muttered at him in his dreams; but by the third day rumor of what Henry intended seemed to have spread, and a procession of the townspeople began to visit his office—men like Gaylord and Schuler and Foster.
"I'm interested in seeing that nobody pitches a monkey wrench into the Boland machinery," the Mayor explained. "Henry, you don't want to do anything to injure the community," mourned Schuler.
But this outside pressure made Henry angry. "Community, rot!" he blazed. "It's mere selfishness that brings you fellows here. I'm getting fed up anyway—tired of having everybody try to make a goat out of me. Community, eh? Why, the community's very existence depends on justice from the courts for small as for great. Community? By George, that's the big point. It isn't the scrawny little Indian; it's the community I'm going to stand up for and defend."
Thus did the issue widen in Harrington's mind.
"I can't make out Henry at all," Mayor Foster told Gaylord and Schuler, going down the stairs, and the banker and the merchant confessed themselves mystified by this sudden clouding of one of the city's brightest minds.
But it was not alone self-appointed meddlers who were discussing Henry now.
His rumored intention had traveled widely this third day. He was being talked about every where, in the lodges, in the women's clubs; before the county medical association, by the ministerial association, on the corners of the streets, in the front rooms of soft drink parlors and in the back rooms of bootleg joints; and always with disfavor—because of a mere rumored intent of his, the first ever to invoke a criticism of any sort.
