s side of the Mississippi, and I am its local
attorney."

"I don't envy you," said Loring. "I had no idea the opposition
crystallized itself in any such concrete ill will. You must have the whole
weight of public sentiment against you in any railroad litigation."

"I do," said Kent, simply. "If every complainant against us had the right
to pack his own jury, we couldn't fare worse."

"What is at the bottom of it? Is it our pricking of the Gaston bubble by
building on to the capital?"

"Oh, no; it's much more personal to these shouters. As you may, or may
not, know, our line--like every other western railroad with no
competition--has for its motto, 'All the tariff the traffic will stand,'
and it bleeds the country accordingly. But we are forgetting your train.
Shall we go and see how late it is?"

II

A MAN OF THE PEOPLE

Train Number Three, the Western Flyer, was late, as Kent had
predicted--just how late the operator could not tell; and pending the
chalking-up of its arriving time on the bulletin board, the two men sat on
an empty baggage truck and smoked in companionable silence.

While they waited, Loring's thoughts were busy with many things, friendly
solicitude for the exile serving as the point of departure. He knew what a
handfast friend might know: how Kent had finished his postgraduate course
in the law and had succeeded to his father's small practice in the New
Hampshire county town where he was born and bred. Also, he knew how Kent's
friends, college friends who knew his gifts and ability, had deprecated
the burial; and he himself had been curious enough to pay Kent a visit to
spy out the reason why. On their first evening together in the stuffy
little law office which had been his father's, Kent had made a clean
breast of it: there was a young woman in the case, and a promise passed
before Kent had gone to college. She was a farmer's daughter, with no
notion for a change of environment; wherefore she had determined Kent's
career and the scene of it, laying its lines in the narrow field of her
own choosing.

Later, as Loring knew, the sentimental anchor had dragged until it was
hopelessly off holding-ground. The young woman had laid the blame at the
door of the university, had given Kent a bad half-year of fault-finding
and recrimination, and had finally made an end of the matter by bestowing
her dowry of hillside acres on the son of a neighboring farmer.

Thereafter Kent had stagnated qui