"I'm all broke up, I can tell you!"

"But aside from the way in which it leaves me it seems such a--such an
insult to Uncle Joe--as though nobody cared--as though--" she could not
finish.

"I know--I know," he nodded gravely.

"I'm going up to see the mayor--to beg him to keep on--to tell him what
it means to me!" she declared passionately.

"I wouldn't, Miss Prentice," Lingle advised.

"I must! It can't stop like this! He shall understand what it means to
me--this suspicion--this disgrace that is nearly killing me!"

He saw that she was determined, so he did not protest further, but his
reluctant gaze followed her as she disappeared up the narrow dirty
stairway.

The mayor attended to the official business of Prouty at a flat-top desk
in a large front room where he also wrote an occasional life insurance
policy. As the insurance business was a rise from a disreputable saloon
and gambling joint, so the saloon and gambling joint had been a step
upward from his former means of livelihood as a dance-hall tout in a
neighboring state.

With his election to an office which nobody else wanted, an incipient
ambition began to stir. Already his mind was busy with plans for
advancement, and each move that he made was with an eye to the future.
But one thing was certain, and it was that wherever his Star of Destiny
led him he would remain, underneath any veneer of polish which
experience might give him, the barroom bully, the mental and moral
tinhorn that Nature had made him.

Enveloped in a cloud of the malodorous smoke of a cheap cigar and
tilted on the hind legs of his chair with his heels hooked in the rungs,
he was resting his head against the wall where a row of smudges from his
oily black hair bore evidence to the fact that it was a favorite
position.

Hearing a woman's light step and catching a glimpse of a woman's skirt
as Kate came down the corridor, he removed his cigar and unhooked his
heels preparatory to rising.

She was in the doorway before he recognized her; where she paused during
a moment's look of mutual inquiry. Then, with all the deliberation of an
intentional insult he retilted his chair, returned his heels to the
rungs and replaced his cigar while he surveyed her with a quite
indescribable insolence.

"Tinhorn" had no special reason for the act and it served no purpose; it
was merely the instinctive act of the bully who strikes in wanton
cruelty at something or somebody he knows cannot retal