Randolph Mason did not at once answer; he walked stumblingly across the room to his chair and sat down by the table. His form was thin and gaunt, and along the border of his forehead the veins were purple and swollen. After a time he turned toward the powerful grazier, his face ugly with a sneer. “To the law,” he said, “all things are possible--even justice.” V ONE morning in the early winter the red roan horse, with his head over the high fence of his pasture, saw two men standing in the neighboring meadow contemplating in silence a gigantic derrick. One he immediately recognized as his master Rufus Alshire, and the other resembled in a very large degree a certain obnoxious person who on a memorable summer night had smeared his well kept mane with most disagreeable petroleum. Presently the grazier spoke. “I judge that it will not now be necessary for Jerry to invoke the tedium of Federal tribunals, there seems to be grease enough here to pay everything and wind up the lawsuits.” The driller looked up at the oil streaming down from the timbers of the derrick; then he made a mighty angular gesture with his bare right arm. “By jolly!” he said, “there is money enough in that hole to pay off the national debt.” THE RULE AGAINST CARPER I CARPER did not recall that he had ever noticed the ugly details of the courtroom before,--the high, soiled ceiling, the rows of benches, worn, broken, empty as a fool's heart, the clerk's desk, and the presumptuous bench of the judge; the long tables, too, for the attorneys, heaped with papers, books, and dusty covers, a farrago of disorder--how ugly they were! Carper looked up at the judge. The man's black silk robe fell away in sharp straight folds; he sat erect like a bronze cast, his face turned half toward the window in order that he might better read the paper before him. How power had changed this face! Carper remembered idly that, years before, the face of this man had been sweet, tender, lit with kindness. Now it was as hard as white ivory. The attorneys at the table were talking in subdued whispers; Carper did not hear; he was wondering vaguely if the long slim fingers of the judge ever ached as his head was aching. The conjecture was unique. It was difficult for Carper to realize his position. His clothing was certainly better than that of any other man in the court-room, He was quite certain that his face was the same powerful, clean-cut, immobile mask that it had been always. The world did not know, it did not even suspect. If one had asked the clerk yonder for a financial rating on Russell Carper, the clerk would have shrugged his shoulder and written six figures on the margin of his record.. Yet this was the end,--the end.