Kent smoked on in silence while the train measured the rail-lengths between two of the isolated prairie stations.  When he spoke again there was honest deference in his manner.

“Mr. Marston, you have a far better right to your courtesy title of ‘Judge’ than that given by the Great American Title Company, Unlimited,” he said.  “Will you advise me?”

“As plain Oliver Marston, and a man old enough to be your father, yes.  What have you been doing?  Trying to oust the receiver, I suppose.”

“Yes; trying to find some technical flaw by which he could be ousted.”

“It can’t be done.  You must strike higher.  Are you fully convinced of Judge MacFarlane’s venality?”

“As fully as I can be without having seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears.”

Marston opened his watch and looked at it.  Then he lighted another of the villainous little cigars.

“We have an hour yet,” he said.  “You have been giving me the legal points in the case:  now give me the inferences—­all of them.”

Kent laughed.

“I’m afraid I sha’n’t be able to forget the lieutenant-governor.  I shall have to call some pretty hard names.”

“Call them,” said his companion, briefly; and Kent went deep into the details, beginning with the formation of the political gang in Gaston the dismantled.

The listener in the gray dust-coat heard him through without comment.  When Kent reached the end of the inferences, telling the truth without scruple and letting the charge of political and judicial corruption lie where it would, the engineer was whistling for the capital.

“You have told me some things I knew, and some others that I only suspected,” was all the answer he got until the train was slowing into the Union Station.  Then as he flung away the stump of the little cigar the silent one added:  “If I were in your place, Mr. Kent, I believe I should take a supplementary course of reading in the State law.”

“In what particular part of it?” said Kent, keen anxiety in every word.

“In that part of the fundamental law which relates to the election of circuit judges, let us say.  If I had your case to fight, I should try to obliterate Judge MacFarlane.”

Kent had but a moment in which to remark the curious coincidence in the use of precisely the same word by both Hunnicott and his present adviser.

“But, my dear sir! we should gain nothing by MacFarlane’s removal when his successor would be appointed by the executive!”

Marston turned in the doorway of the smoking-compartment and laid a fatherly hand on the younger man’s shoulder.

“My boy, I didn’t say ‘remove’; I said ‘obliterate’.  Good night.”

XIV

THE GERRYMANDER

With Judge Marston’s hint partly to point the way, Kent was no long time in getting at work on the new lead.