The same Commonwealth's attorney who had prosecuted Asa Gregory had gone to his own house for dinner, and now he sat before his library fire in slippers and faded smoking jacket. On the floor near him lay an afternoon paper, but the day's chief news he had garnered more directly by personal contact. Over there in the Assembly was being waged a battle which interested him deeply. So inured had he become to high tides of political struggle that it did not occur to him to reflect upon the frequency with which, in his native State, bitter campaign followed upon bitter campaign. A Democrat and a Republican were at grips for the United States senatorship. Each of them had been a governor of Kentucky and the legislature, where senators were still made, hung in grimly unyielding deadlock. All that afternoon until its adjournment the lawyer had sat in the visitors' gallery of the house or laboured in the lobby. Now he sought brief relaxation after his own fashion. He sat upright in his armchair with a clarionet pressed to his lips and his cheeks ballooned, playing "Trouble in the Land." The soloist at length took the instrument from his pursed lips and wiped the mouthpiece with his handkerchief, and as he did so the negro man who was both bodyservant and butler opened the door of the room. "Thar's a gentleman done come ter see you, sah. He 'pears mighty urgent in his mind an' he wouldn't give me no name." The officer, bethinking himself of political satellites who sometimes make a virtue of mystery, smiled as he directed: "Bring him in here, Tom. It's cold in the parlour." Into the library came Boone, and stood silent until the negro had closed the door upon his exit; then he nodded curtly. There was an air of suppressed wildness in his eyes and a pallour under the bronze of his cheeks, upon which the attorney, as he offered a chair, made no comment. "I'm here," announced the visitor with a brusque pointedness, "to give you information upon which it is your duty to act." There was an unintended rasp of challenge in the manner, and under it the official's lips compressed themselves. Boone in his overwrought state felt that he must make haste, while he yet held himself in hand, and the attorney, believing his visitor to be ill, curbed his own temper. "Let's have the information," he suggested. "Then I'll be in a better position to construe my own duty." "Presumably you wish to punish all those guilty of the conspiracy that ended in Senator Goebel's death," went on the mountain man in a hard voice. "I say presumably, because the Commonwealth has heretofore appeared to discriminate among the accused." The attorney bridled. "As to Governor Goebel's death," he asserted heatedly, and in the very employment of the widely different titles the two men proclaimed their antithesis of political creed and opinion, "my record speaks for itself. My sincerity needs no defence."