lad to remember
that my savings, which were still reposing in Abel Geddis's bank vault,
would enable me to pay as I went.

By this time, in bitter revulsion from gratitude to fierce enmity, I
was determined to defend myself tooth and nail. At one stroke Abel
Geddis had cancelled all my obligations to him. At the very moment
when I was promising his daughter to help cover up his criminality, he
had been deliberately plotting to make me his scapegoat.

"I need a lawyer, of course," I told Runnels; and then I made the first
and worst of a long series of wretched mistakes. "Send word to Cy
Whitredge and tell him I'd like to see him."

If anybody had asked me five minutes after Runnels went away why I had
chosen Cyrus Whitredge to be my counsel I doubt if I could have offered
any justifiable reason. Whitredge was known throughout our end of the
State as a criminal lawyer, shrewd, unscrupulous, and with a reputation
built up entirely upon his singular success in defeating the ends of
justice. Before a jury of farmers and small merchants, such as I was
likely to have, I had prejudiced my case at the very outset.

I was completely and thoroughly convinced of this a little later when
Whitredge came to see me. He was a lean man, leather-faced, and with
an eye like that of a fish. To my consternation and keen
disheartenment he assumed my guilt from the moment the cell door was
locked upon him and he had seated himself upon the iron-framed cot to
nurse a knee in the locked fingers of his bony hands.

"You've got the wrong idea of things, altogether, Weyburn," he
criticised, after I had tried to tell him that I was being made to hold
the bag for some one else; and his use of the bare surname, when he had
known me from boyhood, cut me like a knife. "You can't expect me to do
anything for you unless you are entirely frank with me. As your
counsel, I've got to know the facts; and you gain absolutely nothing by
insisting to me that you are not guilty."

There was more of it; a good bit more in which I stubbornly asserted my
innocence while Whitredge used every trick and wile known to his craft
to entrap me into admitting that I was guilty, in the act if not in the
intention.

"You can't deny--you don't deny--that you knew these mining sharps,
Hempstead and Lesherton, pretty intimately, that you saw them
frequently and talked with them in the way of business, and that you
knew all about the capitalization scheme they wer