CHAPTER XX
Saturday was a lazy June day; there was little breeze, little movement of any sort and blue-bottle flies droned through the open door of the office of the Blueberry Banner. Humphrey Bryant sat in his chair, arms hanging limply from his shoulders, one foot resting on its side, the other leg sprawled before him.
It was nearly noon. All day yesterday, all the night before he had worked to batter down the defense that Jim Harris had built about the individuals of his board of supervisors—his by right of possession. It had availed nothing. Bryant had watched them come into town, watched them gather at the court house and he could see them now, in the upper corner of the red building, moving about as they got at the work before them—
That he could see, and something else, the feet of Jim Harris, propped against the window sill, as he tilted his chair backward and let the machinery of legislation grind its way—the way he had directed. Those feet rested idly enough, lazily enough, but Bryant knew that they were ready to stamp down upon any challenge that might be flaunted, that Harris would not leave that meeting until the motion to adjourn had carried, that it was such vigilance that had made him valuable to Pontiac Power, and a menace to honest men.
And the old editor was slumped listlessly in his chair, riffling the pages of that worn note book because he was
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