postulate?"

"I can. With fifteen minutes more on the day of the preliminary hearing I
should have shown it to any one's satisfaction."

Marston went into a brown study with his eyes fixed upon the
stamped-leather devil in the panel at the opposite end of the compartment.
When he spoke again, Kent wondered at the legal verbiage, and still more
at the clear-cut, judicial opinion.

"The facts in the case, as you state them, point to judicial connivance,
and we should always be slow to charge that, Mr. Kent. Technically, the
court was not at fault. Due notice was served on the company's attorney of
record, and you admit, yourself, that the delay, short as it was, would
have been sufficient if you had not been accidentally detained. And, since
there were no contravening affidavits submitted, Judge MacFarlane was
technically warranted in granting the prayer for a temporary receiver."

"I'm not trying to refute that," said Kent. "But afterward, when I called
upon the judge with the evidence in hand----"

"He was under no absolute obligation to retry the case out of court, as
you know, Mr. Kent. Neither was he obliged to give you an unofficial
notice of the day upon which he would hear your motion for the discharge
of the receiver and the vacation of his order appointing him."

"Under no absolute legal obligation, perhaps," retorted Kent. "But the
moral obligation--"

"We are coming to that. I have been giving you what would probably be a
minority opinion of an appellate court, if you could take an appeal. The
majority opinion might take higher ground, pointing to the manifest
injustice done to the defendant company by the shortness of the delay
granted; by Judge MacFarlane's refusal to continue the hearing for one
hour, though your attorney was present and pleading for the same; and
lastly for the indefinite postponement of the hearing on the merits on
insufficient grounds, since the judge was not at the time, and has not
since been, too ill to attend to the routine duties of his office."

Kent looked up quickly.

"Judge Marston, do you know that last assertion to be true?" he demanded.

The slow smile came and went in the introspective eyes of the older man.

"I have been giving you the opinion of the higher court," he said, with
his nearest approach to jocoseness. "It is based upon the supposition that
your allegations would be supported by evidence."

Kent smoked on in silence while the train measured the rail