The man appeared to be lonely by nature. Excepting the young assistant, Aronson, he associated no colleague with him, carrying all the details of his growing volume of business in his own capacious mind. Other men made memoranda. Shagarach remembered. What he might be in himself none knew; yet "all things to all men" was a motto he spurned. Shagarach was Shagarach to judge or scullion, everywhere masterful, unruffled, mysterious. Were it not for the luminous eyes he might be taken for an abstract thinker. These orbs supplied the magnetism to rivet crowds and suggested a seer of deep soul-secrets (unknown even to their possessor), dormant, perhaps subdued, but not annihilated, under the exterior equipment of the criminal lawyer.
Shagarach often colloqued with himself as he was doing now. In his trials, though he neither badgered witnesses nor wrangled with opponents, he was noted for sotto-voce comments, sometimes ironical, that seemed scarcely conscious. These mannerisms might be relics of a solitary pre-existence, in which the habit of thinking aloud had been formed.
"Was it Arnold or Mungovan who touched the match?" He continued his pacing in silence. "Both knew the premises, Mungovan the better of the two."
The electric street lamp shone into his room and the footfalls of the last tenant, receding on the stairs, had long since died to silence.
"I will study Arnold," he said, finally, buttoning his coat, as if the problem were as good as solved.
CHAPTER IX.
THE ROYSTERERS.
"Get the mail, Indigo."
The letters made a goodly heap on the salver, but Harry Arnold sifted them over with an air of dissatisfaction. One cream-colored envelope, superscribed in a dainty hand, he laid apart. The rest he tore open and tossed into Indigo's lap, as if they were duns, invitations and other such formal matters.