For a time the talk was a desultory monologue, with Kent doing his best to keep it from dying outright.  Later, when he was fairly driven in upon his reserves, he began to speak of himself, and of the hopeless fight for enlargement in the Trans-Western struggle.  Marston lighted the match-devouring stogie for the twentieth time, squared himself on the end of the divan and listened attentively.  At the end of the recounting he said: 

“It seems to be a failure of justice, Mr. Kent.  Can you prove your 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.”