sful in his elaborate deceit; rather gloating at times in
the iniquity of one in his position being in so low a business. He
wondered what the people would say if they really knew the depths of his
infamy, and when he sentenced a poor devil for some minor crime, he
would often watch himself as a third party and wonder if he would ever
stand up and take his sentence. But he had no fear of that. The little
drama between Judge Van Dorn, the prisoner at the bar, and the lover of
Margaret Fenn, was for his diversion, rather than for his instruction,
and he enjoyed it as an artistic travesty upon the justice he was
dispensing.

Thomas Van Dorn believed that the world was full of a number of
exceedingly pleasant things that might be had for the taking, and no
questions asked. So when he felt the bee sting of gossip, he threw back
his head, squared his face to the wind, put an extra kink of elegance
into his raiment, a tighter crimp into his smile and an added ardor into
his hale greeting, did some indispensable judicial favor to the old
spider of commerce back of the brass sign at the Traders National,
defied the town, and bade it watch him fool it. But the men who drove
the express wagons knew that whenever they saw Judge Van Dorn take the
train for the capital they would be sure to have a package from the
capital the next day for Mrs. Fenn; sometimes it would be a milliner's
box, sometimes a jeweler's, sometimes a florist's, sometimes a dry-goods
merchant's, and always a candy maker's.

At last the whole wretched intrigue dramatized itself in one culminating
episode. It came in the spring. Dr. Nesbit had put on his white linens
just as the trees were in their first gayety of foliage and the spring
blooming flowers were at their loveliest.

After a morning in the dirt and grime and misery and injustice and
wickedness that made the outer skin over South Harvey and Foley and
Magnus and the mining and smelter towns of the valley, the Doctor came
driving into the cool beauty of Quality Hill in Harvey with a middle
aged man's sense of relief. South Harvey and its neighbors disheartened
him.

He had seen Grant Adams, a man of the Doctor's own caste by birth,
hurrying into a smelter on some organization errand out of overalls in
his cheap, ill-fitting clothes, begrimed, heavy featured, dogged and
rapidly becoming a part of the industrial dregs. Grant Adams in the
smelter, preoccupied with the affairs of that world, and passing