His brows contracted and he shut his lips tightly so that his stiff mustache gave to his mouth a sinister look that Dan had never seen before.

The disagreeable expression vanished and he was his usual calm, unruffled self.

"And," he concluded, smiling, "I might have some trouble in proving it myself." Dan was not only accumulating valuable information, but Bassett interested him more and more as a character.

He was an unusual man, a new type, this senator from Fraser, with his alternating candor and disingenuousness, his prompt solutions of perplexing problems.

It was unimaginable that a man so strong and so sure of himself, and so shrewd in extricating others from their entanglements, could ever be cornered, trapped, or beaten.
Bassett's hands had impressed Dan that first night at Fraserville, and he watched them again as Bassett idly twisted a rubber band in his fingers.