--and then the man who
managed the lights at the opera-house, a friend of Boyd's, helped me
with the stage effects. Jimmy Grayson, of course, knew nothing about
that. I borrowed the idea. I have read somewhere that Aaron Burr by just
such a device once convicted a guilty man who was present in court as a
witness when another was being tried for the crime."

"Well, you have saved his life to an innocent man," said Harley.

"And I have cost a guilty one his." And then, after a moment's pause,
Hobart added, with a little shiver:

"But I wouldn't go through such an ordeal again at any price. When Jimmy
Grayson thundered out, 'Thou art the guilty man,' it was all I could do
to keep from crying, 'Yes, I am, I am!'"

XIV

THE DEAD CITY

As they left the hall, Churchill overtook Harley and tapped him on the
shoulder. Harley turned and saw an expression of supreme disgust on the
face of the _Monitor's_ correspondent, but Harley himself only felt
amusement. He knew that Churchill meant attack.

"I never saw anything more theatrical and ill-timed," said Churchill.
"Of course, it was all prearranged in some manner. But the idea of a
Presidential nominee taking such a risk!"

"He has saved an innocent man's life, and I call that no small
achievement."

"Because the trick was successful; but it was a trick, all the same, and
it was beneath the dignity of a Presidential nominee."

"There was but little risk of any kind," said Harley, shortly, "and even
had it been larger, it would have been right to take it, when the stake
was a man's life. Churchill, you are hunting for faults, you know you
are, or you would not be so quick to see them."

Churchill made no audible reply, but Harley could see that he was
unconvinced, and, in fact, he sent his newspaper a lurid despatch about
it, taking events out of their proper proportion, and hence giving to
them a wholly unjustifiable conclusion. But Sylvia Morgan was devotedly
loyal to her uncle. There were few deeds of his of which she approved
more warmly than this of saving Boyd's life, and Hobart, the master
spirit in it, she thanked in a way that made him turn red with pleasure.
But the discussion of the whole affair was brief, because fast upon its
heels trod another event which stirred them yet more deeply.

When the special train was at Blue Earth, in Montana, among the high
mountains, there came to Jimmy Grayson an appeal, compounded of pathos
and despair, that he c