No other man in town would have dared that with Handy after he became a statesman; but we figured it out in the office that old Charley Hedrick was merely exhibiting his brand on Ab Handy to show the town that his title to Handy was still good. For though there was considerable of the King Cole about Hedrick--in that he was a merry old soul--he was always king, and he insisted on having his divine right to rule the politics of the county unquestioned. That was his vanity and he knew it, and was not ashamed of it. He was the best lawyer in the State in those days, and one of the best in the West. Ten months in the year he paid no attention to politics, pendulating daily between his house and his office. Often, being preoccupied with his work, he would go the whole length of Main Street speaking to no one. When a tangled case was in his mind he would enter his office in the morning, roll up his desk top, and dig into his work without speaking to a soul until, about the middle of the morning, he would look up from his desk to say as though he had just left off speaking: "Jim, hand me that 32 Kansas report over there on the table." When he worked, law books sprang up around him and sprawled over his desk and lay half open on chairs and tables near him until he had found his point; then he would get up and begin rollicking, slamming books together, cleaning up his debris and playing like a great porpoise with the litter he had made. At such times--and, indeed, all the time unless he was in what he called a "legal trance"--Hedrick was bubbling with good spirits, and when he left his office for politics he could get out in his shirt-sleeves at a primary and peddle tickets, or nose up and down the street like a fat ferret looking for votes. So when Abner Handy announced that he desired to go to the State Senate, to fill an unexpired term for two years, he had Hedrick behind him to give strength and respectability to his candidacy. Between the two Handy won. That was before the days of reform, when it was supposed to be considerable of a virtue for a man to stand by his friend; and, being a lawyer, Hedrick naturally had the lawyer's view that no man is guilty until the jury is in, and its findings have been reviewed by the supreme court. So Senator and Mrs. Senator Handy--as the town put it--went to Topeka as grandly as ever "Childe Roland to the dark tower came"--to use Hedrick's language. "No one ever has been able to find out what Roland was up to when he went to the dark tower, but," continued Hedrick, "with Ab and his child-wonder it will be different. She isn't taking all that special scenery along in her trunks for nothing. Ab has stumbled on to this great truth--that clothes may not make the man, but they make the crook!"