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76 personally Santoine might have been counted one, and he had his friends, both in high places; he was a world figure. Then, all of a sudden, the man had been struck down—killed, because of some private quarrel, men whispered, by an obscure and till then unheard-of man.

The trembling wires and cables, which should have carried to the waiting world the expected news of Latron's conviction, carried instead the news of Latron's death; and disorder followed. The first public concern had been, of course, for the stocks and bonds of the great Latron properties; and Latron's bigness had seemed only further evidenced by the stanchness with which the Latron banks, the Latron railroads and mines and public utilities stood firm even against the shock of their builder's death. Assured of this, public interest had shifted to the trial, conviction and sentence of Latron's murderer; and it was during this trial that Santoine's name had become more publicly known. Not that the blind man was suspected of any knowledge—much less of any complicity—in the crime; the murder had been because of a purely private matter; but in the eager questioning into Latron's circumstances and surroundings previous to the crime, Santoine was summoned into court as a witness.

The drama of Santoine's examination had been of the sort the public—and therefore the newspapers—love. The blind man, led into the court, sitting sightless in the witness chair, revealing himself by his spoken, and even more by his withheld, replies as one of the unknown guiders of the destiny of the Continent and as counselor to the most powerful,—himself till then hardly heard of but plainly one of the nation's "uncrowned rulers,"—had caught the public sense. The