“Well?” said Loring.

“We fought it, of course—­in the only way it could be fought in the lower court.  I got a continuance, and we choked it off in the same way at the succeeding term.  The woman was tired out long ago, but Hawk will hang on till his teeth fall out.”

“Do you ‘continue’ again?” asked the general manager.

Kent nodded.

“I so instructed Hunnicott.  Luckily, two of our most important witnesses are missing.  They have always been missing, in point of fact.”

Loring was glancing over the letter.

“How about this affidavit business, and the Falkland stop-over?” he asked.

“Oh, I fancy that’s gossip, pure and simple, as Hunnicott says.  Hawk is sharp enough not to let us know if he were baiting a trap.  And Falkland probably told the Clarion man the simple truth.”

Loring nodded in his turn.  Then he broke away from the subject abruptly.  “Sit down,” he said; and when Kent had found a chair:  “I had a caller this morning—­Senator Duvall.”

State Senator Duvall had been the father, or the ostensible father, of the Senate amendment to House Bill Twenty-nine.  He was known to the corporations’ lobby as a legislator who would sign a railroad’s death-warrant with one hand and take favors from it with the other; and Kent laughed.

“How many did he demand passes for, this time?  Or was it a special train he wanted?”

“Neither the one nor the other, this morning, as it happened,” said the general manager.  “Not to put too fine an edge upon it, he had something to sell, and he wanted me to buy it.”

“What was it?” Kent asked quickly.

Loring was rubbing his eye-glasses absently with the corner of his handkerchief.

“I guess I made a mistake in not turning him over to you, David.  He was too smooth for me.  I couldn’t find out just what it was he had for sale.  He talked vaguely about an impending crisis and a man who had some information to dispose of; said the man had come to him because he was known to be a firm friend of the Trans-Western, and so on.”

Kent gave his opinion promptly.

“It’s a capitol-gang deal of some sort to hold us up; and Duvall is willing to sell out his fellow conspirators if the price is right.”

“Have you any notion of what it is?”

Kent shook his head.

“Not the slightest.  The ways have been tallowed for us, thus far, and I don’t fully understand it.  I presented our charter for re-filing yesterday, and Hendricks passed it without a word.  As I was coming out of the secretary’s office I met Bucks.  We were pretty nearly open enemies in the old days in Gaston, but he went out of his way to shake hands and to congratulate me on my appointment as general counsel.”

“That was warning in itself, wasn’t it?”

“I took it that way.  But I can’t fathom his drift; which is the more unaccountable since I have it on pretty good authority that the ring is cinching the other companies right and left.  Some one was saying at the Camelot last night that the Overland’s reorganization of its within-the-State lines was going to cost all kinds of money in excess of the legal fees.”