fe failed to uncover his
head, with a due amount of reverence, in the presence of the town's
great man.

Perhaps with his mind set upon other things that morning Young Denny
forgot it, perhaps there was an even deeper reason for his remissness,
but the Judge, while he stood and listened to the boy's tersely short
explanation of his errand, was himself too taken up with other
thoughts to note the omission. He was already formulating the rounded
sentences with which he would introduce the subject that night to the
circle in the Tavern office.

There was much of the dramatic in the whole situation--much that
needed only proper staging and elaboration to make of it a tremendous
triumph, a personal triumph, the extent of which he began to foresee
with Denny's opening words. And the greater became his consciousness
of Denny Bolton's strange new bearing, the clearer he saw all the
possibilities of the situation.

To cap it all, the one big, irrefutable fact about which he
could build his climax was there all ready before him, ripe for
exploitation. It was with an actual effort of the will that the
Judge held his brain sufficiently attentive to the boy's words to
grasp the reason for his early morning visit, in the face of the
fascination which that great, ragged bruise across Denny's chin had
for him. Properly displayed, properly played up, the possibilities
of that raw, unbandaged wound were incalculable, and the Judge
started almost guiltily from his greedy scrutiny of it to a sudden
realization that the boy before him had paused in his recital and
was waiting in almost insulting self-possession for a reply.

Many men and some few women had rung boldly at the Judge's front door
or, more often, tapped timidly at the entrance in the rear of the
house, all bent upon the same errand. For it was a country-wide secret
that no one had ever been turned away from those doors with a refusal.
If any of those same visitors ever awakened to a realization that the
terms of their bargain were far harder to bear than a refusal might
have been, they nursed that knowledge in secret.

The Judge was a first mortgage financier, and he scanned each new
addition to his already extensive collection with all the elaborate
care which a matcher of precious stones might have exercised in the
assembling of a fabulous priced string of pearls. It was his practice
to scrutinize each transaction from every possible angle, in every
degree of light and