ngly exerted against Happy Fear. The Tocsin had always
been a powerful agent; Judge Pike had increased its strength with a
staff which was thoroughly efficient, alert, and always able to strike
centre with the paper's readers; and in town and country it had
absorbed the circulation of the other local journals, which resisted
feebly at times, but in the matter of the Cory murder had not dared to
do anything except follow the Tocsin's lead. The Tocsin, having lit
the fire, fed it--fed it saltpetre and sulphur--for now Martin Pike was
fighting hard.

The farmers and people of the less urban parts of the country were
accustomed to found their opinions upon the Tocsin. They regarded it
as the single immutable rock of journalistic righteousness and wisdom
in the world. Consequently, stirred by the outbursts of the paper,
they came into Canaan in great numbers, and though the pressure from
the town itself was so strong that only a few of them managed to crowd
into the court-room, the others joined their voices to those sombre
murmurs outdoors, which increased in loudness as the trial went on.

The Tocsin, however, was not having everything its own way; the volume
of outcry against Happy Fear and his lawyer had diminished, it was
noticed, in "very respectable quarters." The information imparted by
Mike Sheehan to the politicians at Mr. Farbach's had been slowly
seeping through the various social strata of the town, and though at
first incredulously rejected, it began to find acceptance; Upper Main
Street cooling appreciably in its acceptance of the Tocsin as the law
and the prophets. There were even a few who dared to wonder in their
hearts if there had not been a mistake about Joe Louden; and although
Mrs. Flitcroft weakened not, the relatives of Squire Buckalew and of
Peter Bradbury began to hold up their heads a little, after having made
home horrible for those gentlemen and reproached them with their
conversion as the last word of senile shame. In addition, the
Colonel's grandson and Mr. Bradbury's grandson had both mystifyingly
lent countenance to Joe, consorting with him openly; the former for his
own purposes--the latter because he had cunningly discovered that it
was a way to Miss Tabor's regard, which, since her gentle rejection of
him, he had grown to believe (good youth!) might be the pleasantest
thing that could ever come to him. In short, the question had begun to
thrive: Was it possible that Eskew Arp had