In the midst of the furore that week, Mrs. Worthington gave an evening reception for the Federation and its husbands at her mansion, fed them sumptuously, and, after Mrs. Handy had tapped a bell for silence, Mrs. Worthington rose in her jet and passementerie and announced that our town had come to a crisis in its career; that we must now decide whether we were going to be a beautiful little city or a cow pasture. She said that beauty was as much an essential to life as money and that we would be better off with more beauty and less trade, and that with the court-house square a mudhole the town could never rise to any real consequence. As the men of the town seemed to be moral cowards, she was going to enlist the women in this war, and as the first step in her campaign she proposed to hire the Honourable Abner Handy to assist the city attorney in fighting this case, and as a retainer she would herewith and now hand him her personal check for five hundred dollars. Whereat the women clapped their hands, their husbands winked at one another, and "there was a sound of revelry by night." The check was put on a silver card-tray by Mrs. Worthington and set on a table in the midst of the company waiting for Handy to come forward and take it. After the town had looked at the check, Mrs. Handy seemed to cut his leashes and Abner went after it. He was waiting at the Worthington bank the next morning at nine o'clock to cash it--and all the town saw that also. Whereupon the town grinned broadly that evening when it read in the _Statesman_ a most laudatory article about "our distinguished fellow-townsman." The article declared that it was "the duty of the hour to send Honourable Abner Handy to the halls of Congress." The _Statesman_ contended that "Judge Handy had been for a lifetime the defender of those grand and glorious principles of freedom and protection and sound money for which the Grand Old Party stood." The General proclaimed that "it shall be not only a duty, but a pleasure, for our citizens to lay aside all petty personal and factional quarrels and rally round the standard of our noble leader in this great contest." If Handy ever went to the city attorney's office to look after Mrs. Worthington's lawsuit, no one knew it. He smiled wisely when asked how the suit was progressing, and one day John Markley--who during the life of Ezra Worthington, hated him with a ten-horse-power hate and loaded it onto his widow's shoulders and the Worthington bank which she inherited--John Markley called Handy into the back room of the Markley Mortgage Company, and, when Handy passed the cashier's window going out, he cashed a check signed by John Markley for a thousand dollars on which was inscribed "for legal services in assisting the county attorney in the hitching rack case."