"Concealing his love!" whispers I to Hen; and he put the leg of his chair on my foot and ground it around till I almost yelled. When they had marked the note "Exhibit A" the way they do, Smythe said "Plaintiff rests," though they didn't seem near as tired as our side was, and the court let out for noon. They let McKenzie take the note with him to look at. There it was on one of those blanks that it cost me a good claim in Kansas once to practise writing on, and I never got to be much of a penman either; it was signed "Henry Peters" as natural as life. "Well," questioned Mac, as Hen turned it over, "what do you say to it, Henry?" I could feel that all the time McKenzie had had a hunch that Hen had really signed the note, and Hen felt it, too, and he threw to the winds the remains of his last conversion, and his fear that Mac would strike again, and talked as bad as if he was learning a calf to drink. "Why, you scoundrelly Keeley graduate," he yelled, "what did I tell you! That's a forgery, as any one but a half-witted pettifogger could see by lookin' at it!" "I sever my connection with this case right now," said Mac, away down in his chest, and as dignified as a ring-master. "No inebriated litigant can refer to the struggle and expense I have incurred in lifting myself to a nobler plane of self-control, and then call for my skill and erudition in extricating him from the quagmire of the law in which his imprudences have immeshed him. Go, sir, to some practitioner so far lost to manhood as to be able to resist the temptation to brain you with his notary-public's seal. Leave me to my books!" Mac went into the next room and shut the door, but did not lock it. "I can see," said Colonel Baggs, "the wisdom of leaving it on the latch." I took and apologized for Hen; but Mac stuck his nose in a book and waved me away. If Hen had been a little drunker he would have cried; and I went back to woo McKenzie some more. Finally, he agreed to come into the case again, on payment of another retainer fee of twenty dollars. Hen was game, and skinned a double-X off his roll without a flinch. Mac opened up a new account in his books, and Hen, for my successful diplomacy, raised my wages two dollars a month. It was a great lesson to me. Of course I could see that it was not Hen's signature; for his way of writing was Spencerian, modified by handling a fork, shucking corn, and by the ink drying up while he was thinking. The name on the note was kind of backhand. Mac asked about other Henry Peterses, and Hen told him that there was a man that passed by that name in the county a year or so back, but that he never had credit for three hundred cents, never bought any such machinery, and had escaped to Dakota.