It was true.  He who controlled legislatures and dictated to Supreme Court judges had found himself powerless when each turn of the legal machinery had brought him face to face with Judge Rossmore.  Suit after suit had been decided against him and the interests he represented, and each time it was Judge Rossmore who had handed down the decision.  So for years these two men had fought a silent but bitter duel in which principle on the one side and attempted corruption on the other were the gauge of battle.  Judge Rossmore fought with the weapons which his oath and the law directed him to use, Ryder with the only weapons he understood—­ bribery and trickery.  And each time it had been Rossmore who had emerged triumphant.  Despite every manoeuvre Ryder’s experience could suggest, notwithstanding every card that could be played to undermine his credit and reputation, Judge Rossmore stood higher in the country’s confidence than when he was first appointed.

So when Ryder found he could not corrupt this honest judge with gold, he decided to destroy him with calumny.  He realized that the sordid methods which had succeeded with other judges would never prevail with Rossmore, so he plotted to take away from this man the one thing he cherished most—­his honour.  He would ruin him by defaming his character, and so skilfully would he accomplish his work that the judge himself would realize the hopelessness of resistance.  No scruples embarrassed Ryder in arriving at this determination.  From his point of view he was fully justified.  “Business is business.  He hurts my interests; therefore I remove him.”  So he argued, and he considered it no more wrong to wreck the happiness of this honourable man than he would to have shot a burglar in self-defence.  So having thus tranquillized his conscience he had gone to work in his usually thorough manner, and his success had surpassed the most sanguine expectations.

This is what he had done.

Like many of our public servants whose labours are compensated only in niggardly fashion by an inconsiderate country, Judge Rossmore was a man of but moderate means.  His income as Justice of the Supreme Court was $12,000 a year, but for a man in his position, having a certain appearance to keep up, it little more than kept the wolf from the door.  He lived quietly but comfortably in New York City with his wife and his daughter Shirley, an attractive young woman who had graduated from Vassar and had shown a marked taste for literature.  The daughter’s education had cost a good deal of money, and this, together with life insurance and other incidentals of keeping house in New York, had about taken all he had.  Yet he had managed to save a little, and those years when he could put by a fifth of his salary the judge considered himself lucky.  Secretly, he was proud of his comparative poverty.  At least the world could never ask him “where he got it.”