it in some genial derision, their sacred privilege; it would be natural, he had been there among them in unquestioned authority so long.  Now it had assumed an importance.  The squire looked at it with the ardour of a converted eye.  When he told Mr Farquharson that he could bring Moneida with him to a Liberal victory, he thought and spoke of the farmers of the township not of his wards of the Reserve.  Yet as the day approached these would infallibly become voters in his eyes, to swell or to diminish the sum of Moneida’s loyalty to the Empire.  They remembered all this in the committee room of his old party.  “The squire,” they said to one another, “will give himself away this time if ever he did.”  Then young Murchison hadn’t known any better than to spend the best part of the day out there, and there were a dozen witnesses to swear that old Ormiston introduced him to three or four of the chiefs.  That was basis enough for the boys detailed to watch Moneida, basis enough in the end for a petition constructed to travel to the High Court at Toronto for the purpose of rendering null and void the election of Mr Lorne Murchison, and transferring the South Fox seat to the candidate of the opposite party.

That possibility had been promptly frustrated by a cross petition.  There was enough evidence in Subdivision Eleven, according to Bingham, to void the Tory returns on six different counts; but the house-cat sold by Peter Finnigan to Mr Winter for five dollars would answer all practical purposes.  It was a first-rate mouser, Bingham said, and it would settle Winter.  They would have plenty of other charges “good and ready” if Finnigan’s cat should fail them, but Bingham didn’t think the court would get to anything else; he had great confidence in the cat.

The petitions had been lodged with promptness.  “Evidence,” as Mr Winter remarked, “is like a good many other things—­better when it’s hot, especially the kind you get on the Reserve.”  To which, when he heard it, Bingham observed sarcastically that the cat would keep.  The necessary thousand dollars were ready on each side the day after the election, lodged in court the next.  Counsel were as promptly engaged—­the Liberals selected Cruickshank —­and the suit against the elected candidate, beginning with charges against his agents in the town, was shortly in full hearing before the judges sent from Toronto to try it.  Meanwhile the Elgin Mercury had shown enterprise in getting hold of Moneida evidence, and foolhardiness, as the Express pointed out, in publishing it before the matter was reached in court.  There was no foolhardiness in printing what the Express knew about Finnigan’s cat; it was just a common cat, and Walter Winter paid five dollars for it, Finnigan declaring that if Mr Winter hadn’t filled him up with bad whiskey before the bargain, he wouldn’t have let her go under ten, he was that fond of the creature.  The Express pointed out that this was grasping of Finnigan, as the cat had never left him,