"This début ball is just their way of putting me on the marriage market—duly labelled and proclaimed. I don't fancy being put up at auction, and it doesn't even seem quite honest. It's not a genuine offer of sale, because it's all fixed in their own minds. Morgan is to bid me in when the time comes."
Boone's face grew sombre, and his strong mouth line stiffened over his resolute chin.
"God knows that arrangement is going to come to grief," he said in a low voice that shook with feeling.
"Not if Lochinvar doesn't come to the party," she retorted with a swift change to the riffle of laughing eyes. "I'm letting sleeping dogs lie for the present, Boone, because it's the best way. There isn't any doubt of you in my heart. You know that, but it will be a long time before you can marry me. Meantime,—" the battle light shone for a flashing instant in her pupils—"I'm standing out for one thing. They've got to give you full acknowledgment. Everybody that accepts me must accept you—and unless you claim recognition, they won't do it."
Boone rose and came over. He took her hands in his own and looked down at her, and, though he smiled, his voice was full of worship.
"Lochinvar will come, dearest," he declared. "He'll come in full war-paint, and nobody but himself will know how stiff he's scared."
It was the morning after that that Boone sat again as a defendant in the police court, flanked by Morgan and the Colonel. He was on trial for shooting and wounding, and there had been broadly circulated hints that his prosecution would be gruelling enough to dissuade bold and adverse spirits on election day. Yet when the case was reached on the docket, Henry Simpson, whose finger was in every pie as a master pastry cook for the intrenched element, arose from his place at the right hand of the court's prosecutor and sonorously cleared his throat.
"May it please your Honour," he announced, with the rhetorical dignity of a Roman senator—or a criminal lawyer's idea of a Roman senator—"the prosecuting witness harbours no feeling of rancour in this affair, despite the injuries which he sustained. The defendant seems to have been led astray in the hot enthusiasm of his youth by older heads. Having no wish to punish a cat's-paw for the responsibility of his mentors, we move the dismissal of the accused."
"And we, your Honour," came the uptake of Morgan Wallifarro so swiftly as to leave no margin of pause between statement and retort, "insist upon a trial and a full vindication. This prosecuting witness who would now spread the benign mantle of charity over the conduct of his assailant, fell face foremost while leading an armed raid on a registration booth. I am prepared to prove that the wounded man who now sits there, an exemplar of Christian forgiveness, was spirited away, after his gang fled, and cared for in a private room at the City Hospital under the tender auspices of certain officials. I am further prepared to prove that the name which this municipal favourite now wears is, for him, a new one and that until recently he was known as Kid Repetto whose likeness and Bertillon measurements are preserved in the local rogues' gallery. The profession which he ornamented until the city hall cried out for his skilled aid was burglary and second-story work—"
The judicial gavel fell with an admonitory slam, and the magisterial jaws came warningly together.