the
second floor of the capitol.

Now it chanced that, like all gossip, this statement was subject to
correction as to details in favo