Their clothes were soaked with the rain, their wet boots tracked the floor with mud, their umbrellas trickled little streams of dirty water. The air, already saturated with heavy moisture and foggy with the smoke of tobacco, which does for the smoke of battle in these political contests, was foul with the fumes of beer and whisky, while the whiff of an onion now and then brought to mind the long saloon of Chris Steisfloss below where the pink mosquito-netting had been removed for that day from the free-lunch table. In his private office, his rumpled hair falling to his haggard eyes, his cravat untied, his long coat tails gathered behind the hands that were thrust deep in his trousers' pockets, Garwood strode back and forth silent and savage, chewing the cigar that smoked away in the corner of his mouth. Pusey was with him, tapping in and out of the room, and so was Hale. Hale had been there all morning, for, having no acquaintance in Grand Prairie, he could do nothing outside, and so he sat, feeling that his stolid, imponderable presence must somehow be a comfort to Garwood. And, besides, he did not know how he could decently get away. Garwood spoke to neither of them; but walked the floor and rolled his cigar round and round in his mouth, spitting out pieces of it now and then savagely. Once at the end of the beat he was pacing he paused by the revolving bookcase in which he had kept his working library, the books he had needed at his elbow when he was digging into the law. These books, because of that rapid displacement which goes on in law libraries, so swiftly do the appellate courts grind out new decisions, were now out of date; the statutes were two sessions behind the Legislature, the digest had been superseded by a new edition, the last six numbers of his set of the reports were missing. But he did not observe these things--a little volume had caught his eye, and he picked it up, blew the dust from it, and opened it. And as his glance fell on its pages, its well-read remembered pages, his face softened and there passed across its darkness the faint reflection of a smile. It was not a law book, for Garwood held it tenderly in his hand, as though he loved it, and men do not learn to love law books. It was a little leather covered copy of Epictetus, with the imprint of a London publisher on its title page, one that Emily had given him, and he had read it through and through, and it bore many loving marks on its margins.