With Judge Marston's hint partly to point the way, Kent was no long time in getting at work on the new lead.

Having been at the time a practitioner in one of the counties affected, he knew the political deal by which MacFarlane had been elected. Briefly described, it was a swapping of horses in midstream. In the preliminary canvass it was discovered that in all probability Judge MacFarlane's district, as constituted, would not reelect him. But the adjoining district was strong enough to spare a county without loss to the party; and that county added to MacFarlane's voting strength would tip the scale in his favor. The Assembly was in session, and the remedy was applied in the shape of a bill readjusting the district lines to fit the political necessity.

While this bill was still in the lower house an obstacle presented itself in the form of a vigorous protest from Judge Whitcomb, whose district was the one to suffer loss. The county in question was a prosperous one, and the court fees—which a compliant clerk might secretly divide with the judge appointing him—were large: wherefore Whitcomb threatened political reprisals if Kiowa County should be taken away from him. The outcome was a compromise. For elective purposes the two districts were gerrymandered as the bill proposed; but it was expressly provided that the transferred county should remain judicially in Whitcomb's district until the expiration of Whitcomb's term of office.

Having refreshed his memory as to the facts, Kent spent a forenoon in the State library. He stayed on past the luncheon hour, feeding on a dry diet of Digests; and it was not until hunger began to sharpen his faculties that he thought of going back of the statutory law to the fountain-head in the constitution of the State. Here, after he had read carefully section by section almost through the entire instrument, his eye lighted upon a clause which gradually grew luminous as he read and re-read it.

"That is what Marston meant; it must be what he meant," he mused; and returning the book to its niche in the alcove he sat down to put his face in his hands and sum up the status in logical sequence.

The conclusion must have been convincing, since he presently sprang up and left the room quickly to have himself shot down the elevator shaft to the street level. The telegraph office in the capitol was closed, but there was another in the Hotel Brunswick, two squares distant, and thither he went.

"Hold the pool in fighting trim at all hazards. Think I have found weak link in the chain," was his wire to Loring, at Boston; and having sent it, he went around to Cassatti's and astonished the waiter by ordering a hearty luncheon at half-past three o'clock in the afternoon.

It was late in the evening before he left the tiny office on the fifth floor of the Quintard Building where one of his former stenographers had set up in business for herself. Since five o'clock the young woman had been steadily driving the type-writer to Kent's dictation. When the final sheet came out with a whirring rasp of the ratchet, he suddenly remembered that he had promised Miss Van Brock to dine with her. It was too late for the dinner, but not too late to go and apologize, and he did the thing that he could, stopping at his rooms on the way to dress while his cab-driver waited.

He found Portia alone, for which he was glad; but her greeting was distinctly accusative.

"If I should pretend to be deeply offended and tell Thomas to show you the door, what could you say for yourself?" she began, before he could say a word in exculpation.

"I should say every sort of excuseful thing I could think of, knowing very well that the most ingenious lie would fall far short of atoning for the offense," he replied humbly.

"Possibly it would be better to tell the truth—had you thought of that?" she suggested, quite without malice.

"Yes, I had; and I shall, if you'll let me begin back a bit." He drew up a chair to face her and sat on the edge of it. "You know I told you I was going to Gaston to sell my six lots while Major Guilford's little boom is on?"

"I'm trying to remember: go on."

"Well, I went yesterday morning and returned late last night. Do you know, it's positively marvelous!"

"Which—the six lots, the boom, or the celerity of your movements?" she asked, with a simulation of the deepest interest.

"All three, if you please; but I meant the miraculous revival of things along the Trans-Western. But that is neither here nor there—"

"I think it is very much here and there," she interrupted.

"I see you don't want me to tell the truth—the whole truth; but I am determined. The first man I met after dinner was Hunnicott, and when I had made him my broker in the real estate affair we fell to talking about the railroad steal. Speaking of MacFarlane's continued absence, Hunnicott said, jokingly, that it was a pity we couldn't go back to the methods of a few hundred years ago and hire the Hot Springs doctor to 'obliterate' him. The word stuck in my mind, and I broke away and took the train chiefly to have a chance to think out the new line. In the smoking-room of the sleeper I found—whom, do you suppose?"

"Oh, I don't know: Judge MacFarlane, perhaps, coming back to give you a chance to poison him at short range?"

"No; it was Marston."

"And he talked so long and so fast that you couldn't get here in time for dinner this evening? That would be the most picturesque of the little fictions you spoke of."

Kent laughed.

"For the first hour he wouldn't talk at all; just sat there wooden-faced, smoking vile little cigars that made me think I was getting hay-fever. But I wouldn't give up; and after I had worn out all the commonplaces I began on the Trans-Western muddle. At that he woke up all at once, and before I knew it he was giving me an expert legal opinion on the case; meaty and sound and judicial. Miss Van Brock, that man is a lawyer, and an exceedingly able one, at that."

"Of course," she said coolly. "He was one of the justices of the Supreme Court of his own state at forty-two: that was before he had to come West for his health. I found that out a long time ago."

"And you never told me!" said Kent, reproachfully. "Well, no matter; I found out for myself that he is a man to tie to. After we had canvassed the purely legal side of the affair, he wanted to know more, and I went in for the details, telling him all the inferences which involve Bucks, Meigs, Hendricks, MacFarlane and the lot of them."

Miss Portia's eyes were flashing.

"Good, good, good!" she said. "David, I'm proud of you. That took courage—heaps of it."

"I did have to forget pretty hard that he was the lieutenant-governor and nominally one of the gang. But if he is not with us, neither is he against us. He took it all in quietly, and when I was through, he said: 'You have told me some things that I knew, and some others that I only suspected.'"

"Was that all?" asked Miss Van Brock, eagerly.

"No; I took a good long breath and asked his advice."

"Did he give it?"

"He did. He said in sober earnest just what Hunnicott had said in a joke: 'If I had your case to fight, I should try to obliterate Judge MacFarlane.' I began to say that MacFarlane's removal wouldn't help us so long as Bucks has the appointing of his successor, and then he turned on me and hammered it in with a last word just as we were leaving the train: 'I didn't say remove; I said obliterate.' I caught on, after so long a time, and I've been hard at work ever since."

"You are obliterating me," said Miss Portia. "I haven't the slightest idea what it is all about."

"It's easy from this on," said Kent, consolingly. "You know how MacFarlane secured his reelection?"

"Everybody knows that."

"Well, to cut a long story short, the gerrymander deal won't stand the light. The constitution says—"

"Oh, please don't quote law books at me. Put it in English—woman-English, if you can."

"I will. The special act of the Assembly is void; therefore there was no legal election, and, by consequence, there is no judge and no receiver."

Miss Van Brock was silent for a reflective minute. Then she said:

"On second thought, perhaps you would better tell me what the constitution says, Mr. David. Possibly I could grasp it."

"It is in the section on elections. It says: 'All circuit or district judges, and all special judges, shall be elected by the qualified voters of the respective circuits or districts in which they are to hold their court.' Kiowa County was cut out of Judge Whitcomb's circuit and placed in Judge MacFarlane's for electoral purposes only. In all other respects it remains a part of Judge Whitcomb's circuit, and will so continue until Whitcomb's term expires. Without the vote of Kiowa, MacFarlane could not have been elected; with it he was illegally elected, or, to put it the other way about, he was not elected at all. Since he is not lawfully a judge, his acts are void, among them this appointment of Major Guilford as receiver for the Trans-Western."

She was not as enthusiastic as he thought she ought to be. In the soil prepared for it by the political confidences of the winter there had grown up a many-branching tree of intimacy between these two; a frank, sexless friendship, as Kent would have described it, in which a man who was not very much given to free speech with any one unburdened himself, and the woman made him believe that her quick, apprehending sympathy was the one thing needful—as women have done since the world began.

Since the looting of the railroad which had taken him out of the steadying grind of regular work, Kent had been the prey of mixed motives. From the first he had thrown himself heartily into the problem of retrieval, but the pugnacious professional ambition to break the power of the machine had divided time pretty equally with sentiment. Elinor had said little about the vise-nip of hardship which the stock-smashing would impose upon three unguardianed women; but Penelope had been less reticent. Wanting bare justice at the hands of the wreckers, Elinor would go to her wedding with Ormsby as the beggar maid went to King Cophetua; and all the loyalty of an unselfish love rose up in Kent to make the fight with the grafters a personal duel.

At every step in the hitherto discouraging struggle Portia Van Brock had been his keen-sighted adviser, prompter, ally of proof. He told himself now and again in a flush of gratitude that he was coming to owe her more than he had ever owed any woman; that where other men, more—or less—fortunate, were not denied the joy of possession, he, the disappointed one, was finding a true and loyal comradeship next best, if not quite equal to the beatitudes of passion.

In all of which David Kent was not entirely just to himself. However much he owed to Portia—and the debt was large—she was not his only creditor. Something he owed to the unsatisfied love; more, perhaps, to the good blood in his veins; but most of all to the battle itself. For out of the soul-harrowings of endeavor was emerging a better man, a stronger man, than any his friends had known. Brutal as their blind gropings were, the Flagellants of the Dark Ages plied their whips to some dim purpose. Natures there be that rise only to the occasion; and if there be no occasion, no floggings of adversity or bone-wrenchings upon the rack of things denied, there will be no awakening—no victory.

David Kent was suffering in both kinds, and was the better man for it. From looking forward to success in the narrow field of professional advancement, or in the scarcely broader one of the righting of one woman's financial wrongs, he was coming now to crave it in the name of manhood; to burn with an eager desire to see justice done for its own sake.

So, when he had come to Portia with the scheme of effacing Judge MacFarlane and his receiver at one shrewd blow, the first of the many plans which held out a fair promise of success as a reward for daring, he was disappointed at her lack of enthusiasm.

"What is the matter with it?" he demanded, when he had given her five full minutes for reflection.

"I don't know, David," she said gravely. "Have I ever thrown cold water on any of your schemes thus far?"

"No, indeed. You have been the loyalest partizan a man ever had, I think; the only one I have to whom I can talk freely. And I have told you more than I have all the others put together."

"I know you have. And it hurts me to pull back now when you want me to push. But I can't help it. Do you believe in a woman's intuition?"

"I suppose I do: all men do, don't they?"

She was tying little knots in the fringe of the table scarf, but the prophetess-eyes, as Penelope called them, were not following the deft intertwinings of the slender fingers.

"You mean to set about 'obliterating' Judge MacFarlane forthwith?" she asked.

"Assuredly. I have been whipping the thing into shape all afternoon: that is what kept me from dining with you."

"It involves some kind of legal procedure?"

"Yes; a rather complicated one."

"Could you explain it so that I could understand it?"

"I think so. In the first place the question is raised by means of an information or inquiry called a quo warranto. This is directed to the receiver, and is a demand to know by what authority he holds. Is it clear thus far?"

"Pellucidly," she said.

"In reply the receiver cites his authority, which is the order from Judge MacFarlane; and in our turn we proceed to show that the authority does not exist—that the judge's election was illegal and that therefore his acts are void. Do I make it plain?"

"You make it seem as though it were impossible to fail. And yet I know you will fail."

"How do you know it?"

"Don't ask me; I couldn't begin to tell you that. But in some spiritual or mental looking-glass I can see you coming to me with the story of that failure—coming to ask my help."

He smiled.

"You don't need to be the prophetess Penelope says you are to foresee part of that. I always come to you with my woes."

"Do you?—oftener than you go to Miss Brentwood?"

This time his smile was a mere tightening of the lips.

"You do love to grind me on that side, don't you?" he said. "I and my affairs are less than nothing to Miss Brentwood, and no one knows it any better than you do."

"But you want to go to her," she persisted. "I am only the alternative."

He looked her full in the eyes.

"Miss Van Brock, what is it you want me to say? What can I say more than I said a moment ago—that you are the truest friend a man ever had?"

The answering look out of the brown eyes was age-old in its infinite wisdom.

"How little you men know when you think you know the most," she said half-musingly; then she broke off abruptly. "Let us talk about something else. If Major Guilford is wrecking the railroad, why is he spending so much money on improvements? Have you thought to ask yourself that question?"

"A good many times," he admitted, following her promptly back to first principles.

"And you have not found the answer?"

"Not one that fully satisfies me—no."

"I've found one."

"Intuitively?" he smiled.

"No; it's pure logic, this time. Do you remember showing me a letter that Mr. Hunnicott wrote you just before the explosion—a letter in which he repeated a bit of gossip about Mr. Semple Falkland and his mysterious visit to Gaston?"

"Yes, I remember it."

"Do you know who Mr. Falkland is?"

"Who doesn't?" he queried. "He has half of Wall Street in his clientele."

"Yes; but particularly he is the advisory counsel of the Plantagould System. Ever since you showed me that letter I have been trying to account for his presence in Gaston on the day before Judge MacFarlane's spring term of court. I should never have found out but for Mrs. Brentwood."

"Mrs. Brentwood!"

Miss Van Brock nodded.

"Yes; the mother of my—of the young person for whom I am the alternative, is in a peck of trouble; I quote her verbatim. She and her two daughters hold some three thousand shares of Western Pacific stock. It was purchased at fifty-seven, and it is now down to twenty-one."

"Twenty and a quarter to-day," Kent corrected.

"Never mind the fractions. The mother of the incomparable—Penelope, has heard that I am a famous business woman; a worthy understudy for Mrs. Hetty Green; so she came to me for advice. She had a letter from a New York broker offering her a fraction more than the market price for her three thousand shares of Western Pacific."

"Well?" said Kent.

"Meaning what did I do? I did what you did not do—what you are not doing even now; I put two and two together in the twinkling of a bedstaff. Why should a New York broker be picking up outlying Western Pacific at a fraction more than the market when the stock is sinking every day? I was curious enough to pass the 'why' along to a friend of mine in Wall Street."

"Of course he told you all about it," said Kent, incredulously.

"He told me what I needed to know. The broker in question is a Plantagould man."

"Still I fail to 'connect up,' as the linemen say."

"Do you? Ah, David, David! will you leave it for a woman to point out what you should have suspected the moment you read that bit of gossip in Mr. Hunnicott's letter?"

Her hand was on the arm of her chair. He covered it with his own.

"I'll leave it for you, Portia. You are my good angel."

She withdrew the hand quickly, but there was no more than playful resentment in her retort.

"Shame on you!" she scoffed. "What would Miss Brentwood say?"

"I wish you would leave her out of it," he frowned. "You are continually ignoring the fact that she has promised to be the wife of another man."

"And has thereby freed you from all obligations of loyalty? Don't deceive yourself: women are not made that way. Doubtless she will go on and marry the other man in due season; but she will never forgive you if you smash her ideals. But we were talking about the things you ought to have guessed. Fetch me the atlas from the book-case—lower shelf; right-hand corner; that's it."

He did it; and in further obedience opened the thin quarto at the map of the United States. There were heavy black lines, inked in with a pen, tracing out the various ramifications of a great railway system. The nucleus of the system lay in the middle West, but there was a growing network of the black lines reaching out toward the Pacific. And connecting the trans-Mississippi network with the western was a broad red line paralleling the Trans-Western Railway.

She smiled at his sudden start of comprehension.

"Do you begin to suspect things?" she asked.

He nodded his head.

"You ought to be a man. If you were, I should never give you a moment's peace until you consented to take a partnership with me. It's as plain as day, now."

"Is it? Then I wish you would make it appear so to me. I am not half as subtile as you give me credit for being."

"Yet you worked this out."

"That was easy enough; after I had seen Mrs. Brentwood's letter, and yours from Mr. Hunnicott. The Plantagould people want your railroad, and the receivership is a part of a plan for acquiring it. But why is Major Guilford spending so much money for improvements?"

"His reasons are not far to seek now that you have shown me where to look. His instructions are to run the stock down so that the Plantagould can buy it in. Cut rates and big expenditures will do that—have done it. On the other hand, it is doubtless a condition of the deal that the road shall be turned over whole as to its property values—there is to be no wrecking in the general acceptance of the word. The Plantagould doesn't want a picked skeleton."

Miss Portia's eyes narrowed.

"It's a skilful bit of engineering, isn't it?" she said. "You'd admire it as artistic work yourself if your point of view were not so hopelessly personal."

"You don't know half the artistic skill of it yet," he went on. "Besides all these different ends that are being conserved, the gang is taking care of its surplus heelers on the pay-rolls of the company. More than that, it is making immense political capital for itself. Everybody knows what the policy of the road was under the old rÉgime: 'All the tariff the traffic will stand.' But now a Bucks man has hold of it, and liberality is the word. Every man in Trans-Western territory is swearing by Bucks and Guilford. Ah, my dear friend, his Excellency the governor is a truly great man!"

She nodded.

"I've been trying to impress you with that fact all along. The mistake you made was in not joining the People's Party early in the campaign, David."

But Kent was following out his own line of thought and putting it in words as it came.

"Think of the brain-work it took to bring all these things into line. There was no hitch, no slip, and nothing was overlooked. They picked their time, and it was a moment when we were absolutely helpless. I had filed our charter, but our local organization was still incomplete. They had their judge and the needful case in his court, pending and ready for use at the precise moment. They had Hawk on the ground, armed and equipped; and they knew that unless a miracle intervened they would have nobody but an unprepared local attorney to obstruct them."

"Is that all?" she asked.

"No. The finest bit of sculpture is on the capstone of the pyramid. Since we have had no hearing on the merits, Guilford is only a temporary receiver, subject to discharge if the allegations in Hawk's amended petition are not sustained. After the major has sufficiently smashed the stock, Judge MacFarlane will come back, the hearing on the merits will be given, we shall doubtless make our point, and the road will revert to the stock-holders. But by that time enough of the stock will have changed hands on the 'wreck' price to put the Plantagould people safely in the saddle, and the freeze-out will be a fact accomplished."

Miss Van Brock drew a long breath that was more than half a sigh.

"You spoke the simple truth, David, when you said that his Excellency is a great man. It seems utterly hopeless now that we have cleared up all the little mysteries."

Kent rose to take his leave.

"No; that is where they all go out and I stay in," he said cheerfully. "The shrewder he is, the more credit there will be in making him let go. And you mark my words: I am going to make him let go. Good night."

She had gone with him to the door; was in the act of closing it behind him, when he turned back for a belated question.

"By the way, what did you tell Mrs. Brentwood to do?"

"I told her not to do anything until she had consulted you and Mr. Loring and Brookes Ormsby. Was that right?"

"Quite right. If it comes up again, rub it in some more. We'll save her alive yet, if she will let us. Did you say I might come to dinner to-morrow evening? Thank you: you grow sweeter and more truly compassionate day by day. Good night again."