“Well, he seems to be fraternizing with better men just now,” drawled the judge. “Archer Converse, for instance!”
“The thing to do,” suggested young Dodd, still watching the girl, “is get something on that hobo and boot him out of town or put him in jail. It ought to be easy enough.”
“And it will be attended to,” declared the colonel, with venom. “We'll kill that one crow and hang him up in full view of the rest of those croakers! I'll put something over on that fellow and have all the papers in the state print it--and high-and-mighty Converse will be so disgusted that he'll quit and the rest of the crowd will be ashamed to keep on. Disgrace a reformer! That's the surest play in politics! We must get Farr!”
He turned his scowling gaze away from the flowers and found Miss Kilgour looking at him with an expression in her eyes he had never seen there before. Reproach and scorn seemed to mingle in the stare she gave him. He blinked, and when he looked again she was examining the point of her pencil; he decided that his eyesight had played him a strange prank.
“By the way, Miss Kilgour,” he informed her, “you need not remain. Make two typewritten copies--the judge will need one.”
Richard Dodd arose when she left her chair, but she did not glance at him. He began to speak before she had reached the door, unable to restrain his jealous temper longer.
“Uncle Symonds, pass the word to that old Provancher, through the superintendent of the Gamonic, that unless he comes across with all the stuff he knows about that Farr he'll be fired. And I've got a hunter out on my own account. It will be easy enough to catch the skunk and strip off his pelt.”
Miss Kilgour closed the door behind her with a sharper click than she had ever given its latch before. She hurried to her typewriter in her little room and began to work with all her energy.
She was so busy and her machine clattered so viciously that she did not hear Richard Dodd when he entered. He leaned over her.
“Have you talked with your mother yet? Has she given you some advice?” he asked. His jealousy still fired him and his tone was not conciliatory.
The contempt in the glance she flung upward at him roused him to passion. In the state of mind in which he then was he made no allowances for her ignorance of conditions in her mother's case. He knew what he had done for Mrs. Kilgour's sake, and this attitude on the daughter's part pricked him like wilful ingratitude.