“Well,” said a certain Mr. Forsey, also a young man, who had dropped upon the broad window-seat and lounged there, holding one knee in his clasped hands, and smoking too, “do you think Harshaw would have ventured to say it if there were no foundation for it,—if Gwinnan had done nothing to suggest such a proceeding? What motive had Harshaw?”
He was a different manner of man. He had close-cut fair hair, a face broad across the cheek-bones and narrow at the chin, sparse whiskers and a light gray, wide-open eye. He had a sedulously neat appearance, a soft tread, and delicate white hands, in one of which he held his hat.
“What motive? What motive for slander? Go to first principles. Gwinnan has got something that Harshaw wants.” Kinsard put his cigar into his mouth and went on talking as he held it fast between his teeth. “What fools we all are! We make laws against predatory beasts and decree their extermination. Pay a bounty for the scalps of the marauding men, I say,—the sharp fellows who ravage and pillage and have contrived so far to keep the law on their side. But pshaw!” he shifted his legs over the arm of the chair impatiently. “He can’t hurt Gwinnan. Talk can’t compass the impeachment of a judge. Gwinnan is one of the strongest men on the bench. Made the stiffest show that ever was seen when he ran against old Judge Burns, who had sat on the bench in that circuit till everybody thought he owned it. Old man could have mortgaged the bench,—could have raised money on it, I haven’t a doubt. Gwinnan couldn’t have beat Burns, if he hadn’t been above reproach and suspicion; it’s a tremendous thing to upset an old fixture like that.”
Mr. Kinsard’s views, as his colleagues in the legislature had discovered to their confusion, were apt to confirm his hearers in the opposite opinion. A bill was much safer when he arrayed himself against it. Mr. Forsey was not convinced that so serious a charge would have been made with absolutely nothing to support it. The idea of the blurtings of an uncontrolled rage occurred to neither of them. Forsey sat looking so steadily at the dapper toe of his boot for a time, and yet with so stealthy a stillness, that his manner might have suggested the bated exultation of a cat that had had a glimpse of a frisking mouse in that neighborhood, and was waiting to pounce upon it.
“Judge Gwinnan has the reputation,” gravely remarked the granger, who looked as if he might be a pillar of the church, “of being a very upright man, a most worthy man, and a Christian gentleman.”
“Of course he is,” said Kinsard; “no question about it, and nobody but a fool would have thought of anything else. I am going to introduce a bill,” he added seriously, “to make the fool-killer a State officer. We need him more than a geologist, or a governor, or anybody but a sheriff. A fool-killer ought to be on the State pay-roll.”
No one said anything further, for Kinsard was lazily pulling himself out of the contortions into which he had sunk in the chair.
He was very striking when he stood at his full height. There was an air of dash and bravery about him engaging to the imagination. His high, broad forehead gave nobility and seriousness to a face that would otherwise have been only sparkling, or sneering, or melancholy, as his mood dictated. One might have hoped that should he wear out his fantastic, aimless, erratic spirit, should some blow subdue it and give it into his control, he would develop great gifts hitherto dwarfed and denied. He was aware of them in some sort; he bore himself as a man endowed with some splendor of preeminence. And others accorded it. Youth has much credit given to its promise, despite that it so often falls in the bud or fails in the fruit. But it rarely has so brilliant a prospect as here; and after he had strolled off at a leisurely, swinging gait, saying that he was going to the House, where a bill was coming up that he wanted to kill, they all looked after him, and commented on him, and called him a fine, high-minded young man, and said that it was a good thing for young fellows to have political ambition, and that it was dying out among that class generally, who was too fond of making money and of using their time to their own advantage.
He stood for a moment on the steps of the hotel, drawing on his gloves. Despite the snow, there was a faint suggestion of spring in the air. A thaw had set in. He heard drops slowly pattering down from the cornice above. The blue-white splendors of the electric light, with its myriad fine and filar rays whorled out into the darkness, showed a deserted street. A carriage, looking with its two lamps like some watchful-eyed monster, pulled up in front of the door, and the colored driver, with a wide display of a toothful grin, alighted with a “Want a hack, boss?”
“Jim, Tom—oh, it’s Dick,” said Kinsard, glancing at the dusky face in the lamplight; he knew all the colored folks in town. “Well, drive me to the Capitol, and don’t be all night about it, either.”