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spilling over from thirty years of practice, made him hustle out to the small workroom at the rear of his office suite and make copies of both Harms’s handwritten letter and Rider’s own typewritten one. This same uneasiness made him decide to keep, for now, the letter from the Army. When the story broke he could always produce it, again anonymously. He hid the copies in one of his desk drawers and locked it. He returned the originals to the envelope, looked up the address of the Supreme Court in his legal directory, and next typed up a label. He did not provide a return address on the envelope. That done, he put on his hat and coat and walked down to the post office at the corner.
    Before he had time to change his mind, he filled out the form to send the envelope by certified mail so he would get a return receipt, handed it to the postal clerk, completed the simple transaction and returned to his office. It was only then that it struck him. The return receipt could be a way for the Court to identify who had sent the package. He sighed. Rufus had been waiting half his life for this. And, in a way, Rider had abandoned him back then. For the rest of the day Rider lay on the couch in his office, in the dark, silently praying that he had done the right thing, and knowing, in his heart, that he had.
     

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Ramsey’s clerks have been pestering me about the comment you made the other day, Justice Knight, about the poor being entitled to certain preferences.” Sara looked over at the woman, sitting so calmly behind her desk.
    A smile flickered across Knight’s face as she scanned some documents.
“I’m sure they have.”
    They both knew that Ramsey’s clerks were like a well-trained commando unit. They had feelers out everywhere, looking for anything of interest to the chief justice and his agendas. Almost nothing escaped their notice. Every word, exclamation, meeting or casual corridor conversation was duly noted, analyzed and catalogued away for future use.
    “So you intended for that reaction to happen?”
    “Sara, as much as I may not like it, there is a certain process at this place that one must struggle through. Some call it a game, I don’t choose to do so. But I can’t ignore its presence. I’m not so much concerned with the chief. The positions I’m thinking about taking on a number of cases Ramsey would never support. I know that and he knows that.”
    “So you were floating a trial balloon to the other justices.”
    “In part, yes. Oral argument is also an open, public forum.”
    “So, to the public.”
Sara thought quickly.
“And the media?”
    Knight put down the papers and clasped her hands together as she stared at the younger woman.
“This Court is swayed more by public opinion than many would dare to confess. Some here would like to see the status quo always preserved. But the Court has to move forward.”
    “And this ties into the cases you’ve been having me research about equalizing educational rights of the poor?”
    “I have a compelling interest in that.”
Elizabeth Knight had grown up in East Texas, the middle of nowhere, but her father had had money. Thus, her education had been first-rate, and she had often wondered how her life would have been if her father had been poor like so many of the people she had grown up with. All justices carried psychological baggage to the Court and Elizabeth Knight was no exception.
“And that’s all I’m really going to say right now.”
    “And
Blankley
?”
Sara said, referring to the affirmative action case Ramsey had so thoroughly decimated.
    “We haven’t voted on it yet, of course, Sara, so I can’t say one way or the other how it will turn out.”
The voting conferences took place in complete secrecy, without even a stenographer or secretary in residence. However, for those who followed the Court with any consistency, and for the clerks who lived in the place every day, it wasn’t too difficult to predict how votes were