"With God's help I'll be the instrument for their destruction." He frowned with a preternatural severity.

Eh--if he could turn a trick like that, it would pull him up! There would be no more jeers and laughter.
What credit and standing it would give him! His thoughts slipped along this fresh channel.

What a prosecution he would conduct--what a whirlwind of eloquence he would loose! He began to breathe hard.

His name should go from end to end of the state! No man could be great without opportunity--for years he had known this--but here was opportunity at last! Then he remembered what Mahaffy had told him of the man on the raft.

This Slosson's tavern was probably on the upper waters of the Elk.