e interview asking his friends to suspend judgment, and saying
that he would try his case in the courts and not in the newspapers. It
was contended by the newspapers that if Handy had an honest defence, it
would lose no weight in court by being printed in the newspapers; and
his enemies in the Congressional fight pushed the charges against Handy
so relentlessly that the public faith in him melted like an April snow,
and when the delegates to the Congressional convention were named, our
own county instructed its delegates against Handy. The farmers opposed
him for taking the case against them, and the town scorned him for his
perfidy. No one who was not paid for it would peddle his tickets at the
primaries, so Handy, with his money all spent, went home on the night of
the local primaries a whipped dog. They said around town that all the
whipped dog got at home was a tin can; for it is certain that at
daylight Handy was down on Main Street viciously drunk, flourishing a
revolver with which he said he was going to kill Charley Hedrick and
then himself. They took the pistol from him, and then he wept and said
he was going to jump in the river, but no one followed him when he
started toward the bridge, and he fell asleep in the shade of the piers,
where he was found during the morning, washed up and sent home sober.

One of the curious revelations of society's partnership in crime was the
way the grocers and butchers who despised Ab Handy's method, but shared
his gains when he succeeded, stopped giving him credit when he failed.
At the end of the first year after the primary wherein he was defeated,
the Handys could not get a dime's worth of beefsteak without the dime.
And dimes were scarce. By that time Handy was wearing his flashy New
York clothes for every day--frayed and spotted and rusty. His
temperament changed with his clothes, from the oily optimism of success
to the sodden pessimism of utter failure; which inspired Colonel
Morrison, returning after the hitching rack case had been settled in
favour of the town, to remark, speaking of Handy, that "an optimist is a
man who isn't caught, and is cheering to keep up his courage, and a
pessimist is one who has been caught and thinks it will be but a
question of time until his neighbours are found out too."

Mrs. Worthington, who was a necessary witness in the disbarment
proceedings and the criminal proceedings against Handy, always went to
Europe when the cases were called