98
VIII. The Editor of the _Express_ 116
IX. The Price of a Man 131
X. Sunset at The Sycamores 146
XI. The Trial 158
XII. Opportunity Knocks at Bruce's Door 172
XIII. The Deserter 191
XIV. The Night Watch 212
XV. Politics Make Strange Bedfellows 226
XVI. Through The Storm 240
XVII. The Cup of Bliss 250
XVIII. The Candidate and the Tiger 264
XIX. When Greek Meets Greek 276
XX. A Spectre Comes to Town 295
XXI. Bruce to the Front 311
XXII. The Last Stand 328
XXIII. At Elsie's Bedside 346
XXIV. Billy Harper Writes a Story 368
XXV. Katherine Faces the Enemy 388
XXVI. An Idol's Fall 403
XXVII. The End of The Beginning 418

COUNSEL FOR THE DEFENSE

CHAPTER I

WESTVILLE PREPARES TO CELEBRATE

The room was thick with dust and draped with ancient cobwebs. In one
corner dismally reposed a literary junk heap--old magazines,
broken-backed works of reference, novels once unanimously read but now
unanimously forgotten. The desk was a helter-skelter of papers. One of
the two chairs had its burst cane seat mended by an atlas of the
world; and wherever any of the floor peered dimly through the general
debris it showed a complexion of dark and ineradicable greasiness.
Altogether, it was a room hopelessly unfit for human habitation; which
is perhaps but an indirect manner of stating that it was the office of
the editor of a successful newspaper.

Before a typewriter at a small table sat a bare-armed, solitary man.
He was twenty-eight or thirty, abundantly endowed with bone and
muscle, and with a face----But not to soil this early page with
abusive terms, it will be sufficient to remark that whatever the
Divine Sculptor had carved his countenance to portray, plainly there
had been no thought of re-beautifying the earth with an Apollo. He was
constructed not for grace, but powerful, tireless action; and there
was something absurdly disproportionate between th