“It’s no time for refinements or phrasings. It isn’t the idle alone who expect impossibilities. Most of your people think Trafford’s failed before he’s had time to begin. There’s got to be something done to feed their impatience and gain time. A Yankee’s substitute for doing something is to hold a public meeting.” McManus shook his head. “With the chances that it would end in a hanging-bee,” he said. When, however, McManus returned to Millbank from the county town, he found affairs so far more menacing than he had anticipated as to lead him to take counsel with the more prominent citizens. Naturally almost the first man to whom he broached the matter was Charles Hunter, the head of the leading logging firm. Hunter was a man who at the age of thirty-five was already recognised as the first business man of the town. Succeeding to a business built up by his father, he had doubled it and doubled it again. Its operations extended over the entire northern part of the State, and into Canada, and were closely interlocked with the immense logging interests of the Penobscot and the Androscoggin. President of the Millbank National Bank, he was also on the Board of leading banks in Augusta, Bangor, and Portland, and as a member of the Governor’s staff he had attained the rank of colonel--that warlike title which so many exceedingly peaceful gentlemen parade with pride. In fact, his operations had touched all interests save politics, for his title had more of a social than a political significance. “Undoubtedly,” he said, “Trafford is entitled to make a show for the money he’s getting, and we can understand his giving us some horse-play; but it’s going too far when he endangers an innocent man, to say nothing of the good name of the town. The episode of the revolver found twenty-four hours after the murder is mere child’s play. I shouldn’t have thought it would have taken for a moment.” “You think Trafford put it there?” “I think he knew when to look for it and when not to. He looked for it at the right time, at any rate.” “I don’t think Trafford’s so much to blame for producing the pistol as Coroner Burke,” McManus said. “I was watching him at the time, and I thought him annoyed at the question.” “Whoever is to blame,” Hunter answered, with the positiveness of a man accustomed to rely much on his own judgment and to have others do the same, “the mischief’s done. Half the town is certain that Oldbeg is the murderer. It’s being whispered that Mrs. Parlin hired him to do it, so she could have the money, and the fact that she doesn’t discharge the man is held to be proof of the fact. Then, with the logic of dolts, they declare that she hired Trafford because she was afraid of him.” A look of horror showed in McManus’s face at this statement of the public attitude. Surely, Mrs. Parlin had suffered enough without having to bear this injustice.