God. Will you let your little girl do that?" The great railroad fight, ten years in the darkest labyrinths of the law, was nothing compared with the struggle through which he passed before answering this question. Close the brewery! Open the hotels as temperance houses! Yield everything the enemy cared for! He had sworn to fight it out to the death, to die behind prison-bars rather than surrender. He had promised his friends that they should share his victory, and he had never yet gone back on his pledged word. The prohibitory law had become a burning issue instead of a dead letter. The Republican party was divided into hostile camps, and the smaller, the one with money and discipline, looked to him as its leader. The fanatics were to be scourged into abject submission, their law, odious from his point of view, was to be repealed, and a license law was to recognize what he regarded as the natural, inherent, and inalienable right of personal liberty. All this Denman had in view when he told his friends it should be no drawn battle and that they should share his victory. And at last within his heart had sprung up a consuming passion for the political honors he could once have had for the taking, not for themselves, but as the coronation of his cause. He believed in the justice of the cause exactly as he had put it to Craigin, and the desperate railroad litigation, involving his entire fortune, had developed his inborn love of victory to overmastering proportions; but he idolized Isabel. The terrible conflict in his soul raged all night. When it ended his purpose was more inexorable than ever before. From that time he was a changed man. He gave

still more lavishly and abounded still more in acts of thoughtful kindness. If possible, his love for Isabel increased. Her conduct won his boundless admiration. She bore her anguish in silence. As the weeks went by and her form grew thinner and the roses faded from her cheeks, it was pitiful to see how he watched her and the delicate ways in which he tried. to atone for the one thing he denied her. He worked and plotted day and night, and his genius shone brighter than ever before; but he aged from week to week, his old smile was gone, his old laugh had become forced and bitter. "Your great fortune drips with the blood of your own son!" "I love you so well, I'll stand with you fighting against God. Will you let your little girl do that?" "It 's almost killing me, but, if you want me to, I'll try to hate him for your sake!" "How can you break him? He sprang under the hoofs of that great horse and saved your life!" These words from the lips he loved best were always ringing in his ears, and, while his purpose was unchangeable, he suffered the torments of the damned. At last he hated the enemy who had stolen his daughter's heart, hated him for saving his own life, and often he muttered bitterly, "I wish the horse had killed us both!"

IX

COLLAPSE

T was the law that Denman could not be tried until a grand jury had decided whether there was enough evidence against him to justify putting him on trial.

"Well, gentlemen," said the county attorney, on the morning of the second day that the grand jury was in session, “we 've got through with everything but the liquor cases."

"Mr. Strickland," pleaded one of the best men, "I want to be excused. I'll tell you why. My wife died five years ago. She'd been ailing ever since our last baby was born, and in bed all the time for the last three years. What with housekeepers' bills and doctors' bills and all, I had to mortgage my farm. Just after my wife died my barn was burned with everything in it—hay, grain, cattle, horses, farming tools, all I had. I'd been so hard up I 'd let the insurance run out. As soon as the man who held the mortgage found out that I had n't anything to pay him with, he went right to work to foreclose. It was winter, I had four little children, and my last dollar

was gone. I'd always worked hard and paid my bills, and it seemed as if t' would kill me to have my little children taken away from me and put in the poorhouse, but it stared 'em right in the face. I went to the banks, and old Deacon Follett, and three or four other rich men, and they all said they'd be glad to help me if they was n't so dreadful short; they all said they were dreadful short. Then I went to John Denman and told him just what I've told you. He did n't say a word about being dreadful short. He gave my hand a grip,-seems as if I could feel it now,-and I saw two big tears standing in his eyes. Then he just sat down and wrote me a check for every dollar of that mortgage and enough to give me a little start besides, and told me I was to look out for the children first and pay him when I could. That's all I've got to say. John Denman put me on my feet and kept my four babies out of the poorhouse, and, proof or no proof, oath or no oath, I won't go against him. You may shut me up, just as you 're trying to shut him up; I won't do it, all the same."

The New York lawyer who could make a jury believe the moon was a green cheese could n't have made a more effective appeal, or one more foreign to the law and the evidence. The jurors looked at each other and whispered among themselves.

"No one wants to shut you up, Mr. Adams," said Strickland. "We'll go up-stairs and tell the judge, and I guess he 'll let you off."

"Let me off! I can't sit on this case, either!" cried half a dozen.

"It is n't easy to get excused; you must n't ask what

can't be done," replied Strickland, hurrying away to

escape their importunities.

"There was

While he was gone the jurors talked. "It's just like Denman," said one. Weeks. All he left was a patent right. Folks thought it was n't worth anything-said it was only one of Weeks's crazy inventions; but you bet Denman knows a good thing when he sees it! It was put up at auction to pay the debts, and he bought it for 'most nothing, and took it to New York and sold it for thirty thousand dollars spot cash. What'd he do with the money? Put it in his own pocket, and let that sick widow and her little girl go to the poorhouse, as old Deacon Follett and lots of the pious folks would have done? Not a bit of it! He bought thirty thousand dollars' worth of good six-per-cent. bonds in Mrs. Weeks's name, and now, instead of being a pauper, she's got eighteen hundred a year to live on. That's the kind of a criminal John Denman is!"

"There was Willie Brown," said another, "that poor little orphan cripple; Denman sent him to a Boston hospital and paid the doctors and nurses and board and everything till he got well."

"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me'!" exclaimed a third.

""T would take a darn sight longer to tell what he has done than what he has n't," said a fourth. "He's the whitest man in these parts, if he is a rumseller."

"And he 's been mighty judicious in handling it," remarked another. "Has n't allowed any one to sell right and left to drunkards and boys. Held a taut