The two men faced each other for the moment almost with hostility. Then McManus’s face lightened and he held out his hand without a word of apology: “You’ll do, I guess. If the fellow escapes you, he’d deserve to--if he’d killed anybody but Theodore Wing. Whatever I can do to aid, call on me day or night. At the least, keep me posted.” CHAPTER IV Trafford Gets an Assurance Trafford sat in his room in the hotel at Bangor the next evening and studied the copy of Judge Parlin’s statement. “Her brilliancy of mind has carried her far,” he said; “has aided her husband politically; and it was this influence that defeated him for the chief justiceship. It’s so easy that I can’t believe the solution. By George! I wonder if the old judge ever wrote that paper? I wish I’d examined the original more critically. If I’d been one of your inspired detectives, such as you find in novels, I’d probably have caught a forgery the first thing!” None the less, he put himself to the task of untangling the threads of the statement, with a result that set him to deep thinking. Bangor was not the direction from which had come opposition to the judge’s nomination. On the contrary, Judge Parlin had been rather a favourite than otherwise in Bangor, and his cause had received substantial aid. But the statement did not assert that Wing’s mother had remained in Bangor, or that it was there that she aided her husband politically. The most hostile influence that Judge Parlin had encountered was popularly credited to an ex-Governor, Matthewson, an Eastern Maine man, who at present held no office, but without whose countenance few men ventured even to aspire to office. “If it should prove that Matthewson’s wife is a Bangor woman, ’twould be so easy as to be absurd,” Trafford mused. “The old judge wasn’t silly enough to believe that what he wrote could conceal her identity. Either he meant it should be known to Wing or Mrs. Parlin, or--but what possible object could there be in forging such a paper?” Suddenly he sat bolt upright and stared at the document in blank amazement. Then, with a low whistle, he folded it into his pocketbook. “I’ll find Mrs. Matthewson Bangor-born, I’ll bet ten cents to a leather button!” he declared.