He paused, and then abruptly, yet with a sudden and pathetic
dropping of his dominant note, said: "Hathaway, you're young, and
Hammersley liked you--what's to be done? I thought of passing over
my tools to you. You can shoot, and I hear you HAVE. But the h--l
of it is that if you dropped a man or two people would ask WHY, and
want to know what it was about; while, when I do, nobody here
thinks it anything but MY WAY! I don't mean that it would hurt you
with the crowd to wipe out one or two of these hounds during the
canvass, but the trouble is that they belong to YOUR PARTY, and,"
he added grimly, "that wouldn't help your career."

"But," said Paul, ignoring the sarcasm, are you not magnifying the
effect of a disclosure? The girl is an heiress, excellently
brought up. Who will bother about the antecedents of the mother,
who has disappeared, whom she never knew, and who is legally dead
to her?"

"In my day, sir, no one who knew the circumstances," returned the
colonel, quickly. "But we are living in a blessed era of Christian
retribution and civilized propriety, and I believe there are a lot
of men and women about who have no other way of showing their own
virtue than by showing up another's vice. We're in a reaction of
reform. It's the old drunkards who are always more clamorous for
total abstinence than the moderately temperate. I tell you,
Hathaway, there couldn't be an unluckier moment for our secret
coming out."

"But she will be of age soon."

"In two months."