“What are you staying for?” demanded the judge savagely. “I tell you I won’t be pilled for a muscular twist!”
“Put out your tongue, Hadley,” responded his visitor, mounting his spectacles. “The color of it is more important just now than the way it wags.”
In spite of himself the judge laughed in a sour way. Then a twinge overtook him, and he swore under his breath.
“If you could cure this infernal disease, I’d give you ten thousand dollars!”
“Keep it for Diane. She’ll need the money about the time you kill yourself with hard work.”
The judge eyed him.
“Trying to intimidate me into taking your drugs, eh?”
“That’s my business,” replied the doctor, drawing his chair to the fire and looking over his open case for an appropriate dose.
The other man lay back in his cushioned chair, free for a moment of the teasing ache, and regarded Gerry in silence. His appearance of great strength, the florid flush on his skin, and his iron-gray hair, defied both age and weakness; but the doctor’s words had set him thinking, and he strummed on his chair-arms with angry fingers. A bright fire was burning on the hearth, and the flames made fitful shadows in the small, comfortable, book-lined room—a room that had an intimate air of having associated long with a man of affairs, and of having acquired, even in its old, dilapidated bindings and its well-worn rug, the full measure of dignity and reserve which befitted a judge.
“I’ve got a great deal to do before I’m ready to go,” he remarked at length, in his deep voice. “They’ve mussed up the political situation in this State. If I died or resigned, they’d put in that fool, Henry Runes, as judge!”