It was an hour before noon.  Up to that moment Richard had been engaged in reading and replying to the letters received by the morning’s mail, a duty which usually fell to Mr. Slocum.  As Richard stepped from the office into the yard a small boy thrust a note into his hand, and then stood off a short distance tranquilly boring with one toe in the loose gravel, and apparently waiting for an answer.  Shackford hastily ran his eye over the paper, and turning towards the boy said, a little impatiently: 

“Tell him I will come at once.”

There was another person in Stillwater that forenoon whose agitation was scarcely less than Mr. Slocum’s, though it greatly differed from it in quality.  Mr. Slocum was alive to his finger-tips with dismay; Lawyer Perkins was boiling over with indignation.  It was a complex indignation, in which astonishment and incredulity were nicely blended with a cordial detestation of Mr. Taggett and vague promptings to inflict some physical injury on Justice Beemis.  That he, Melanchthon Perkins, the confidential legal adviser and personal friend of the late Lemuel Shackford, should have been kept for two weeks in profound ignorance of proceedings so nearly touching his lamented client!  The explosion of the old lawyer’s wrath was so unexpected that Justice Beemis, who had dropped in to make the disclosures and talk the matter over informally, clutched at his broad-brimmed Panama hat and precipitately retreated from the office.  Mr. Perkins walked up and down the worn green drugget of his private room for half an hour afterwards, collecting himself, and then dispatched a hurried note to Richard Shackford, requesting an instant interview with him at his, Lawyer Perkins’s, chambers.

When, some ten minutes subsequently, Richard entered the low-studded square room, darkened with faded moreen curtains and filled with a stale odor of law-calf, Mr. Perkins was seated at his desk and engaged in transferring certain imposing red-sealed documents to a green baize satchel which he held between his knees.  He had regained his equanimity; his features wore their usual expression of judicial severity; nothing denoted his recent discomposure, except perhaps an additional wantonness in the stringy black hair falling over the high forehead,—­that pallid high forehead which always wore the look of being covered with cold perspiration.

“Mr. Shackford,” said Lawyer Perkins, suspending his operations a second, as he saluted the young man, “I suppose I have done an irregular thing in sending for you, but I did not see any other course open to me.  I have been your cousin’s attorney for over twenty-five years, and I’ve a great regard for you personally.  That must justify the step I am taking.”

“The regard is mutual, I am sure,” returned Richard, rather surprised by this friendly overture, for his acquaintance with the lawyer had been of the slightest, though it had extended over many years.  “My cousin had very few friends, and I earnestly desire to have them mine.  If I were in any trouble, there is no one to whom I would come as unhesitatingly as to you.”