The speech of the day before of which Treadwell had spoken so enthusiastically to Cameron Craig, had indeed given to the crowd, which had been wont on past occasions to gather at the old court-house when he spoke, another revelation of Harry Sevier. It had been impromptu--not the outgrowth of deliberate plan. The non-appearance of a much-heralded speaker had thrust the exigency upon him without warning, and he had acquiesced only in a keen desire to save from blank failure a meeting in whose principles and object he was by his very character deeply interested. The tortuous involutions of local politics had never interested him, but he had thrilled to the stirring beneath the surface of the great forces of good and evil and the present agitation for clean government had found him enrolled, without question, on its side. As he stepped forward to face the great curtain of faces that stretched outward and upward beyond the footlights, he had not known what he should say. Indeed, while he slowly "felt" his audience in his opening sentences, the sub-conscious part of his mind had been full of a matter foreign to the subject at hand. There had come to him a fleeting recollection of the last time he had spoken in public--the day upon which he had betrayed his client and put a man, of whose innocence an instinct deeper-rooted than reason had convinced him, into the striped habiliments of the convict. The sharp, aching compunction of that thought had never left him. Since that day, though he went daily to his sumptuous office, he had taken no new case. He had gone always with that sin clanking against his conscience and the memory of the trial had focused always in that glimpse, across the mass of faces, of a woman's look of puzzle and hurt. During the months since then that face had hung before his fevered vision as a far, cool oasis to the desert wayfarer. These had been black months of fierce, untiring battle with the appetite to which he had surrendered himself, and which he had sworn to conquer. There had been times when the avid thirst had seized him by the throat, when endurance had almost failed: days when he had sat in his inner office, with door locked and blinds down, fighting desperately with the strenuous impulse that seemed to be dragging him bodily, as if with fleshly hands, to the little wall-cabinet whose door had never been unlocked since the day of that sinister court-recess.