t is the letter of the law
which shelters you."

Shelby rasped a laugh.

"I know something of the spirit of laws."

"I doubt not. You've helped make enough disreputable legislation to
qualify an expert."

"What right has a dilettante like you to sit in judgment?" he demanded,
the other's barb rankling none the less that he had invited it. "You
have no notion of just political expediency; no notion even of politics
with which you meddle. Politics isn't book knowledge; it's flesh and
blood fact. Party fealty means nothing to you. You've not voted a
straight ticket twice in your life."

"I know where that shoe pinches," retorted Graves. "You mean I've
consistently neglected to vote for you. Somehow I never could swallow
your assumption of divine right to hold office all the time."

Shelby's fingers knotted round his whip-handle.

"I'd like to trounce you," he menaced. "It's a hiding you need."

"For presuming to run against you? Let me make it plain that I'm not to
be intimidated by you or any of your creatures."

"I'd like to trounce you," repeated Shelby, hoarsely, beside himself with
the gadfly inquisition of the past few days. "I'm sick of your
pharisaical ways. I bottom your lofty motives well enough. Jealousy
goaded you into politics. You're a reformer because the heiress wanted
none of you. If Ruth Temple--"

Graves wrenched the whip from Shelby's grasp, and struck with all his
might. The warded blow spent itself on the pommel of the saddle.

"Stung, eh?" Shelby leaped from his stirrups and closed with him. The
cob took fright at the reeling men and pounded off up the tow-path toward
the town.

Then another horse loomed of a sudden from out the dusk, and Ruth herself
rode straight upon them, enforcing a separation.

"How dare you drag my name into a low political quarrel--either of you?"
No one answered her. "Give _me_ the whip." Shelby, who had regained it,
obeyed without a word. Ruth flung it far into the canal. "Now if you
will be brutes, use brutes' weapons." Wherewith she turned an indignant
back and galloped an exit from the scene as spirited as her entrance.

"You knew she was there," accused Graves.

"I left her in the road, damn you. I couldn't know she had seen."

Standing on the dock's sheer edge, they glowered into one another's eyes
through the fading twilight, the great steam cranes behind flinging out
giant arms over the stone heaps, the black water below glan