Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/167

 "I couldn't either, until I had to. But I've got sense enough to know that I'm done, with nobody to back up my hand. After all, I'm only a deputy," he said savagely. "I'm all broke up, I can tell you!"

"But aside from the way in which it leaves me it seems such a—such an insult to Uncle Joe—as though nobody cared—as though—" she could not finish.

"I know—I know," he nodded gravely.

"I'm going up to see the mayor—to beg him to keep on—to tell him what it means to me! " she declared passionately.

"I wouldn't. Miss Prentice," Lingle advised.

"I must! It can't stop like this! He shall understand what It means to me—this suspicion—this disgrace that is nearly killing me!"

He saw that she was determined, so he did not protest further, but his reluctant gaze followed her as she disappeared up the narrow dirty stairway.

The mayor attended to the official business of Prouty at a flat-top desk in a large front room where he also wrote an occasional life insurance policy. As the insurance business was a rise from a disreputable saloon and gambling joint, so the saloon and gambling joint had been a step upward from his former means of livelihood as a dance-hall tout In a neighboring state.

With his election to an office which nobody else wanted, an incipient ambition began to stir. Already his mind was busy with plans for advancement, and each move that he made was with an eye to the future. But one thing was certain, and it was that wherever his Star of Destiny led him he would remain, underneath any veneer of polish which experience might give him, the barroom bully, the mental and moral tinhorn that Nature had made him.

Enveloped in a cloud of the malodorous smoke of a