en appeals were made to
the correspondents for information about him more detailed than the
newspapers gave.

Harley studied the faces of the three witnesses as attentively as the
distance and the light would admit, but they remained near the door,
evidently intending to stand there, back to the wall, a plan sometimes
adopted by those who may wish to slip out quietly before a speech is
finished. Harley, the trained observer, saw that Hobart, without their
knowledge, was shepherding them as the shepherd gently makes his sheep
converge upon a common spot.

The correspondent could draw no inference from the faces of the three
men, which were all of usual Western types, without anything special to
distinguish them, and his attention turned to the audience. He had
received an intimation that Jimmy Grayson intended to deliver that
evening a speech of unusual edge and weight. He would indict the other
party in the most direct and forcible manner, pointing out that its sins
were moral as well as political, but that a day of reckoning would come,
when those who profited by such evil courses must pay the forfeit; it
was a part of the law of nature, which was also the law of retribution.

The candidate was a little late, and the opera-house was filled to the
last seat, with many people standing in the aisles and about the doors.
Harley, glancing again at the rows and rows of faces, saw the three
witnesses almost together, and just to the right of the main entrance,
where they leaned against the wall, facing the stage. Hobart fluttered
about them, holding them in occasional talk, and Harley was just about
to look again, and with increasing attention, but at that instant the
great audience, with a common impulse and a kind of rushing sound, like
the slide of an avalanche, rose to its feet. The candidate, coming from
the wings, had just appeared upon the stage, and the welcome was
spontaneous and overwhelming. Jimmy Grayson was always a serious man,
but Harley noticed that evening, when he first appeared before the
footlights, that his face looked tense and eager, as if he felt that a
great task which he must assume lay just before him.

He wasted no time, but went at once to the heart of his subject, the
crime of a great party, the wicked ways by which it had attained its
wicked ends, and from the opening sentence he had his big audience with
him, heart and soul.

The indictment was terrible: in a masterly way he summed up the