To Boone, whom he no longer quarantined behind a manner of aloofness, he had confided, "We have no illusions about the courts. Their judgments will bear the label of party, not justice; but when they turn us down I mean to make them do it in the face of a record that will damn them before the public." So, together with gentlemen like General Prince and ministers of the Gospel bearing sworn narratives of police browbeating, came the backwash of the discontented riffraff: deserters who were willing to disclose their secrets to appease their various resentments. Boone, who had played simple and direct politics in the backwoods, found himself in the midst of a more intricate version of the game--and into it he had thrown all the weight of his energies--until this morning. Now, as he sat gazing out over roofs and chimney-pots, a messenger boy, impatient of anteroom delays, burst officiously into his office. "Are you Mr. Morgan Wallifarro?" he demanded, scanning a label on the package he bore, and, as Boone shook his head, he heard Morgan's voice behind him: "I'm the man you're looking for." Then as the younger Wallifarro took the package from the snub-nosed Mercury, he opened it, revealing a gold-knobbed riding crop. Once before that morning the young attorney had halted the all-but-congested tide of business to telephone to a florist, and through the open door Boone had heard the order given. Then Morgan had directed that violets and orchids be sent that evening to Miss Anne Masters. Presumably the riding crop was bound for the same destination. "Anne's riding some of those Canadian hunters tonight at the Horse Show," was Morgan's casually put remark as he felt Boone's eyes upon him. "I thought she might like this." It was the first time that Anne's name had passed conversationally between them since the evening when, in that same office, Morgan's pistol had clicked harmlessly, and upon each face fell a faint shadow of embarrassment. Then Wellver admitted, "It's a very handsome one," and the other passed on into his own office. Already Boone had been thinking of those Canadian hunters. It was that which had lured his mind away from his littered desk and filled him with the spirit of truancy. Tonight would see the opening of the Horse Show with the fanfare of its brass bands and the spreading of its peacock plumes of finery. Following upon it, as musical numbers follow an overture, would come the dances for the debutantes, and Anne would be a debutante. In that far, tonight would be a sort of door closing against himself as one holding no membership in that circle whose edicts were written by Fashion. It was, however, of another phase of the matter that his present restiveness was born. Yesterday afternoon he had slipped into the emptiness of the Horse Show building for an inquisitive half hour, and had seen a hard bitten stable boy trying to rehearse a stubborn roan over the jumps.