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At the head of the table sat old Korchagin, on his left the physician; on his right, a visitor, Ivan Ivanovich Kolosoff, an ex-district commander, and now a bank manager, who was a friend of the family, and of liberal tendencies; further to the left was Miss Rader, governess to Missy's four-year-old sister, with the little girl herself; then to the right, Missy's only brother, Peter, a high-school pupil, on account of whose forthcoming examinations the entire family remained in the city, and his tutor, also a student; then again to the left, Katherine Alexeievna, a forty-year-old girl Slavophile; opposite to her was Michael Sergeievich, or Misha Telegin, Missy's cousin, and at the foot of the table, Missy herself, and beside her, on the table, lay an extra cover.
He protested vigorously, addressing himself to Bicknell and ignoring the ex-district attorney as if he were not. He, McTosh, was willing to surrender the office on an official order in writing over the chief clerk's signature. But did Bicknell fully understand what it might mean in loss of life and property to put a new man on the wires at a moment's notice?
The guest of honor was a brother lawyer though he might have refused to acknowledge the relationship with the ex-district attorney a keen-eyed, business-like gentleman, whose name as an organizer of vast capitalistic ventures had traveled far, and whose present attitude was one of undisguised and angry contempt for Gaston and all things Gastonian.
Some Bluebeard admiral there will always be for such stressful occasions, and David Kent, standing aside and growing cynical day by day, laid even chances on Hawk, the ex-district attorney, on Major Guilford, and on one Jasper G. Bucks, sometime mayor of Gaston the iridescent. Afterward he was to learn that he had underrated the gifts of the former mayor.
While he was pocketing his change at the receiving clerk's pigeon-hole, a cab rattled up with a horse at a gallop, and Stephen Hawk sprang out. Kent saw him through the plate-glass front and turned quickly to the public writing-desk, hoping to be overlooked. He was. For once in a way the ex-district attorney was too nearly rattled to be fully alert to his surroundings.
"Who is he?" asked Loring, in an aside to Kent. "Stephen Hawk, the ex-district attorney: boomer, pettifogger, promoter a charter member of the Gaston wolf-pack. A man who would persuade you into believing in the impeccability of Satan in one breath, and knife you in the back for a ten-dollar bill in the next," was the rejoinder. Loring nodded, and again became a listener.
The most complete legend on this subject I obtained from a prominent ex-district kapala, Kiai Laman, a Kahayan Dayak converted to Islam. He has travelled much in certain sections of Borneo, is interested in folklore matters, and told his stories without apparent errors or contradictions. The tale here rendered is from the Ot-Danums on the Upper Kahayan River.
In the storm of applause that burst upon the dramatic peroration of the ex-district attorney, a man rose from the center of the stage semicircle and lumbered heavily forward to the footlights. Loring's first emotion was of surprise, tempered with pity.
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