It was said for thirty years that Handy did old Charley's dirty work in politics, but we knew many of the mean things that Handy did were unjustly charged to Hedrick. People in a small community are apt to put two and two together and make five. Much of the talk about the alliance between Hedrick and Handy is, of course, down-right slander; every lawyer who tries lawsuits for forty years in a country town is bound to make enemies of small-minded people, many of whom occupy large places in the community, and a small-minded man, believing that his enemy is a villain, makes up his facts to suit his belief, and then peddles his story. It is always just as well to discount the home stories on an old lawyer ninety-five per cent. if they are bad; and seventy per cent. if they are good--for he may have saved the fellow who is telling them from the penitentiary. But Abner Handy was never enough of a lawyer to come within this rule. Indeed they used to say that he was not admitted to the bar, at all, but that when he came to town, in 1871, he erased his dead brother's name on a law diploma and substituted his own. Still, he practised on the law--as Simon Mehronay used to say of Handy--and for twenty years carried an advertisement in Eastern farm journals proclaiming that his specialty was Kansas collections. He never took as a fee less than ninety-five per cent. of the amount he collected. That was the advantage which he had as a lawyer, which advantage inspired Colonel Alphabetical Morrison to proclaim that a lawyer's diploma is nothing but a license to steal; upon hearing which Charley Hedrick sent back to the Colonel the retort that it would take two legal diplomas working day and night to keep up with the Colonel's more or less honest endeavours. Now Ab Handy was a lean coyote, who was forever licking his bruises, and some ten years later he tried to run for the school board solely to get the Colonel's daughters dismissed as school-teachers. It was his boast that he never forgot a foe; and for twenty years after Hedrick saved Handy from going to jail for robbing a cattleman of a thousand dollars in "Red" Martin's gambling-room, the only good thing the town knew of Handy was that he never forgot a friend.