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cursed these bad prophets, "Damn fools!" "Bunch o' jack asses!" but they were not sitting near Railroad Jones. . . .

The van drew up at the courthouse gate. Abner took the sack on his shoulder and started patiently working his way among the stream of men up the steps to the second story. The dark stairway, the jammed crowd, recalled to Abner how he had once climbed these same stairs filled with fear lest he had lost Nessie Sutton; and now he had lost her indeed, mother and baby. . . .

The Chancery Court of Lane County seldom has a large attendance, owing to the prevailing practice of conducting its suits with written depositions. However, in the matter of the Irontown Bank versus David M. Jones et al., the courtroom was jammed from door to chancellor's dais.

When the attending constable at last observed Railroad Jones trying to press his bulk through the aisle, he was forced to shout at individuals in the passage to let the defendant into court. He threatened the men at the door to stop crowding or he would shut the doors in their faces.

The chancellor, a thin old man with a long face, a large nose, and a black skullcap, ordered the windows opened somewhat from the top.

Abner, with the bag, followed the course of the fat man and eventually came to a table where the defendant's lawyer was seated with some documentary evidence piled before him. Railroad Jones had only one lawyer, an attorney by the name of Norton, but across on the opposite side of the enclosed space, at the plaintiff's table, were stationed a veritable battery of the bar: Buckingham Sharp, Judge John A. Stone, Turley M. Johnstone, and a swarthy, rather picturesque man with curly black hair, who, somebody eventually whispered to Abner, was a Mr. Swikerd who came from Nashville.

Half of the plaintiff's desk was covered high with leather-backed law books. When Abner saw this array, his heart began to sink again; at his own desk were only himself