Jack Holton reappeared in Montgomery toward the end of March, showed himself to Main Street in a new suit of clothes, intimated to old friends that he was engaged upon large affairs, and complained bitterly to a group of idlers at the Morton House of the local-option law that had lately been invoked to visit upon Montgomery the curse of perpetual thirst. He then sought Alexander Waterman in that gentleman's office. Waterman he had known well in old times, and he correctly surmised that the lawyer was far from prosperous. Men who married into the Montgomery family didn't prosper, some way! An assumption that they were both victims of daughters of the House of Montgomery may have entered into his choice of Waterman as a likely person to precipitate a row in Sycamore affairs. It was with a purpose that he visited Waterman's office on the Mill Street side of the court-house, over Redmond's undertaking parlors--a suggestive proximity that had not been neglected by local humorists. "This is your chance, old man, to take up a fight for the people that can't fail to make you solid. What this poor old town needs is a leader. They're all sound asleep, dead ones, who'd turn over and take another nap if Gabriel blew his horn. These fellows are getting ready to put over the neatest little swindle ever practiced on a confiding public. The newspapers are in it--absolutely muzzled. I won't lie to you about my motive in coming to you. I'm sore all over from the knocks I've got. My dear brother Will has kicked me out; actually told me he'd have me arrested if I ever showed up here again. Like a fool I sent word to Kirkwood that I could be of service in getting to the bottom of Sycamore; thought he'd let bygones be bygones when it came to straight business, but, by George, he didn't even answer my letter! Cold as a frozen lobster, and always was! You see I thought it was all on the level--his tinkering with the traction company--but he's in on the shrewdest piece of high finance that was ever put over in Indiana. Talk about my lamented brother Samuel--Sam never started in his class!" Waterman, with his ponderous swivel-chair tipped back against the Indiana Reports that lined the wall, listened guardedly. It was not wholly flattering to be chosen by a man of Jack Holton's reputation as the repository of confidences; but things had been going badly with Waterman. His passion for speculation had led him to invest funds he held as guardian in pork margins, and a caprice of the powers that play with pork in Chicago had wiped him out. Judge Walters had just been asking impertinent questions about the guardianship money, and when he had gone to the First National Bank for a loan to tide over the judicial inquiry and avert an appeal to his bondsmen, William Holton had "called" a loan of three hundred dollars that the bank had been carrying for two years. This was very annoying, and it made the lawyer more tolerant of Jack Holton than he should otherwise have been.