The Squire closed his door on the flood of profane threats that Willard began to pour out, clutching the tire of Bradish’s wheel with one hand and pounding emphasis with the other. The lawyer’s hands were trembling a bit as he sat down in his arm-chair and drew his tin tobacco-box toward him. He heard the voice of Bradish outside, raised above the captain’s angry diapason: “Do it? Why, of course I should do it; and you’d be backed up in it by all of us.” Squire Phin leaned on his table, and, narrowing his eyes in earnest thought, stared up at a row of creosote stains on the cracked plastering of his wall. Those stains for many years had occupied a peculiar place in his thoughts. When he half shut his eyes and gazed on the wall without studying detail, the stains took on the semblance of a row of men. He used at first to imagine them a jury, and he rehearsed his cases before them. It was profitable exercise. Every judge who came to hold court in that county had grown to respect the ability of the earnest attorney whose law was so flawless and whose cases were so thoroughly prepared. And after the Squire began to study the conditions of the country and its great social questions, he found recreation in applying to them the broad principles of law and seeking for solution. His own modest orbit of practice afforded him no mental stimulus such as he got from this imaginary practice. One day when there were no loafers in his office, he half-shamefacedly cut the picture of the Chief Justice of the United States out of an illustrated weekly and tacked it on the wall in the centre of the creosote stains, and after that he argued “big cases.” And in order to argue them he stinted himself in his modest personal wants in order to buy reports and digests and commentaries and all kinds of fat books in slippery buff calf; and he read those books until his eyes ached and his head spun, and he trained his big guns of logic and appeal on those creosote stains--and then sometimes wondered whimsically if this were not a sign of incipient aberration. He worried a bit occasionally until a certain grave judge whom he met at nisi prius term confessed to him one day as they were strolling after supper that he, from childhood, had entertained a gnawing hankering to be a locomotive engineer, and even then at sixty-five liked to walk by himself along country paths, chuffing softly between his teeth and keeping as sharp a lookout as though he were in the cab of a limited express. After that--the Judge being generally considered the most matter-of-fact old hard-head on the State bench--Squire Phin reflected that probably all men, if one but knew it, nurse little notions of their own.