“I’m here to speak for a man who lies at Carson wounded by three bullets from the revolvers of two murderers. I’m here to answer the whispers set going by the men who profit most by that attempted assassination, men who would never have the courage to say any of these things face to face with Colonel McClintock.” He reviewed his brother’s life and tried to interpret it. “They say he was a gambler. So he was, at a time when nine tenths of the men in this state gambled hard and often. But they can’t say he wasn’t a straight gambler. There never was a crooked hair in the head of Scot McClintock. Everybody knows that.” Without gloves he took up the charge that Scot had broken up Robert Dodson’s home. He showed that Dodson was a drunken ne’er-do-well who had smothered his own baby and had afterwards been rescued from a mob of lynchers by McClintock, that he was a wife beater and a loafer who by chance had later stumbled into a fortune, a man always without honour or principle. “It was this same man who rode out of Carson at breakneck speed fifteen minutes after my brother had been shot down from behind, rode with the red-handed murderer Sam Dutch. It was this same man and his brother Ralph Dodson who tried to keep me and my friends from bringing Dutch back to Carson as a prisoner. “From the beginning of this campaign they have smeared mud on the reputation of Scot. Even now, when he lies at the point of death at the hands of their hired killers, they go about hissing poisonous lies. The record of Scot McClintock is an open book. You know all his faults. They are exposed frankly to all men’s eyes. If he was wild, at least his wildness was never secret. It was a part of his gay and open-hearted youth.” Hugh passed to his later years, to his brilliant career as a soldier, and to his public services as a citizen since the close of the war. He named Scot’s qualifications for the office he sought and concluded with an appeal for justice in the form of a vindication. Nevada was young. It understood men like the McClintocks and it liked them. Ralph Dodson was of a type it neither knew nor wanted to know. The verdict was unmistakable. The political bosses gave way to the public demand, and Scot McClintock was nominated on the first ballot by a large majority. Hugh took the Carson stage to carry his brother the news. CHAPTER XXXII FATHER MARSTON PROPHESIES Sulky, morose, sluggish as a saurian, Dutch lay in his cell and waited for deliverance. The weeks passed. The Dodsons sent him word to say nothing, that when the time came they would set him free. He suspected them as he suspected everybody. If they failed him he meant to betray them. But the time had not come for that yet.