Who Mrs. Melissa Varnum was; how she came to be traveling from Midland City to the end of the track on a scalper’s ticket; and in what manner she was given her choice of paying fare to the conductor or leaving the train at Gaston—­these are details with which we need not concern ourselves.  Suffice it to say that Kent, then local attorney for the company, mastered them; and when Mrs. Varnum, through Hawk, her counsel, sued for five thousand dollars damages, he was able to get a continuance, knowing from long experience that the jury would certainly find for the plaintiff if the case were then allowed to go to trial.

And at the succeeding term of court, which was the one that adjourned on the day of Kent’s transfer to the capital, two of the company’s witnesses had disappeared; and the one bit of company business Kent had been successful in doing that day was to postpone for a second time the coming to trial of the Varnum case.

It was while Kent’s head was deepest in the flood of reorganization that a letter came from one Blashfield Hunnicott, his successor in the local attorneyship at Gaston, asking for instructions in the Varnum matter.  Judge MacFarlane’s court would convene in a week.  Was he, Hunnicott, to let the case come to trial?  Or should he—­the witnesses still being unproducible—­move for a further continuance?

Kent took his head out of the cross-seas long enough to answer.  By all means Hunnicott was to obtain another continuance, if possible.  And if, before the case were called, there should be any new developments, he was to wire at once to the general office, and further instructions would issue.

It was about this time, or, to be strictly accurate, on the day preceding the convening of Judge MacFarlane’s court in Gaston, that Governor Bucks took a short vacation—­his first since the adjournment of the Assembly.

One of the mysteries of this man—­the only one for which his friends could not always account plausibly—­was his habit of dropping out for a day or a week at irregular intervals, leaving no clue by which he could be traced.  While he was merely a private citizen these disappearances figured in the local notes of the Gaston Clarion as business trips, object and objective point unknown or at least unstated; but since his election the newspapers were usually more definite.  On this occasion, the public was duly informed that “Governor Bucks, with one or two intimate friends, was taking a few days’ recreation with rod and gun on the headwaters of Jump Creek”—­a statement which the governor’s private secretary stood ready to corroborate to all and sundry calling at the gubernatorial rooms on the second floor of the capitol.

Now it chanced that, like all gossip, this statement was subject to correction as to details in favor of the exact fact.  It is true that the governor, his gigantic figure clad in sportsmanlike brown duck, might have been seen boarding the train on the Monday evening; and in addition to the ample hand-bag there were rod and gun cases to bear out the newspaper notices.  None the less, it was equally true that the keeper of the Gun Club shooting-box at the terminus of the Trans-Western’s Jump Creek branch was not called upon to entertain so distinguished a guest as the State executive.  Also, it might have been remarked that the governor traveled alone.