The quiet threat, the suggested possibility, the attack which wraps itself in vague uncertainty, are ever the most effective.  As his raucous voice, dry with sinister purpose which no man could shake, died out in an offensive drawl, Mr. Black edged a step nearer the judge, before he sprang and caught the young fellow by the coat-collar and gave him a very vigorous shake.

“See here!” he threatened.  “Behave yourself and treat the judge like a gentleman or—­”

“Or what?” the bulldog mouth sneered.  “See here yourself,” he now shouted, as the lawyer’s hands unloosed and he stood panting; “I’m not afeard o’ you, sir, nor of the jedge, nor of the lady nuther.  I knows somethin’, I do; and when I gets ready to tell it, we’ll just see whose coat-collar they’ll be handlin’.  I came ’cause I wanted to see the inside o’ the house Ol Ostrander’s father doesn’t think him good enough to live in.  It’s grand; but this part here isn’t the whole of it.  There’s a door somewhere which nobody never opens unless it’s the jedge there.  I’d like to see what’s behind that ‘ere door.  If it’s somethin’ to make a good story out of, I might be got to keep quiet about this other thing.  I don’t know, but I might.”

The swagger with which he said this, the confidence in himself which he showed and the reliance he so openly put in the something he knew but could not be induced to tell, acted so strongly upon Mr. Black’s nerves, that he leaped towards him again, evidently with the intention of dragging him from the house.

But the judge was not ready for this.  The judge had gained a new lease of life in the last half-hour and he felt no fear of this sullen bill-poster for all his sly innuendoes.  He, therefore, hindered the lawyer from his purpose, by a quick gesture of so much dignity and resolve that even the lout himself was impressed and dropped some of his sullen bravado.

“I have something to say to this fellow,” he announced, looking anywhere but at the drooping figure in the window which ought, above all things in the world, to have engaged his attention.  “Perhaps he does not know his folly.  Perhaps he thinks because I was thrown aback to-day by those public charges against my son and a string of insults for which no father could be prepared, that I am seriously disturbed over the position into which such unthinking men as himself have pushed Mr. Oliver Ostrander.  I might be if there were truth in these charges or any serious reason for connecting my upright and honourable son with the low crime of a highwayman.  But there is not.  I aver it and so will this lady here whom you have doubtless recognised for the one who has stirred this matter up.  You can bring no evidence to show guilt on my son’s part,”—­these words he directed straight at the discomfited poster of bills—­“Because there is no evidence to bring.”