cFarlane's removal wouldn't help us so
long as Bucks has the appointing of his successor, and then he turned on
me and hammered it in with a last word just as we were leaving the train:
'I didn't say remove; I said obliterate.' I caught on, after so long a
time, and I've been hard at work ever since."

"You are obliterating me," said Miss Portia. "I haven't the slightest idea
what it is all about."

"It's easy from this on," said Kent, consolingly. "You know how MacFarlane
secured his reelection?"

"Everybody knows that."

"Well, to cut a long story short, the gerrymander deal won't stand the
light. The constitution says--"

"Oh, please don't quote law books at me. Put it in English--woman-English,
if you can."

"I will. The special act of the Assembly is void; therefore there was no
legal election, and, by consequence, there is no judge and no receiver."

Miss Van Brock was silent for a reflective minute. Then she said:

"On second thought, perhaps you would better tell me what the constitution
says, Mr. David. Possibly I could grasp it."

"It is in the section on elections. It says: 'All circuit or district
judges, and all special judges, shall be elected by the qualified voters
of the respective circuits or districts in which they are to hold their
court.' Kiowa County was cut out of Judge Whitcomb's circuit and placed in
Judge MacFarlane's for electoral purposes only. In all other respects it
remains a part of Judge Whitcomb's circuit, and will so continue until
Whitcomb's term expires. Without the vote of Kiowa, MacFarlane could not
have been elected; with it he was illegally elected, or, to put it the
other way about, he was not elected at all. Since he is not lawfully a
judge, his acts are void, among them this appointment of Major Guilford as
receiver for the Trans-Western."

She was not as enthusiastic as he thought she ought to be. In the soil
prepared for it by the political confidences of the winter there had grown
up a many-branching tree of intimacy between these two; a frank, sexless
friendship, as Kent would have described it, in which a man who was not
very much given to free speech with any one unburdened himself, and the
woman made him believe that her quick, apprehending sympathy was the one
thing needful--as women have done since the world began.

Since the looting of the railroad which had taken him out of the steadying
grind of regular work, Kent had been the prey of mixed motives. Fro