“Biggest blatherskite out of hell, Harshaw is,” remarked a young fellow, who flung himself diagonally into a seat, hanging his long legs over one arm of the chair and resting his back against the other. He put his cigar into his mouth, and puffed at his ease. He had a pale face, thin dark hair, irregular features, straight black eyebrows, and wide, black eyes, quickly glancing, but with a suggestion of melancholy. He was handsomely dressed, although he wore his clothes with a slouching, irreverent air, as if he gave his attire scant heed. Despite their cut and quality, there was nothing dapper about him. He had a lank, listless white hand, and a foot singularly long and narrow. His forehead was remarkably high, austere, and noble; one might look in vain for correlative expressions in the other features. He was languid and inattentive, but this manner suggested affectation, for it did not eliminate the idea of energy. He smoked a great deal, and drank not much, but discriminatingly; he was proud of seeming reckless, and of being more reckless than he seemed. He had other qualities more genial. He knew a good dog when he saw him. He knew a good horse, and he loved him. He was the possessor of a liberal hand and a long purse. He had an enthusiastic admiration of fine principles, and he had—the pity of it!—his own definition of fine principles. He entertained a horror of anything base, and he had a command of very strong language to characterize it. He arrogated to himself the finer attributes. He strained for the heroic poise. He would feel nothing, believe nothing, do nothing, that was unbecoming of what he esteemed the noblest expression of man and gentleman. Nevertheless he had no serious objects in life, no absorbing ambition, no ability to originate. But he could espouse another man’s cause with a fervor of unselfishness. The excitements and vicissitudes of the affairs of others rejoiced the voids of his capacities for emotion. He was of the stuff of which adherents are made, essentially a partisan. His prototypes have ridden in the ranks of every losing cause since the world began. He was of the essence of those who are born for freaks of valor, for vagrant enthusiasms, for misguided fantastic feuds, for revolution. “Do you think, sir, that Mr. Harshaw had no foundation for his threat,” said an elderly granger, who leaned against a pillar,—“no foundation for this charge against Judge Gwinnan?” “Gwinnan may have ruled against him a time or two,” said Kinsard. “That’s about the size of it.” He had a pedigree as long as his favorite colt’s, but this was the way he talked. “It is a gross slander, then; it implies a stealage, or taking a bribe, or some malfeasance in office,—the judicial office,” said one of the by-standers. “It was very shabby in Harshaw to say it; then, thinking Gwinnan had never heard of it, to go fawning up, pretending to be so mighty friendly,” rejoined another.