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Besides Plank scarcely noticed what the press said of hi over deep into the night Brokers, lawyers, sycophants, tipsters, treacherous ex-employés of Quarrier, detectives, up-State petty officials, lobbyists from Albany, newspaper men, men from Wall Street, Broad Street, Mulberry Street, Forty-second Street--all these he saw in units, relays, regiments--either at his offices or after dinner--and soht in his own house And these were only a few, picked froed him with advice, importunity, threats, and attempted blackmail And he handled them all in turn, stolidly but with decision His obstinate under lip protruded further and further with rare recessions; his heavy head was like the lowered head of a bull Undaunted, inexorable, slow to the verge of stupidity at ti personality steadily developing, looher, heavier, athwart the financial horizon--in stature holding his own aradually, inch by inch, do level sky line

The youth in hiedy to the old; the sudden silence of the ton was already an old man; Quarrier's oeapon had always been secrecy; but the silence of Plank confused him, for he had never learned to parry well another's use of his oeapon The left-handed swordshts with the left hand And Harrington, hoary, seaotten battles, looked long and hard upon this weird of his own dead youth which now rose towering to confront hi him with the armed point of the sa found shelter--the Law!

The closing of the courts enforced ar certain lines of Plank's battle front; the adjournislature emptied Albany Once it was ru with the Governor of the greatest State in the Union and that the conference was to be repeated A sware at Saratoga, but they learned nothing, nor could they find a trace of Plank's tracks in the trodden trails of the great Spa

Besides, the racing had begun; Desuild had opened new club-houses; the wretched, half-starved natives in the surrounding hills were violating the game-laws to distend the paunches of the overfed with five-inch troutlings and grouse and woodcock slaughtered out of season; so there was plenty of copy for newspaper raph devoted to the doings of Beverly Plank Some scandal, too--but newspapers never touch that; and after all it was nobody's affair that Leroy Morti-car, new a county Perhaps the siave rise to the rumour of Plank's presence; perhaps not, because the car was often driven by a tall, slender girl with dark eyes and hair; and nobody ever saw that sort of pretty woman in Plank's Serin, or saw Leroy Mortimer for many days without a companion of that species