"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.