reat in the insolent bearing of the little, shriveled man who
had passed out into the night a moment before.

It could have been funny. It might have been sublimest farce-comedy,
had they not lacked the perspective necessary for its appreciation.
But it was enough that they realized that the demagogue had come
crashing down--enough that, watching his furtive disappearance that
night, they learned how pitiful a coward a blusterer really can be.

Old Jerry's own actions in those days which followed had furnished
rich food for conjecture. The fact that it had been the little
mail-carrier himself who had ridden in the carriage beside the slim
girl with the tumbled hair, at the head of the dreary procession that
toiled slowly up to the bleak cemetery behind the church, had, indeed,
been worthy of some discussion. The spendthrift prodigality of the
white roses which rumor whispered he had gone to place the next day
over the new mound of raw earth had not gone unspoken. Even the
resemblance of the girl who John Anderson had named Dryad in his
hunger for the beautiful--even the likeness of her face with its
straight little nose and wistfully curved lips, to the features of
that small, rain-stained statue of the white and gold slip of a woman
who had been his wife, came in for its share of the discussion, too.

But all those topics which were touched upon in the nights that
followed were, at best, of only secondary importance. Inevitably the
circle about the stove swung back to a consideration of that first
day's major climax, until the very discord of opinion which hitherto
had been the chief joy of those nightly sessions bade fair to prove
their total disruption.

For the circle of regulars were leaderless now; there was no longer a
master mind to hold in check the flood of argument and rebuttal, or
preserve a unity of disagreement. Where before they had been
accustomed to take up each new development and pursue it until it
reached a state either too lucid for further consideration or an
insolvable problem that dead-locked conversation, a half dozen
different arguments sprang up each night, splitting the circle into
wrangling factions which trebled the din of voices and multiplied
ten-fold the new note of bitter personalities which had taken the
place of former incontrovertible logic.

Judge Maynard's iron discipline was gone, and the old guard faced a
quite probable dissolution in the first week or two which followed his