“Order! Order!” protested Wanser and Bausch with suspicious readiness. “I am in order,” retorted the economist, rising in his place to confront the Governor opposite. The Governor smiled, but thrust out a nervous tongue and licked the corners of the smile. The professor’s face was as set and still as a frozen river, and much the same color. Embree, motioning with a placating hand for silence, resumed: “The Honorable Carter N. Rock--” “Wait!” The scholar’s keener voice cut off the reading. “I rise to a point of order, sir.” “State the point.” “Governor Embree, is that your honest conception of a council to fight this war?” “Out of order!” cried Bausch again, and was reinforced by Girdner, Fliess, and others. “Who said fight?” “We are not making war.” “Keep to the point.” “Discussion is not in order.” “Sit down.” But the hard challenge of the professor’s glare compelled the Governor. “It is my carefully considered selection,” said he with a suggestion of sulkiness. There leapt from Rappelje’s lips a blasting oath. From any mouth in that environment it would have been startling. From the lean dry, silent, repressed scholar it had something of the shock of nature’s forces in outbreak. Not less appalling was the single word to follow: “Treason!” Embree’s smile did not fade; but it shriveled into a masklike grimace, the rictus of a child before the convulsion racks it. “You--you will retract--” he began chokingly. Two astounding tears welled from the scholar’s pale eyes, tears of a still man’s uttermost fury. “I will demonstrate to you,” said he precisely, “what it is to fight.” He launched himself across the table at the Governor’s throat. The steel-framed Laurens seized and forced him back; but not before Embree had collapsed into his chair. From his place, up the table, the Lieutenant-Governor, quite beside himself, squealed for a totally imaginary sergeant-at-arms. The corn-belt farmer, in thunderous tones with a wailing inflection besought any and all not to forget that they were gentlemen. Girdner, huge and formidable, had jumped to his feet. The white-haired, alert Milliken caught up a heavy paper-weight. Bausch was solemnly, almost sacrificially taking off his coat. A medley of voices demanded “Order!” “Throw him out!” “Arrest him!” There were all the elements of a lively and scandalous mêlée, waiting only the fusing act. Laurens checked it with one sufficient threat. Brandishing the weighty official gavel of lignum vitæ, he stood, a modern Thor, in the unconscious pose and with the menace of the Berseker, and, in a full-throated bellow proclaimed: “I’ll brain the first man that strikes a blow.” Before that intimidation they dropped into their chairs. There was a ripple of the shamed and foolish laughter of self-realization as the strain eased. The warrior-scholar’s neighbors, who had been holding him in his chair, felt his limbs relax, and mistakenly thinking his effort spent, released him. Instantly he rose.