ichard Shackford that day.

It was an hour before noon. Up to that moment Richard had been
engaged in reading and replying to the letters received by the
morning's mail, a duty which usually fell to Mr. Slocum. As Richard
stepped from the office into the yard a small boy thrust a note into
his hand, and then stood off a short distance tranquilly boring with
one toe in the loose gravel, and apparently waiting for an answer.
Shackford hastily ran his eye over the paper, and turning towards the
boy said, a little impatiently:

"Tell him I will come at once."

There was another person in Stillwater that forenoon whose
agitation was scarcely less than Mr. Slocum's, though it greatly
differed from it in quality. Mr. Slocum was alive to his finger-tips
with dismay; Lawyer Perkins was boiling over with indignation. It was
a complex indignation, in which astonishment and incredulity were
nicely blended with a cordial detestation of Mr. Taggett and vague
promptings to inflict some physical injury on Justice Beemis. That
he, Melanchthon Perkins, the confidential legal adviser and personal
friend of the late Lemuel Shackford, should have been kept for two
weeks in profound ignorance of proceedings so nearly touching his
lamented client! The explosion of the old lawyer's wrath was so
unexpected that Justice Beemis, who had dropped in to make the
disclosures and talk the matter over informally, clutched at his
broad-brimmed Panama hat and precipitately retreated from the office.
Mr. Perkins walked up and down the worn green drugget of his private
room for half an hour afterwards, collecting himself, and then
dispatched a hurried note to Richard Shackford, requesting an instant
interview with him at his, Lawyer Perkins's, chambers.

When, some ten minutes subsequently, Richard entered the
low-studded square room, darkened with faded moreen curtains and
filled with a stale odor of law-calf, Mr. Perkins was seated at his
desk and engaged in transferring certain imposing red-sealed
documents to a green baize satchel which he held between his knees.
He had regained his equanimity; his features wore their usual
expression of judicial severity; nothing denoted his recent
discomposure, except perhaps an additional wantonness in the stringy
black hair falling over the high forehead,--that pallid high forehead
which always wore the look of being covered with cold perspiration.

"Mr. Shackford," said Lawyer Perkins, suspending his operati