"'The problem, gentlemen, of limb-grafting has been solved.'" [[Page 4]]

MORTMAIN

BY
ARTHUR TRAIN

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1928

Copyright, 1907, by
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1905, BY ESS ESS PUBLISHING COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1905, 1906, 1907, BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY THE METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY ASSOCIATED SUNDAY MAGAZINES
COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY THE BUTTERICK PUBLISHING COMPANY

Printed in the United States of America

To
AMOS
ESNESTO AND SANDRO

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

MORTMAIN

I

Sir Penniston Crisp was a man of some sixty active years, whose ruddy cheeks, twinkling blue eyes, and convincingly innocent smile suggested forty. At thirty he had been accounted the most promising young surgeon in London; at forty he had become one of the three leading members of his profession; at fifty he had amassed a fortune and had begun to accept only those cases which involved complications of true scientific interest, or which came to him on the personal application of other distinguished physicians.

Like many another in the medical world whose material wants are guaranteed, he found solace and amusement only in experimentation along new lines of his peculiar hobbies. His days were spent between his book-lined study with its cheery sea-coal fire and his adjacent laboratory, where three assistants, all trained Bachelors of Science, conducted experiments under his personal direction.

His daily life was as well ordered as his career had been. Rising at seven, Sir Penniston partook of a meager breakfast, attended to his trifling personal affairs, read his newspaper, dictated his letters, and by nine was ready to don his uniform and receive his sterilized instruments from his young associate, Scalscope Jermyn, a capable and cheerful soul after Crisp's own heart. An operating theater adjoined the laboratory, and here the baronet made it a point to perform once each week, in the presence of various surgeons who attended by invitation, a few difficult and dangerous operations upon patients sent to him from the City Hospital.

When Jermyn was with his familiars he was wont to refer to his master as the "howlingist cheese in surgery." This was putting it mildly, for, although Sir Penniston was indubitably, if you choose, quite the "howlingist cheese" in surgery, he was also a pathfinder, an explorer into the mysteries of the body and the essence of vitality in bone and tissue. He could do more things to a cat in twenty minutes than would naturally occur in the combined history of a thousand felines. He could handle the hidden arteries and vessels of the body as confidently and accurately as you or I would tie a shoe string. He had housed a tramp for thirteen months and inserted a plate-glass window in that gentleman's exterior in order that he might with the greater certainty study the complicated processes of a digestion stimulated after a chronic lack of food. He experimented on men, women, children, elephants, apes, ostriches, guinea pigs, rabbits, turtles, frogs, and goldfish. He could alter the shape of a nose, or perfect an irregular ear in the twinkling of an instrument; remove a human heart and insert it still beating without inconvenience to its owner; and was as much at home among the vessels of Thebesius as he was on Piccadilly Circus.

He was single, kept but one servant—a Jap—neither smoked nor drank, attended the worst play he could find every Saturday night, and gave ponderous dinners to his professional brethren on Wednesdays. He was the dean of his order, and bade fair to remain so for a long time to come—a calm, passionless craftsman in flesh and bone. His rivals frequently were heard to say that there was nothing surgical in heaven or earth that Crisp would not undertake. A faint odor of chloroform followed his well-regulated progress through existence.

On the morning upon which this narrative opens Sir Penniston had entered his laboratory with that urbanity so characteristic of him. A white frock hung jauntily upon his well-filled, if slenderly nourished, proportions, his blue eyes sparkled with good-natured activity, and his long, muscular hands rubbed themselves together in a manner which signified that they were anxious to be at the skilled work in which their owner took so keen a pleasure. Scalscope was already on hand, and with a bundle of dripping instruments in his grasp met his master halfway between the minor operating table and the antiseptic bath.

"Ah, good morning, Scalscope! How is the Marchioness of Cheshire this fine morning?"

Scalscope smiled deferentially at the little joke.

"I presume you mean Lady Tabitha? Her ladyship is doing splendidly—better, I fancy, than could be expected under the circumstances."

"Excellent, Scalscope! Delightful! Where is she?"

At that moment a large Maltese cat, cognizant by some unknown instinct that she was the subject of this matutinal conversation, stalked slowly out of a patch of sunshine and rubbed herself between Sir Penniston's broadcloth-covered calves. The surgeon bent over and felt carefully of her foreleg, but the feline did not flinch; on the contrary, she screwed round her head and thrust it into the doctor's hand.

"Perfect!" exclaimed Sir Penniston, his face lighting with a smile of scientific satisfaction. "Absolutely perfect! Scalscope, you have lived to participate in the highest achievement of modern surgery! Is the patient in the operating room? Very good. The gentlemen assembled? Excellent! While you are administering the somni-chloride I will announce our success."

He bowed to the other assistants and, followed by the Marchioness of Cheshire, opened the door which led to the platform of the operating theater. Some dozen or fifteen professional-looking gentlemen rose as he made his appearance and bowed. A young woman with her arm in a sling sat by the table attended by a couple of women nurses.

"Good morning, gentlemen! Good morning!" remarked Sir Penniston. "Mr. Jermyn, will you kindly prepare the patient? My friends, I have the pleasure of being able to announce to you, and thus permitting you in a measure to share in, what I regard as the most extraordinary achievement of our profession."

A murmur of interest and appreciation made itself audible from the physicians who had resumed their seats upon the benches. If Sir Penniston regarded anything as remarkable, it must indeed be so, and they awaited his next words expectantly.

"The problem, gentlemen, of limb-grafting has been solved!" he announced modestly.

The assembled surgeons gazed at one another in amazement.

"You may perhaps recall," continued the baronet, "that it has for years been my particular hobby, or, I should more properly say, theory, that there was no reason in the world why, if a severed finger or a nose could be replaced by surgery, the same should not be true of a major part, such as a hand or leg; and why, if a limb once severed could be replaced upon its stump, another person's might not be used.

"Many gentlemen eminent in our profession, some of whom I believe I see before me, gave it as their opinion that such an operation was impossible. A few—and most of these, I regret to say, were upon the other side of the Atlantic—agreed with me that it could and would ultimately be accomplished. I studied the problem for years. Was it our inability to nourish a part once severed or so to reënervate it as to unite tendons, muscles, or bone? The latter surely gave no trouble. Tendons were sutured every day, and under favorable circumstances their functions were restored, while nerves were frequently sutured and functional restoration recorded.

"The question, therefore, seemed to narrow itself down to whether or not it was impossible to restore an arterial supply once cut off. Veins, of course, were frequently cut and sutured, and performed perfectly afterwards. Was there no way to restore an artery? In other words, could a limb once severed be sufficiently nourished to restore it? This, then, became my special study—a fascinating study indeed, involving as it did the possibilities of untold benefit to mankind."

Sir Penniston paused and glanced toward the table upon which was extended the now almost unconscious form of the patient. There was still plenty of time for him to conclude his remarks.

"With a view, therefore, to observing whether a thin glass tube would be tolerated in a sterilized state within an artery (the only possible means I could devise to allow a continued flow of blood and contemporaneous restoration), I made a number of half-inch pieces to suit the caliber of a dog's femoral, constricted them very slightly to an hour-glass shape, and smoothed their ends by heat, so that no surface roughness should induce clotting. Cutting the femorals across, I tied each end on the tube by a fine silk thread, and tied the thread ends together. Primary union resulted, and the dog's legs were as good as ever! The first step had been successfully accomplished."

The assembled surgeons clapped their hands faintly in token of appreciation, and one or two murmured, "My word!—Extraordinary!—Marvelous!" Sir Penniston bowed slightly and resumed:

"I now added one more step to my experiments. I dissected out the trachial artery and vein near the axilla of a dog's forelimb, and, holding these apart, amputated the limb through the shoulder muscles and sawed through the bone, leaving the limb attached only by the vessels. I then sutured the bone with a silver wire and the nerves with fine silk. Each muscle I sutured by itself with catgut, making a separate series of continuous suturing of the fascia lata and skin. The leg was then enveloped in sterilized dressing, a liberal use of iodoform gauze being the essential part. Over all, cotton and a plaster jacket were placed, leaving him three legs to walk on. The dog's leg united perfectly."

The assembled gentlemen broke into loud applause. The patient was lying motionless, her deep inspirations showing that she was under the anæsthetic. But Sir Penniston was now lost in the enthusiasm of his subject.

"Thus, gentlemen, I demonstrated that, if in an amputated limb an artery could be left, the limb would survive the division and reuniting of everything else, and had good ground for the belief that if an arterial supply could be restored to a completely amputated limb, that limb also might be grafted back to its original or to a corresponding stump.

"The final experiment only remained—the complete amputation of a limb and its restoration—a combination of all the others—difficult, dangerous, delicate—and requiring much preparation, assistance, and time. I finally selected a healthy cat, amputated its foreleg, inserted a glass tube in the artery, and sutured bone, muscles, nerves, and skin. Complete restoration occurred! And after four months you have here before you this morning the cat herself, fat, well, and strong, and as good as ever!—Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!"

The Marchioness of Cheshire ran quickly to Sir Penniston and leaped into his lap, while the gentlemen left the benches and hastened forward to seize the master's hand and to examine the cat in wonder.

"There is nothing, therefore, in the way of grafting which cannot be successfully undertaken. A human arm or leg crushed at thigh or shoulder, and requiring amputation, would admit of Esmarch's bandage being applied to expel its blood and of being used after amputation. Why not another man's blood as well as its owner's? No reason in the world! Had we here a suitable forearm ready to be applied I have no doubt but that I could successfully replace it upon the stump of the one I am now about to remove. Hereafter, so long as there are limbs enough to go round—so long as the demand does not transcend the supply—none of our patients need fear the permanent loss of a member!"

The surgeons overwhelmed him with their congratulations, but Sir Penniston modestly waived them aside. His triumph was the triumph of science—and its purity was not marred by any thought of personal glorification.

"The Crispan operation," some one whispered. The others caught it up. "The Crispan operation," they repeated. A slight look of gratification made itself apparent upon Sir Penniston's rosy countenance.

"Thank you, gentlemen! Thank you! Mr. Jermyn, is the patient quite ready? Yes? We will proceed, gentlemen. My instruments, if you please."

Among those who left the operating theater an hour later was Sir Richard Mortmain.

II

The opalescent light from the bronze electric lamp on the mahogany writing table disclosed two gentlemen, whose attitudes and expressions left no doubt as to the serious import of their discussion. At the same time the membra disjecta of afternoon tea which remained upon the teak tabaret, together with the still smoking butt of an Egyptian cigarette distilling its incense in a steadily perpendicular gray column toward the ceiling from a jade jar used as an ash receiver, showed that for one of them at least the situation had admitted of physical amelioration. The gentleman beside the table had rested his high, narrow forehead upon the delicate fingers of his left hand, and with contracted eyebrows was gazing in a baffled manner toward his companion, who had extended his limbs at length before the heavy chair in which he reclined, and with his elbows upon its arms was holding his finger tips lightly against each other before his face. To those who knew Ashley Flynt this meant that the last word had been spoken, and that nothing remained but to accept the situation as he stated it and follow his advice.

His heavy yet shrewd countenance, whose florid hue bespoke a modern adjustment of golf to a more traditional use of port, had that cold, vacant look which it displayed when the mind behind the mask had recorded Q. E. D. beneath its unseen demonstration. The gentleman at the table twitched his shoulders nervously, slowly raised his head, and leaned back into his chair.

"And you say that there is absolutely nothing which can be done?" he repeated mechanically.

"I have already told you, Sir Richard," replied Flynt in even, incisive tones, "that the last day of grace expires to-morrow. Unless the three notes are immediately taken up you will be forced into bankruptcy. Your property and expectations are already mortgaged for more than they are worth. Your assets of every sort will not return your creditors—I should say your creditor—fifteen per cent. Seventy-nine thousand pounds, principal and interest—can you raise it or even a substantial part of it? No, not five thousand! You have no choice, so far as I can see, but to go into bankruptcy, unless—" He hesitated rather deprecatingly.

"Well!" cried Sir Richard impatiently, "unless——"

"Unless you marry."

The baronet drew himself up and a flush crept into his cheeks and across his forehead.

"As your legal adviser," continued Flynt unperturbed, "I give it as my opinion that your only alternative to bankruptcy is a suitable marriage. Of course, for a man of your position in society a mere engagement might be enough to——"

Sir Richard sprang quickly to his feet and stepped in front of his solicitor.

"To induce the money lenders to advance the amount necessary to put me on my feet? Bah! Flynt, how dare you make such a suggestion! If you were not my solicitor—Good heavens, that I should ever be brought to this!"

Flynt shrugged his shoulders.

"So far as that goes, bankruptcy is the cheapest way to pay one's debts."

His client uttered an ejaculation of disgust. Then suddenly the red deepened in his cheeks and he clenched his white hand until the thin blue veins stood out like cords.

"Curse him!" he cried in a voice shaken by anger. "Curse him now and hereafter! Why did I ever take advantage of his pretended generosity? He meant to ruin me! Why was I ever born with tastes that I could not afford to gratify? Why must I surround myself with music and flowers and marbles? He saw his chance, stimulated my extravagance, seduced my intellect, and now he casts me into the street a beggar! How I hate him! I believe I could kill him!"

Sir Richard turned quickly. The door had opened to admit the silent, deferential figure of Joyce, the butler.

"Pardon me, Sir Richard. A clerk from Mr. Flynt's office, sir, with a package. Shall I let him in?"

Mortmain still stood with his fist trembling in mid-air, and it was a moment before he regained sufficient control of himself to reply:

"Yes, yes; let him in."

The butler nodded to some one just behind him, and a nondescript, undersized man cringingly entered the room and stood hesitatingly by the threshold.

"Have you the papers, Flaggs?" inquired Flynt.

"Here, sir," replied the other, drawing forth a bundle tied with red tape and handing it to his employer.

"Very good. You need not return to the office. Good night."

"Good night, sir. Thank you, sir," mumbled Flaggs, and casting a furtive, beetling glance in the direction of Sir Richard, he shambled out.

The solicitor followed him with his eye until the door had closed behind him, and then shrugged his shoulders for the second time.

"My dear Sir Richard," he remarked, "many of our most distinguished peers have gone through bankruptcy. It will all be the same a year hence. Society will be as glad as ever to receive you. Your name will command the same respect and likely enough the same credit. Bankruptcy is still eminently respectable. As for Lord Russell—try to forget him. It is enough that you owe him the money."

Mortmain's anger had been followed by the reaction of despair. Now he groped for a cigarette, and, drawing a jeweled match box from his pocket, lit it with trembling fingers.

Flynt arose.

"That's right!" he exclaimed; "just be sensible about it. Meet me to-morrow at my office at ten o'clock and we will call in Lord Russell's solicitors for a consultation. It will be amicable enough, I assure you. Well, I must be off. Good night." He extended his hand, but Mortmain had thrust his own into his trousers' pockets.

"And you say nothing can prevent this?"

"Why, yes," returned Flynt in a sarcastic tone; "I believe two things can do so."

"Indeed," inquired Sir Richard. "What may they be?"

Flynt had stepped impatiently to the door, which he now held half open. Sir Richard had failed to send him a draft for his last bill.

"A fire from heaven to consume the notes—coupled with the death of Lord Russell—or your own. Good night!"

The door closed abruptly and Sir Richard Mortmain was left alone.

"The death of Lord Russell or my own!" he repeated with a harsh laugh. "Agreeable fellow, Flynt!" Then the bitter smile died out of his face and the lines hardened. Over on the heavy onyx mantel, between two grotesque bronze Chinese vases from whose ponderous sides dragons with bristling teeth and claws writhed to escape, a Sèvres clock chimed six, and was echoed by a dim booming from the outer hall.

Mortmain glanced with regret about the little den that typified so perfectly the futility of his luxurious existence. The deadened walls admitted hardly a suggestion of the traffic outside. By a flower-set window the open piano still held the score of "Madame Butterfly," the opening performance of which he was to attend that evening with Lady Bella Forsythe. A bunch of lilies of the valley stood at his elbow upon the massive table that never bore anything upon its polished surface but an ancient manuscript, an etching, or a vase of flowers. Delicate cabinets showed row upon row of grotesque Capodimonte, rare Sèvres and Dresden porcelains, jade, and other examples of ceramic art. Two Rembrandts, a Corot, and a profile by Whistler occupied the wall space. The mantel was given over to a few choice antique bronzes, covered with verdigris. The only concession to modern utilitarianism was an extension telephone standing upon a bracket in the corner behind the fireplace.

The sole surviving member of his family, Mortmain had inherited from his father, Sir Mortimer, a discriminating intellect and artistic tastes, united with a gentle, engaging, and unambitious disposition, derived from his Italian mother. Carelessly indifferent to his social inferiors, or those whom he regarded as such, he was brilliantly entertaining with his equals—a man of moods, conservative in habit, yet devoted to society, expensive in his mode of life, given to hospitality—and a spendthrift. These qualities combined to make him caviare to the general, an enigma to the majority, and the favorite of the few, whose favorite he desired to be. He had never married, for his calculation and his laziness had jumped together to convince him that he could be more comfortable, more independent, and more free to pursue his music and kindred tastes, if single. Altogether, Sir Richard, though perhaps a trifle selfish, was by no means a bad fellow, and one whose temperament fitted him to be what he was—a leader in matters of taste, a connoisseur, and an esteemed member of the gay world.

No doubt, as Flynt had suggested, he could have liberated himself financially by donning the golden shackles of an aristocratic marital slavery. But his soul revolted at the thought of marrying for money, not only at the moral aspect of it, but because a certain individual tranquillity had become necessary to his mode of life. He was forty and a creature of habit. A conventional marriage would be as intolerable as earning his living. On the other hand, the odium of a bankruptcy proceeding, the publicity, the vulgarity of it, and the loss of prestige and position which it would necessarily involve brought him face to face with the only alternative which Flynt had flung at him in parting—the death of Lord Russell or his own.

He had known that without being told. Months before, the silver-mounted pistol which was to round out his consistently inconsistent existence had been concealed among the linen in the bureau of his Louis XV bedroom, but it was to be invoked only when no other course remained. That nothing else did remain was clear. Flynt had read his client's sentence in that brutally unconscious jest.

On the day of his interview with Flynt he was one of the most highly regarded critics of music and art in London, and his own brilliant accomplishments as a virtuoso had been supplemented by a lavish generosity toward struggling painters and musicians who found easy access to his purse and table, if not to his heart.

He had introduced Drausche, the Austrian pianist, to the musical world at a heavy financial loss and had made several costly donations to the British Museum, in addition to which his collection of scarabs was one of the most complete on record and demanded constant replenishing to keep up to date. His expensive habits had required money and plenty of it, and when his patrimony had been exhausted he had mortgaged his expectations in his uncle's estate to launch the Austrian genius. It had been a lamentable failure. Mortmain's friends had said plainly enough that Drausche could play no better than his patron. This of itself implied no mean talent, but the public had resolutely refused to pay five shillings a ticket to hear the pianist, and the money was gone. Sir Richard had found himself in the hollow position of playing Mæcenas without the price, and rather than change his pose and his manner of life had borrowed twenty-five thousand pounds four years before from an elderly peer, who combined philanthropy and what some declared to be usury with a high degree of success.

There were those who hinted that this eminently respectable aristocrat robbed Peter more than he paid Paul, but Lord Gordon Russell was a man with whose reputation it was not safe to take liberties. The next year Mortmain had renewed his note, and, in order to save his famous collection from being knocked down at Christie's, had borrowed twenty-five thousand more. The same thing happened the year after, and now all three notes were three days overdue.

Sir Richard responded to the announcement of the little Sèvres clock by pressing a button at the side of his desk, which summons was speedily answered by Joyce.

"My fur coat, if you please, Joyce."

"Very good, sir." Joyce combined the eye of an eagle with the stolidity of an Egyptian mummy.

Mortmain arose, stepped to the fire, rubbed his thin, carefully kept fingers together, then seated himself at the piano and played a few chords from the overture. As he sat there he looked anything but a bankrupt upon the eve of suicide—rather one would have said, a young Italian musician, just ready to receive and enjoy the crowning pleasures of life. The thin light of the heavily shaded lamps brought out the ivory paleness of his face and hands, and the delicate, sensitive outline of his form, as with eyes half closed and head thrown back he ran his fingers with facile skill across the keyboard.

"Your coat, sir," said Joyce.

Mortmain arose and presented his arms while the servant deftly threw on the seal-lined garment, and handed his master his silk hat, gloves, and gold-headed stick.

"I am going for a short walk, Joyce. I shall be back by seven. You can reach me at the club, if necessary."

Joyce held open the door of the study and then hurried ahead through the luxuriously furnished hall to push open the massive door at the entrance. On the threshold Mortmain turned and, looking Joyce in the eye, said sharply:

"Why did you let that fellow Flaggs follow you to the door of my study, instead of leaving him in the hall?"

"I beg pardon, sir," replied the servant, "but he slipped behind me afore I knew it, sir. He was a rum one, anyway, sir—a bit in liquor, I fancy, sir."

Mortmain turned and passed out without reply. He hated intruders and had not liked the way in which Flynt had calmly received the clerk in his private study. On the whole, he regarded the solicitor as presuming.

It was dark already and the street lamps glowed nebulously through the gathering fog. The air was chilly, and a thick mealy paste, half sleet, half water, formed a sort of icing upon the sidewalk, which made walking slippery and uncomfortable. Few people were abroad, for fashionable London was in its clubs and boudoirs, and the workers trudged in an entirely different direction.

The club was but a few streets away, and it was only ten minutes after the hour when he entered it and strolled carelessly through the rooms. No one whom he cared particularly to see was there, and the fresh, if bitter, December air outside seemed vastly preferable to the stuffy atmosphere of the smoke-filled card and reading rooms. Therefore, as he had nearly an hour before it would be time to dress, he left the club, and, with the vague idea of extending his evening ramble, turned northward. Unconsciously he kept repeating Flynt's words: "The death of Lord Russell or your own." Then, without heed to where he was going, he fell into a reverie, in which he pondered upon the emptiness and uselessness of his life.

At length he entered a large square, and found himself asking what was so familiar in the picket fence and broad flight of steps that led up to the main entrance of the mansion on the corner. A wing of the house made out into a side street and presented three brilliantly lighted windows to the night. Two were empty, but on the white shade of the third, only a few feet above the sidewalk, appeared the sharp shadow of a man's head bending over a table. Now and then the lips moved as if their owner were addressing some other occupant of the chamber. It was the head of an old man, bald and shrunken.

Mortmain muttered an oath. What tricks was Fate trying to play with him by leading his footsteps to the house of the very man who, on the following morning, would ruin him as inevitably and inexorably as the sun would rise! A wave of anger surged through him and he shook his fist at the shadow on the curtain, exclaiming as he had done in his study half an hour before, "Curse him!"

"Ain't got much bloomin' 'air, 'as 'e, guv'nor?" said a thick voice at his elbow.

Sir Richard started back and beheld by the indistinct light of the street lamp the leering face of Flaggs, the clerk.

"Tha'sh yer frien' S'Gordon Russell," continued the other with easy familiarity. "A bloomin' bad un, says I. 'Orrid li'l bald 'ead! Got'sh notes, too. Your notes, S'Richard. Don't like 'im myself!"

Mortmain turned faint. This wretched scrivener had stumbled upon or overheard his secret. That he was drunk was obvious, but that only made him the more dangerous.

"Take yourself off, my man. It's too cold out here for you," ordered the baronet, slipping a couple of shillings into his hand.

"Than' you, S'Richard," mumbled Flaggs, leaning heavily in Mortmain's direction. "I accept this as a 'refresher.' Although you've never given me a retainer! Ha! ha! Not so bad, eh? Lemme tell you somethin'. 'Like to kill 'im,' says you? Kill 'im, says I. Le's kill 'im together. 'Ere an' now! Eh?"

"Leave me, do you hear?" cried the baronet. "You're in no condition to be on the street."

Flaggs grinned a sickly grin.

"Same errand as you, your worship. Both 'ere lookin' at li'l old bald 'ead. Look at 'im now——"

He raised his finger and pointed at the window, then staggered backward, lost his balance, and fell over the curb along the gutter. In another instant a policeman had him by the collar and had jerked him to his feet. The fall had so dazed the clerk that he made no resistance.

"I 'ope 'e didn't hoffer you no violence, Sir Richard," remarked the bobby, touching his helmet with his unoccupied hand. "Hit's disgraceful—right in front of Lord Russell's, too!"

"No, he was merely offensive," replied Mortmain, recognizing the policeman as an old timer on the beat. "Thank you. Good night."

The baronet turned away as the bobby started toward the station house, conducting his bewildered victim by the nape of the neck. Without heeding direction, Mortmain strode on, trying to forget the drunken Flaggs and the little bald head in the window. The clerk's words had created in him a feeling of actual nausea, so that a perspiration broke out all over his body and he walked uncertainly. After he had covered half a mile or so, the air revived him, and, having taken his bearings, he made a wide circle so as to avoid Farringham Square again, and at the same time to approach his own house from the direction opposite to that in which he had started. He still felt shocked and ill—the same sensation which he had once experienced on seeing two navvies fighting outside a music hall. He remembered afterwards that there seemed to be more people on the streets as he neared his home, and that a patrol wagon passed at a gallop in the same direction. A hundred yards farther on he saw a long envelope lying in the slush upon the sidewalk, and mechanically he picked it up and thrust it in the pocket of his coat. Joyce came to the door just as the hall clock boomed seven. Sir Richard had been gone exactly an hour.

"Fetch me a brandy and soda," ordered the baronet huskily, and stepped into the study without removing his furs. The fire had been replenished and was cracking merrily, but it sent no answering glow through Sir Richard's frame. The shadow of the little bald head still rested like a weight upon his brain, and his hands were moist and clammy. He thrust them into his pockets and came into contact with the wet manila cover of the envelope, and he drew it forth and tossed it upon the table as Joyce entered with the brandy.

The butler removed his master's coat and noiselessly left the room, while Mortmain drained the glass and then carelessly examined the envelope. The names of "Flynt, Steele & Burnham" printed in the upper left-hand corner caught his eye. The names of his own solicitors! That was a peculiar thing. Perhaps Flynt had dropped it—or Flaggs. He turned it over curiously. It was unsealed, as if it had formed one of a package of papers. The baronet lifted the envelope to the lamp and peeped within it. There were three thin sheets of paper covered with writing, and unconsciously he drew them forth and examined them. At the foot of each, in delicate, firm characters, appeared his own name staring him familiarly in the face. In the corners were the unmistakable figures £25,000. He rubbed his forehead and read all three carefully. There could be no doubt of it—they were his own three notes of hand to Lord Gordon Russell. Fate was playing tricks with him again.

"A fire from heaven to consume the notes," Flynt had said. Here were the notes—there was the fire. Had Heaven perhaps really interposed to save him? Was this chance or Providence? With a short breath the baronet grasped the notes and took a step toward the hearth. As he did so the extension telephone by the mantel began to ring excitedly. His heart thumped loudly as, with a feeling of guilt, he relaid the notes upon the table and seized the telephone.

"Yes—yes—this is Mortmain!"

"Richard," came the voice of a friend at the club in anxious tones, "are you there? Are you at home?"

"Yes—yes!" repeated the baronet breathlessly. "What is it?"

"Have you heard the news—the news about Lord Russell?"

Mortmain's head swam with a whirl of premonition.

"No," he replied, trying to master himself, while the perspiration again broke out over his body. "What news? What has happened?"

"Lord Russell was murdered in his library at half after six this evening. Some one gained access to the room and killed the old man at his study table."

"Killed Lord Russell!" gasped Sir Richard. "Have they caught the murderer?"

"No," continued his friend. "The assassin escaped by one of the windows into the street. The police have taken possession. There is nothing to indicate who did the deed. There was blood everywhere. His secretary, a man named Leach, was discharged two days ago and a general alarm has been sent out for him."

"This is terrible," groaned Sir Richard in horror.

"It is, indeed. I thought you ought to know. I may see you at the opera. If not—good night."

The receiver fell from the baronet's fingers, and the room grew black as he clutched at the mantel with his other hand. He staggered slightly, tried to regain his equilibrium, and in so doing upset one of the bronze dragon vases which grinned down upon him.

The vase fell, and the baronet clutched at it in its descent. It was too late. The heavy bronze crashed downward to the floor carrying Sir Richard with it, and one of the verdigris-covered dragon's fangs pierced his right hand.

Mortmain uttered a moan and lay motionless on the floor. The little Sèvres clock ticked off forty seconds and then softly chimed the quarter, while the blood from the baronet's hand spurted in a tiny stream upon the rug.

"Mortmain . . . lay motionless on the floor."

III

When Sir Richard Mortmain next opened his eyes after his fall he found himself in his bedchamber. The curtains were tightly drawn, allowing only a shimmer of sunshine to creep in and play upon the ceiling; an unknown woman in a nurse's uniform was sitting motionless at the foot of his bed; the air was heavy with the pungent odor of iodoform, and his right arm, tightly bandaged and lying extended upon a wooden support before him, throbbed with burning pains. Too weak to move, unable to recall what had brought him to such a pass, he raised his eyebrows inquiringly, and in reply the nurse laid her finger upon her lips and reaching toward a stand beside the bed held a tumbler containing a glass tube to the baronet's lips. Mortmain sucked the contents from the tumbler and felt his pulse strengthen—then weakness manifested itself and he sank back, his lips framing the unspoken question, "What has happened?"

The nurse smiled—she was a pretty, plump young person—not the kind Sir Richard favored (Burne-Jones was his type), and whispered:

"You have been unconscious over twelve hours. You must lie still. You have had a bad fall and your hand is injured."

In some strange and unaccountable way the statement called to Mortmain's fuddled senses a confused recollection of a scene in Hauptmann's "Die Versunkene Glöcke," and half unconsciously he repeated the words:

"I fell. I—fe—l—l!"

"Yes, you did, indeed!" retorted the pretty nurse. "But Sir Penniston will never forgive me if I let you talk. How is your arm?"

"It burns—and burns!" answered the baronet.

"That horrid vase crushed right through the palm. Rather a nasty wound. But you will be all right presently. Do you wish anything?"

Suddenly complete mental capacity rushed back to him. The disagreeable scene with Flaggs, the finding of the notes, the news of Russell's murder, and his accident. The murder! He must learn the details. And the notes. What had he done with them? He could not recollect, try hard as he would. Were they on the table? His head whirled and he grew suddenly faint. The nurse poured out another tumbler from a bottle and again held the tube to his lips. How delicious and strengthening it was!

"Please get me a newspaper!" said Sir Richard.

"A newspaper!" cried the nurse. "Nonsense! I'll do no such thing!"

"Then please see if there are some papers in an envelope lying on the writing table in my private study."

The nurse seemed puzzled. Where aristocratic patients were concerned, particularly if they were in a weakened condition, she was accustomed to accommodate them. She hesitated.

"At once!" added Sir Richard.

The nurse tiptoed out of the room, and in the course of a few moments returned.

"The butler says that Mr. Flynt's clerk, a man named Faggs, or Flaggs, or something of the sort, came back for them half an hour ago. He explained that he thought Mr. Flynt might have left some papers by mistake, and the butler supposed it was all right and let him have them. The name of your solicitors was upon the envelope."

Sir Richard stared at her stupidly. A queer feeling of horror and distrust pervaded him, the very same feeling which his first sight of the clerk had inspired in him. What could Flaggs have known of the notes? The clerk himself could not have committed the ghastly deed, since he had been under arrest at the time—but might he not have been an accomplice? Were the notes part of some terrible plot to enmesh him, Sir Richard Mortmain, in the murder? Was it a scheme of blackmail? The blood surged to his head and dimmed his eyesight. But why had Flaggs taken them away? Had he left them on the street hoping that Sir Richard would find them and bring them into the house, so that he could testify to having found them in the study? But, if so, why had he risked the possibility of their having been destroyed before he could regain them? Such a supposition was most unlikely. It must have been merely chance. The fellow had probably sneaked in simply to see what he could find. And what had he found! A shiver of terror quenched for an instant the burning of Mortmain's body. A horrible vision of himself standing outside the window of Lord Gordon Russell took shape before him. What if people should say—! He had been heard by Joyce and the clerk to express his hatred of the old man and his willingness to kill him. In addition there were the notes, overdue and about to be protested, which Flaggs had found in his study within twelve hours of Lord Russell's murder. Motive enough for any crime. Moreover, the policeman had seen him loitering there at almost the exact moment of the homicide!

These momentous facts came crashing down upon his brain with the weight of stones, numbing for an instant his exquisite torture—then reason reasserted herself. Lord Russell was dead. If circumstances seemed to point in his direction, he had only to deny that the notes had been in his possession, and certainly his word would be taken as against that of the drunken clerk of a solicitor. Moreover, the notes were obviously not in the possession of the executors. Should, by any chance, no memoranda of them remain he might never be called upon to honor them. At all events, his bankruptcy had, for the time at least, been averted. Even were their existence known, legal procedure would intervene to give him time to evolve some means of escape—perhaps, in default of aught else, a marriage of convenience. Sir Richard, in spite of the burning pain in his right arm, leaned back his head with a sensation of relief.

A soft knock came at the door and he heard the nurse's voice murmuring in low tones; then the curtain was partially raised and he recognized the figures of Sir Penniston Crisp and his young assistant.

"Ah, my dear Mortmain! When you left me yesterday morning I hardly expected to see you so soon again. And how do you find yourself?" was the baronet's cheery salutation.

Sir Richard smiled faintly.

"Rather a nasty wound," continued the surgeon. "Fickles, hand me those bandage scissors. Well, we must take a look at it." And he seated himself comfortably by the bedside.

Miss Fickles, who had elevated Sir Richard to a sitting posture, now handed Sir Penniston the scissors, and the great physician leisurely cut the bandage from the arm. Mortmain winced with pain and closed his eyes. For an instant the outer air soothed the burning palm and forearm, then the blood crept into the veins and the pain became veritable agony.

"Hm!" remarked Sir Penniston. "I must open this up. It needs attending to."

He might well say so, for the edges of the wound showed tinges of yellow, and the hand itself was torn pitifully.

"Scalscope, pass those instruments to Miss Fickles, and open that bottle of somni-chloride. I shall have to give you a whiff of anæsthetic, Mortmain. These little exploring expeditions are apt to be painful, however gentle we try to be. Just enough to make you a mere spectator—you will not lose consciousness. Wonderful, isn't it? I'm afraid I shall have to pick out some slivers of bone and trim off the edges a little. It will only take a moment or two. Then a nice bandage and you will be quite at ease."

While Jermyn was emptying Sir Penniston's bag of its heterogeneous contents, Miss Fickles boiled the surgeon's implements in a tray of water over a tiny electric stove, and then arranged them in order upon a soft bed of padded cotton. Scalscope pulled a table to the bedside, and laid out with military precision rolls of linen, absorbents, antiseptic gauze, scissors, tape, thread, needles, and finally the little bottle of somni-chloride. The nurse lowered Sir Richard back upon the pillow and quickly twisted a fresh towel into a cone.

"How science leaps onward," continued Sir Penniston, meditatively taking the cone in his left hand. "Anodyne, ether, chloroform, nitrous oxide, ethyl-chloride, and at last the greatest of all boons, somni-chloride! And all within my lifetime—that is really the most extraordinary part of it. Ah, what are the miracles of art to the miracles of science? Think of being able at last, as you heard me announce, to feel sure of never permanently losing a limb!"

He allowed a single drop from the bottle to fall into the cone. Even as it descended it resolved itself into a lilac-colored volatile filling the cone like a horn of plenty. Sir Penniston held it with a smile just over Mortmain's head and suffered it to escape gently downward. At the first faint odor the baronet felt a perfect calm steal over his tired brain, at the second he seemed translated from his body and hovering above it, retaining the while an almost supernatural acuteness of eye and ear. Of bodily pain he felt nothing. Then Crisp inverted the cone and poured out the lilac smoke in a faint iridescent cloud, which eddied round the baronet's head and filled his nostrils with the sweet fragrance of an old-fashioned garden. Its perfume almost smothered him, and for a moment his eyes were blurred as if he had inhaled a breath of strong ammonia. Then his sight cleared and he no longer smelled the flowers. The surgeon laid down the cone and took up a small, thin knife.

"Fickles, hold the wrist; you, Scalscope, the fingers. Thank you, that will do nicely."

Mortmain watched with fascinated interest as Sir Penniston applied the point to his palm. Then the surgeon suddenly raised his head and looked pityingly at Sir Richard. At the same moment the effect of the somni-chloride began to wear off and the baronet felt a throbbing in his hand. Jermyn also cast a glance of compassion at the patient, while Miss Fickles turned away her head as if unable to bear the sight of his suffering.

"My poor Mortmain," said the surgeon. "I fear you can never use this hand again."

Mortmain caught his breath and choked.

"What do you mean?" he gasped, and the effort sent a sharp pain through his lungs. "Not use my hand again?" His words sounded like the roar of a waterfall.

"I fear you cannot. It is an ugly-looking wound. I am sorry to say you will have to lose your hand. We shall be lucky if we can save the arm."

Mortmain felt an extraordinary pity for himself. He sobbed aloud. He had been vaguely aware that certain unfortunate persons in lowly circumstances occasionally lost their limbs. He was accustomed to contribute handsomely toward the homes for cripples and the blind, but he had never associated such an affliction with himself. He could not appreciate the proximity of it. There must be a mistake—or an alternative.

"No, no, no!" he exclaimed heavily. "Surely, you can restore my hand by treatment. I do not care how painful or tedious it may be. Why, I must have my hand. I have it now. Leave it as it is. I shall recover in time."

Sir Penniston smiled cheerfully.

"I am sorry," he repeated, and Mortmain fancied that he detected a gleam of exultation in his eye. "Nothing can save it. Gangrene has already set in. The verdigris of the vase has poisoned the flesh. Do you think I would trifle with you? That is not my business. Be a man. It is hard; true enough. But it might be much worse."

"But my music!" cried Mortmain in agony. "I shall be a miserable cripple! A fellow with an empty sleeve or a stuffed hand in a glove! Horrible!" He groaned.

"You have still another," remarked the surgeon calmly. "Bind up this arm," he ordered, turning sharply to Jermyn. "Mortmain, I shall have to amputate your hand at the wrist within twelve hours. Do you desire a consultation? I assure you any physician would unhesitatingly give the same opinion. Still, if you desire——"

The room swam about the baronet, and for an instant the two surgeons seemed like two ogres hovering aloft with bloodthirsty faces glowering down at his helpless body.

Scalscope finished the bandage and tied the ends. Then he looked across at Crisp and remarked:

"How fortunate, Sir Penniston, that your experiments have been concluded in time to save Sir Richard. He will be the very first to benefit by your great discovery!"

Crisp smiled responsively.

"What is that?" cried Mortmain. "Save me? What do you mean?"

"Merely this, Mortmain. That if you are willing I may still give you a hand in place of this ruined one. It is possible, as I announced yesterday, to graft another in its place."

Mortmain stared stupidly at Sir Penniston. A great weight seemed stifling him.

"Did you really mean it?" he gasped.

"Precisely," returned the surgeon. "It will be difficult, but not particularly dangerous."

"Another's hand!" groaned the baronet.

"And why not?" eagerly continued the surgeon. "Surely some one will be found who can be induced for a proper consideration to assist in an operation that will restore to usefulness so distinguished a member of society."

"But is it right?" gasped Mortmain. "Is it lawful to maim a fellow-creature merely to serve oneself?" The idea disgusted him.

"As you please," remarked Crisp dryly. "If you are to avail yourself of this opportunity, which has never been offered to another, you must say so at once. If you are indifferent to the loss of your hand or distrust my skill, there is nothing left but to amputate and be done with it."

"It cannot be right!" moaned Mortmain. "I know it is a wicked thing."

"Right?" sneered Crisp. "Why, I almost believe that it would be a sin if I let this opportunity go by."

"What is that?" cried Miss Fickles sharply.

There was a sharp knock at the door and Ashley Flynt entered, with a strange look on his face. Like a flash it occurred to Mortmain that the solicitor had called to see him about the bankruptcy. He looked again, and a terrible thought possessed him that it was for something else that the lawyer had come. Was it about the murder? Was he already suspected? Apprehension dwarfed the horror of Sir Penniston's suggestion.

"Ah, Flynt," said the surgeon, "I am glad you have come. You can advise our friend here. I have offered to give him a new hand in place of the one which he must lose. He's afraid that it is unlawful. Come, give us an opinion!"

Flynt sank silently into an armchair and rested his finger tips lightly together.

"Flynt," cried Mortmain, "what a terrible thing it is to deprive a fellow-creature of a limb. Is it legal? Is it not criminal?"

Flynt gazed fixedly at Sir Richard for a moment without replying.

"Situations sometimes arise," he remarked in a toneless voice, "where the results desired, even if they do not justify the means employed, at least render legal opinions superfluous."

"I do not understand you," groaned Mortmain. "Do you mean that what Sir Penniston proposes is a crime?"

"I mean that in a transaction of such moment the purely legal aspect of the case may be of slight importance."

"Exactly!" exclaimed Sir Penniston, whose face had assumed an expression of uneasiness. "To be sure! How plain he puts things, Mortmain. The law does not concern us when the integrity of the human body is involved."

"But if I require and insist upon your advice?" continued Mortmain. "You know that you are my solicitor."

"In a matter of this kind I should refuse to give an opinion in a specific case touching the interest of a client," returned Flynt.

"I must know the law!" cried the baronet.

"Very well," replied Flynt. "I have examined the statutes and find that the maiming of another (save where such maiming is necessary to preserve his life or health), even with his consent, is a felony. That is the law, if you must have it."

"Well, well!" exclaimed Crisp. "There are so many laws that one can't help violating some of them every day. What an absurd statute! It only shows how ignorant our legislators used to be! I am sure there were no scientific men in Parliament. It is nonsensical."

Flynt gave a short laugh and arose.

"My dear Sir Richard," he remarked dryly, "this is entirely a matter for your own conscience and that of your physician. I trust that you will soon recover. I have an important engagement. I must beg you to excuse me."

"Gad, sir," cried Crisp, making a wry face toward the door as it closed behind the solicitor, "what a fellow that is! You might as well try to wring juice out of a paving stone. I feel quite irritated by him."

"If I consent," said Mortmain, "do you think you can find a proper person to—to——"

"My dear Mortmain," responded Sir Penniston eagerly, "leave that to us. You may be sure that we shall accept no hand that is not perfect in every way and adapted to your particular needs. You need give yourself not the slightest uneasiness upon that score, I assure you. Of course, you will have to pay for it, but I am convinced that in an affair of this kind a satisfactory adjustment can easily be made—say, two hundred pounds down and an annuity of fifty pounds. How does that strike you? Why, it would be a godsend to many a poor fellow—say a clerk. He earns a beggarly five pounds a month. You give him two hundred pounds and as much a year for doing nothing as he was earning working ten hours a day."

The pains in Mortmain's hand had begun again with renewed intensity and his whole arm throbbed in response. He felt excited and feverish, and his thoughts no longer came with the same clearness and consecutiveness as before. It was evident to him that Crisp's diagnosis was correct. But shocking as was the realization that he, who had been in the prime of health but a few hours before, must now undergo a major operation, it was as nothing compared with the moral difficulty in which he found himself. All his inherited tendencies drew him back from a violation of the law, particularly a violation which included the maiming of a fellow-being; and so, for that matter, did all his acquired tastes and characteristics. On the other hand, his confidence in Crisp's skill and knowledge was such that he never for an instant doubted his ability successfully to achieve that which he had proposed.

"But the law! The law!" cried Mortmain in a last and almost pathetic effort to oppose that which he now in reality desired. Crisp laughed almost sneeringly.

"What is the law? The law is for the general good, not the individual. Are we to follow it blindly when to do so would be suicidal? Bah! The law never dares transgress the sacred circle of a physician's discretion."

"I suppose that is quite true!" exclaimed Sir Richard faintly. "I leave it to you. Do as you think best. I will follow your instructions. But I am suffering. My hand tortures me horribly. Let us have it over with as soon as possible. How soon can you make your arrangements?"

"By this afternoon, Sir Richard."

Mortmain sank back. In his eagerness he had half raised himself from the pillow, and now a sensation of nausea accompanied by dizziness took possession of him. He saw things dimly and in distorted forms. There was a strange roaring in his head as of a multitude of waters and he perceived that Crisp and Jermyn were talking eagerly together. He caught disconnected words muttered hurriedly in low tones. They moved slowly toward the door and he distinctly heard Crisp say as they passed out:

"Yes, Flaggs is the very man!"

The words filled him with a nameless terror.

"Stop!" he cried, "stop! I will have nothing to do with that man—do you hear? Stop! Comeback!" But the door closed, and Mortmain, helpless and trembling, again fell back and shut his eyes.

IV

It was cold in the train—icy cold, and in spite of his fur coat Sir Richard found himself shivering. Only his arm hanging in a splint burned with the fires of hell, as if imps with red-hot pincers were slowly tearing apart the nerves. Sir Penniston, sitting opposite, smiled encouragingly at him.

There were several people in the carriage. The lamps had been lighted and in the corner, beside a large black case, sat Jermyn. Next to him came Joyce, looking exceedingly respectable and very solemn. But the other three he did not remember to have seen before—that tall, white-whiskered man in the otter collar: he probably had been presented and Sir Richard had forgotten. Then there was a big, broad-shouldered fellow in a soft cap, and next to him a slender, white-faced youth whose chin was buried in the depths of his coat collar, and whose hands were thrust deep into his pockets. The big man looked out the window occasionally and inquired the time, but the youth beside him kept his eyes fast shut and hardly moved. Had he not been sitting bolt upright Sir Richard fancied that the latter might have been taken for a corpse.

"Woxton next stop, gentlemen!" announced the guard, opening the door for an instant as the train paused at a way station. A cold blast of air followed and Mortmain's teeth chattered. It was quite dark in the compartment and he felt very weak and miserable. He could not remember getting aboard the train, but the purport of it all was unmistakable. The agonies of the morning rushed back across his memory, and his hand throbbed and twisted within the splint. He felt sick and faint and the atmosphere of the carriage seemed suffocating.

"How much farther is it?" inquired the man in the otter collar. "We've been traveling for hours!"

"Only eight miles," answered Crisp cheerfully. "It certainly has seemed an unearthly distance."

There was a long silence punctuated only by the puffing of the engine and the shriek of the whistle. Suddenly the pale young man whimpered. The sound sent a chill to the marrow of Sir Richard's spine.

"If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee—" whispered the youth. Then he fell to sobbing in the depths of his collar, but without opening his eyes.

"Come, come, my man! None of that!" cried Crisp angrily. "You're a lucky fellow! Why, your fortune is as good as made."

Mortmain shuddered.

"If thy hand offend thee—" he repeated to himself. "If thy hand offend——"

Then he became conscious of still another presence somewhere—a presence that watched him furtively, but hungrily, with eager, greedy eyes. He stared along the seats and into the crannies. Could it have been a face at the window? No, the black night rushed by steadily and blankly. And yet he could not convince himself that another face had not been there a moment before.

The train slowed up with a screeching of the brakes and came to a stop. The door was flung open; his companions hurriedly arose, and the broad-shouldered young man placed his arm protectingly about the baronet and assisted him to the platform. A fine snow was sifting down silently over the lamplit road and upon two large depot wagons standing beside the station. Again Mortmain was conscious of a presence. He glanced quickly across the platform and thought he saw a shadow spring from a rear carriage and leap into the darkness of the bushes.

"What was that?" he gasped.

But the others paid no attention, being busily engaged in deporting their cases and portmanteaus. The train started on again. Only the station agent was left, his lantern making an opaque circle in the intense darkness of the snow-filled night.

The horses champed impatiently, and as quickly as was possible the party divided and climbed into the wagons, Crisp, the nurse, and Mortmain entering the last. The doors were slammed to and they started. Still Mortmain felt convinced that they were not alone. Looking back just as they were leaving the dim lights of the station, he could have sworn that he saw the figure of a man running steadily along behind, crouching low against the road. To the south a distant glow bespoke the presence of a village, but the wagons swung sharply to the north and plunged into a wood.

A drowsiness had come over the baronet and he pressed close to the nurse, terrified and shaken by the dread of some approaching peril. This hired man seemed nearer to him than any other living soul. He cried softly, fearing to be observed, and the tears coursed down his hot cheeks and lost themselves in his furs. Now and then he would listen intently for the sound of some one running, but he could hear nothing save the crunch of the wheels and the jingle of the harness. Yet he knew that just behind them, clinging to their wheel, was pressing that mysterious figure that had leaped into the darkness beside the station.

After what seemed an hour, a bend in the road disclosed a single light not far ahead and in a few moments the wagons stopped before a high wall. The party got out and Crisp opened the gate. Mortmain stared fixedly down the road, waiting for the unbidden guest to creep swiftly into view.

"Here we are!" cried Sir Penniston. "Wait a moment until I notify the farmer."

As the surgeon hastened up the paved walk to the cottage, the wagons turned and started back at a brisk trot, like a home-going funeral procession. All the windows were dark and Mortmain clung sobbing to the nurse's arm.

"Hit's all right, sir," whispered the latter sympathetically. "Hit's all right!"

Slowly the party made their way to the porch. A light appeared in the lower windows, then the door was opened. The nurse, half carrying the baronet, helped him into the hall and seated him upon a wooden chair. As the door closed Mortmain saw a shadow at the gate.

"Look! Look!" he cried. The warm air swallowed him up; he felt a rush of blood to his neck and face; the figures about him swayed and swam in the dim light; there was a stabbing pain in his hand and he knew no more.

V

When Mortmain was able to reappear in society he was astonished to find that the murder of Lord Russell was no longer a matter of interest or of discussion. The temporarily shocked and horrified community had apparently within a short time placidly accepted it, and apart from occasional references in the newspapers, it was rapidly becoming a mere matter of history, taking its proper chronological place in the long list of London's unsolved mysteries. It had been given out at the time that the horrible death of his old friend had so prostrated the baronet that he had been threatened with total collapse, and had only been restored to health by remaining in bed under the constant care of a certain distinguished physician. At times Mortmain was almost inclined to believe this himself, for the ghastly night at the lonely farmhouse, his ensuing illness and slow recovery, seemed, in the full swing of the London season and contrasted with the brilliant colors of its festivities, less actuality than a dreadful nightmare which continually obtruded itself upon his recollection. He had resumed his place in fashionable life with his old assurance, picking up his cards where he had left them lying face downward upon the table. Within a week he was again "among those present" at every gathering of note, and he had dropped hints of his intention to give a new and unique musical entertainment which was to surpass anything of the kind theretofore attempted. He had also resumed his attentions to Lady Bella Forsythe with a definite purpose—that of rendering himself financially impregnable.

But Sir Richard was not the same. His glass showed him to be paler than of yore, his eyes more deeply sunken, his hair touched at the edges with a ghost of white, the lines of his mouth more firmly marked. His friends jokingly told him that he was growing old. He had paid a heavy price for what he had bought, yet it was not loss of vitality, not physical shock alone that had thus aged him, but a ghastly, damning fact that never left him for an instant, waking or sleeping: the fact that the man had died. They had not told him at first—it might have affected his cure. The result upon his spiritual being when he learned of it had been no less disastrous. The man had died. There was no longer any pensioner to claim his annuity; no creditor even to demand the price of his awful bargain; no witness to testify to its hideous terms—he had fled the jurisdiction of all earthly courts. Sir Richard was free. But the thought of that life forfeited to his own egotism was a millstone about his neck, bowing him forever to the ground.

He intentionally talked frankly of Lord Russell. The old man had been highly respected and, indeed, moderately prominent in philanthropic circles. Mortmain had made a point of going personally to see the bas-relief erected to his memory. He learned that the next of kin was a Devon man who never came up to town, and that the executors had taken possession almost immediately and disposed of the house to an American millionaire, who was even now remodeling the historic mansion, inserting Grecian columns and putting on a Château de Nevers roof. Of course he inspected this with friends, was properly disgusted, and seized the opportunity to gratify his curiously morbid hunger for the details of the murder. He learned that, though few of the facts were known to the public, opinion had crystallized into a settled acceptance that the murderer had made good his escape and that the identity of the murderer was known. In fact, the silence of Scotland Yard was rendered nugatory by the reward of £1,000 offered by the County Council for the apprehension of Saunders Leach, the recently discharged secretary of the philanthropist. Nothing had been heard of him since Lord Russell's butler had admitted him to the house, an hour or two before the murder, upon his representation that he had come to look over some papers at the request of his erstwhile master. The butler, a most respectable person, had introduced him into the library, where Lord Russell was, and departed. He had recalled afterwards—it had come out at the hearing at the Central Criminal Court—that he had heard the sound of voices raised at a high pitch, but, as his master was at times somewhat querulous, this had not particularly attracted his attention. An hour later, when he had brought the evening papers, he had discovered the aged man lying face downward upon his desk, and a window, bearing the bloody traces of the assassin, open to the night. And Leach had vanished—as if he had never lived.

The thing most puzzling to Sir Richard, as to everybody else, was the failure of any apparent motive for so ghastly a deed. Leach, according to old Floyd the butler, had been a very decent sort of fellow, rather sickly Floyd took him to be, without any particular faults or virtues. It seemed to outrage reason to suppose that an anæmic little clerk could have murdered a helpless old man simply out of revenge for having lost his place. And then nothing had been stolen—that is, nobody but Sir Richard knew that anything had been stolen. Yet the public and the London County Council pronounced unhesitatingly as established fact that Saunders Leach was the assassin, and that he should be hunted down to the very ends of the world and, if need be, followed into the next. Only Scotland Yard remained silent after annexing the contents of the room, the windows, the carpet, and even portions of the faded paper from the very walls themselves. Then Parliament went into a convulsion over a proposed excise alteration and London forgot the murder of Lord Russell in its feverish interest in the expected legislative abortion. There was an appeal to the country; a premier retired to Italy; some few thousands were added to the credit column of the national ledger at the expense of a ministry, and once more the advent of royalty at St. James's dazzled the cockney eye and filled the cockney mouth to the stultification of the cockney brain. Lord Russell was forgotten—as completely as Saunders Leach—as totally as an isle sunk beneath the waters of oblivion.

The first time Sir Richard had essayed to write he had been deliciously horrified at the ease with which his pencil had followed the pressure of his new fingers. His recent clothes added an extra inch to his sleeves, and his broad cuffs fully concealed the white seam that ran around his wrist. The hand itself served his purposes well enough, but unmistakably it was not his own. He never laid the two together—never let his eyes fall upon the vicarious fingers if he could avoid it, for inevitably a sickening sensation of repulsion followed. His own fingers were long and tapering, the nails fine with pronounced "crowns," the back of the hand slender and smooth; the new one was broader and hairy, the fingers shorter and square at the ends, the nails thick and dull with no "crowns," and the veins blue and prominent. There were too many pores!

He loathed the thing, tell himself as often as he would that it was nothing but a mechanical device to supplement Nature. Physically he felt as if he were wearing a glove that was too small for him, into which he had been forced to stuff his hand. This seemed to produce a tight, swollen sensation which was the only indication of his abnormal condition. He ate, drove, used his keys, articulated his fingers, and even wrote with the same muscular freedom as before. His chirography actually and undeniably exhibited the same general characteristics, only intensified and with less certainty of stroke and pen-pressure. The letters which had previously been merely somewhat original in structure as suited a man of fashion, now became humpbacked and deformed. It was as though the spiritual qualities of Sir Richard's penmanship had shrunk away, leaving only the grotesque residue of a dwarfed and evil nature.

But apart from the question of chirography one other manifestation constantly reminded Mortmain of his crime. This was an itching in the grafted hand whenever its possessor became angry or excited. Even hard physical exercise produced the same phenomenon. It seemed as if Nature, having provided for the circulation of a certain amount of blood, found on reaching this particular extremity that the supply exceeded the power of reception. If angered, he found himself indulging in ungovernable fits of passion, with his eyes suffused and his head buzzing. At times he experienced an almost irresistible impulse to throttle somebody. On the slightest provocation the fingers of his right hand would curve and clutch, and a fierce longing seize him to compass the extinction of life in some animate being—to feel the slackening of the muscles in some victim—an emotion elemental, barbarous, cruel, but keen, masterful and pervading. He had an exhilarating sensation of strength and vitality new to him. Moreover, his attitude toward his fellow-men had imperceptibly altered. Before his operation he had hated all evil doers and been strongly loyal to government and law; now he sympathized with the lawbreakers. In defying society and deliberately violating its statutes, he had allied himself with its enemies.

This he realized and accepted. At any moment he might be called upon to face a criminal prosecution for the felony of mutilation; and there was still the peculiar and inexplicable silence of Flaggs in regard to the papers which he had taken away with him on the morning after the murder. No word had ever passed between them on the subject, and yet the notes were outstanding and in the hands of a more dangerous holder than even Lord Russell himself. By merely handing them to the executors, Flaggs could not only throw Sir Richard into bankruptcy, but could place him in the awkward position of having suppressed the notes at the time of Lord Russell's death. That, too, would lead to a still further and more delicate complication. He would naturally be asked how he had secured possession of the notes. It would be clear that they were in Lord Russell's hands at the time of the murder. Flaggs would explain that he had procured them from Sir Richard. So far as he was concerned, he had been safely "jugged" at the time of the murder. He could call a score of sergeants, matrons, and bobbies to prove that, and establish it by the police records themselves. Where, then, people would want to know, had Sir Richard obtained them? It would be a hard question to answer in such a way that the answer would carry any sort of conviction with it.

No one, of course, would believe that he had found them, as in fact was the case. Any such explanation would excite instant suspicion. If he should say that he had paid them and had received the notes from Lord Russell's lawyers, inquiry would at once demonstrate that the lawyers had never had possession of the notes, or received any money from Sir Richard. If he said that he had taken the money to Lord Russell and received the notes from him, his own evidence would place him upon the scene of the murder at approximately the moment of it. Further, no draft in payment of the notes would be found among Lord Russell's papers, and the suspicion would immediately arise that he had proffered a forged draft to secure possession of the notes, and then murdered the old man to get it back.

It was indeed a predicament of the worst sort. In Sir Richard the horrible unfairness of it bred a hatred for a society in which such things were possible. He looked at any moment to find himself made the defendant in a criminal prosecution, just or unjust—the unjust the more difficult of the two to escape. He needed money—money to fight with, money to live on, money to keep up his hollow pretense of respectability. And as his attitude toward society gradually changed, the dead-alive thing at his wrist with the white seam throbbed and itched until Mortmain longed fiercely to tear it off. At night he would dream—and this dream repeated itself over and over again—that he was fastened to some miserable convict, shackled by the wrist in such a way that somehow they two had grown together, and as he struggled in his sleep his fellow would turn into the grinning, jeering image of Flaggs—Flaggs fastened to him by a bond of burning, itching flesh—Flaggs joined to him like a Siamese twin, flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood—until by some unnatural evolution he became Flaggs and could see his own wretched shape writhing at the other end of their mutual arm. Then shaking, chilled, and covered with perspiration he would awake and look for Flaggs beside him, and hold his hand to the blue night-light only to find the seam about his wrist and the dead-white hand throbbing until he thought he should go mad.

By day he was haunted by the vision of Flaggs watching his house and following him along the streets. He could not get the fellow out of his mind. This terror of the drunken clerk became a positive obsession. As he walked the streets or drove in his brougham through the park he was constantly planning out what he should say when they should finally come together—when Flaggs should call for him, summon him as his own. Could he defy him? Could he palliate him? The hand twitched at the thought of it. He fancied that Flaggs followed him everywhere in various disguises, running swiftly behind, dodging into doorways and up side streets when he turned around. And this habit of turning around and glancing furtively up and down grew on Sir Richard, and with it grew the itching in his hand, until he suspected that people shook their heads and said that his illness had undermined his health more than they had supposed.

It was no bodily illness that thus affected Sir Richard, but spiritual degeneration. He went from dinner party to dinner party and from musicale to musicale, paying court to Lady Bella Forsythe as if no grotesque face were peering from behind the arras of his brain. Yet in reality he was preparing to meet Flaggs in the final struggle for supremacy. Flaggs, like death and the tax man, was coming—when? He could not tell, but inevitably. And he must be ready, armed cap-a-pie to meet him on every ground. He had at last resolved to marry Lady Bella. It was an essential in his campaign to defeat Flaggs. There must be plenty of money—money, that was what he needed, what he wanted. It was partly for Lady Bella that he had planned his musical entertainment, for, in addition to its practical desirability, if he purposed to retain his position in the social world, it would afford an excellent opportunity for presenting himself to her as a person worthy of her own high station and acquaintance. His own music—! Alas! the brain was willing, but the fingers were powerless. Where before he had produced the most delicate of harmonies there now resulted nothing but harsh discords. The hand would not stretch an octave!

The Milbank Street house blazed into the early evening with a thousand lights. All day long wagons of roses and asters had stood before the doors, and aproned men had staggered into the hall with pots of flowers and stands of palms. Confectioners' wagons, loads of camp chairs, and now a large awning were the indubitable evidences of what was afoot. Night came on. The white cloth on the carpet across the sidewalk was trampled to a dirty gray. The orchestra began to arrive, and, shedding their coats in the servants' entrance, toiled up the back stairs and tentatively made their way through the flower-banked halls to the conservatory. Sir Richard sitting in his den and awaiting the arrival of his first guests could hear the musicians tuning their basses and testing the wood winds. But there was no music in Sir Richard's soul. All day long he had been haunted by the ghost of Flaggs scuttling behind him, and his hand had seemed swollen and discolored. Well, if he could but get through the night, could succeed in his suit with Lady Bella, he would go away and rest. Perhaps he would leave London forever—Lady Bella was very fond of Rome. The sounds of the instruments grew more confused and louder, the violins mingling with the others. Occasionally the trombones would boom out and the kettles rumble ominously. Outside splashes of rain began to fall against the windows, and the wind, catching in the hollow column of the awning, swept into the halls and through the open door into the den. Mortmain looked at his watch and found it was ten o'clock. People would be arriving soon. His hand twitched and he lighted a cigarette. There was a great deal of traffic in the front hall—too much. He closed the door and poured out a thimbleful of brandy. Well, a day or two and he would be rid of Flaggs forever! Then he heard a low knock. He tried to cheat himself into the belief that it was Joyce.

"Come in," he cried, but his voice was husky.

Flaggs stood before him.

"I have been expecting you," said Mortmain. It did not seem strange that he should make this declaration.

"Yes?" queried Flaggs.

"What do you want?" demanded the baronet.

"Ten thousand pounds," answered the clerk. "To-morrow."

Mortmain broke into a harsh laugh.

"Ha! my good fellow! What do you think I am—a Crœsus? Come, come, I'll give you fifty—and I get the notes, eh?"

"Ten thousand pounds," repeated Flaggs stubbornly, "by to-morrow noon, or I hand you over to the police."

The blood jumped into Sir Richard's face and his dexter hand throbbed and tingled.

"You miserable rascal!" he cried. "You wretched blackmailer! How dare you come into my house? Do you know that I could kill you? And no one would ever be the wiser! Take a few pounds and be off with you or I'll summon the police myself."

"Not so fast, not so fast, Sir Richard," muttered Flaggs. "I don't think you'll call the police."

The look on the white scowling face before him told Sir Richard that the fellow meant to do his business. A haunting fear seized hold upon him like that which he had experienced in the depot wagon—a feeling that behind this grotesque, dwarfed figure of a man lurked the hand of Fate.

"That's right. Be reasonable," said Flaggs soothingly. "Some folks would think ten thousand pounds was cheap to escape the gallows," he added in lower tones.

"Gallows!" cried Sir Richard, his anger rising. He knew the fellow's game now. He was being lied to. Flaggs was trying to frighten, to bully him. "The gallows, my friend, ceased to be the punishment for felony in 1826—even for blackmail!"

"But not for murder," retorted Flaggs with a ghastly smile. "Not for murder!"

"Enough of this!" exclaimed Sir Richard, but his knees were trembling. "Here are a hundred pounds. Go!" He put his hand to his breast pocket.

Flaggs laughed.

"Look!" he cried, pulling from the lining of his hat a printed slip which he unfolded and handed to the baronet.

Mortmain took it in dread and held it to the light.

"Murder in the first degree defined.

"The taking of the life of a human being by another with malice prepense or in the commission of a felony."

The last six words were underlined in red ink.

"Well?" he asked, but the word stuck in his throat.

"Well?" returned the other. "It's plain enough, isn't it? What more do you want?"

"It is not plain, you blackguard."

"Maiming is a felony. You know that. Amputation is maiming. Flynt told you so. The fellow that sold you that hand of yours died of it, didn't he?"

Mortmain uttered an exclamation of horror. He looked down at the fearful thing and it seemed to him to be the color of death. "They can never prove it!" he cried faintly. "They can't prove it! They cannot!"

"Yes, they can! I saw it done," remarked Flaggs. "I saw him buried in the garden. He is there yet—minus his hand."

"You villain!" gasped Mortmain. The room reeled, and Flaggs danced before him, gibbering with glee. The light darkened and brightened again and seemed to swing in circles.

"Pull yourself together, Sir Richard!" remarked Flaggs mockingly. "Pull yourself together! Isn't it worth ten thousand pounds or one hundred thousand pounds? But I'm reasonable. Only ten thousand pounds! Come, come! Let me have it!"

"No!" shouted Mortmain. "Not if I die for it."

"Then you will die for it," said Flaggs.

The sound of the fiddles came through the closed door of the study. The cries of the lackeys and the roll of carriages arriving and departing could be heard in the front.

"You will die for it, as there is a God in heaven, if I choose!"

Mortmain stood silent. He had a presentiment of what Flaggs was going to say.

"A word from me," continued the clerk, "and you hang for the murder of Lord Russell. Everyone knows you hated him. Flynt, Joyce, and I heard you say you would kill him. You owed him seventy-five thousand pounds and it was two days overdue. He would have ruined you next day. The officer saw you outside his window within five minutes of the murder, and so did I. There was nothing taken but the notes—nothing. They were found in your possession the next morning. How did they get there? The case is complete. The notes convict you. I've got them. They are yours for ten thousand pounds—only ten thousand pounds."

"You villain," shouted Mortmain, springing toward him.

The door from the hall opened and Joyce entered letting in the warm breath of roses and the loud strains of a waltz.

"Lady Bella has arrived, Sir Richard," he announced.

"Tell her I am coming," said Mortmain, starting for the door.

"Wait!" shrieked Flaggs, his face horribly distorted. "Wait!" Joyce had retired.

Mortmain paused with clinched fists.

"Isn't it worth ten thousand pounds to save a guilty man—a man who can't escape?"

"Why, you fool!" cried Mortmain, suddenly regaining his self-control. "Such evidence is valueless. My word is worth yours ten times over, and I deny that you found the notes in my house. I say that you are the murderer. And I believe you are!"

"Not so fast! Not so fast!" leered Flaggs. "You know I was 'in quod' at the time. Don't forget that! And there's one more bit of evidence that nails you. You can't escape. You're done. I've got you—the murderer's thumb marks on the glass!"

"The devil take you!" yelled Mortmain, the blood suffusing his eyes.

"The devil has you already!" retorted Flaggs. "He's part of you. You are the devil. Whose hand is that? Tell me that! Whose hand is that?"

Mortmain turned an agonized face toward his tormentor. His spirit was gone. He was ready to fall upon his knees, but he could not move. He raised his left hand pitifully as if to shield himself from the coming blow, and yet his parched lips uttered the soundless word:

"Whose?"

Flaggs gave a dry laugh.

"It belonged to Saunders Leach!"

With a sickening of the heart the baronet realized for the first time the terrible alternative which confronted him.

His selfish willingness to violate the law and mutilate a fellow human being merely to gratify his own vanity had plunged him into an abyss from which there seemed no escape. "Murder in the first degree defined: the taking of the life of a human being by another with malice prepense or in the commission of a felony." By a cruel yet extraordinary chance he, the needless yet deliberate lawbreaker, had purchased the very hand which had slain his enemy—from the murderer himself, who was only too anxious to get rid of it. By an equally hideous but astonishing coincidence this devil's contract had proved in fact the death warrant of the murderer, and Mortmain had been his involuntary executioner. Saunders Leach had paid the penalty of his crime, but Mortmain carried dangling at the end of his dexter forearm the living evidence that he, and not Leach, was the assassin. The coil of the rope of fate, at one end of which hung the limp body of the common criminal, had fallen upon the neck of his aristocrat brother, and it needed but a word from Flaggs to send him spinning from the gallows. Should he seek to show that the finger prints upon the window of Lord Russell's library were not his own, and by this means to creep from beneath the meshes of the net of circumstantial evidence in which he was entangled, he would, in the same breath, be forced to confess that he was guilty of the murder of Saunders Leach—murder, as the result of the latter's mutilation—murder under the literal interpretation of the statute. Was ever rat so nicely trapped? The horror of the thing turned Mortmain into a madman. He sprang at the clerk in a delirium of rage, his right hand clutched Flaggs tightly by the throat, and its blunt fingers twisted into the flesh deeper and deeper. It was done so quickly that the clerk was unable to escape. His eyes started forward, his tongue protruded, and his mouth frothed as he made ineffectual attempts to break the baronet's hold.

"You've got me, eh?" muttered Mortmain, gritting his teeth. "I think not, Mr. Flaggs!"

The door opened and Joyce entered in much agitation. The orchestra had burst into a triumphant march and the sounds of many footsteps echoed in the hall outside.

"Everybody is arrivin', Sir Richard!" exclaimed the butler, "an' Lady Bella has gone into the music room. His Grace of Belvoir was just askin' for you. Here are two gentlemen who wish to see you important, sir." He held the door open and two men in Inverness coats entered and stood irresolutely near the door.

Mortmain released his grasp upon the neck of Flaggs, who lurched toward the corner and fell motionless behind a table.

"Sir Richard Mortmain?" inquired the taller of the two, a man of massive build and with iron-gray mustache and hair.

"The same," replied Mortmain, his fingers still twitching from the ferocity of his clutch upon the clerk.

The two strangers bowed.

"We have a card to you from Lieutenant Foraker—a friend of yours, I believe. Permit me," and the tall man stepped forward and extended a card to the baronet.

Mortmain mechanically took it between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. It felt like celluloid and a trifle slippery. But the stranger did not release his own hold upon it.

"Pardon me, I have given you the wrong card," he exclaimed apologetically, and withdrawing the bit of board from Mortmain's fingers he opened a wallet and fumbled with the contents. As he did so he handed the first card to his companion, who stepped into the light of the lamp, and examined it carefully through a small microscope which he drew from his pocket.

"His blunt fingers twisted into the flesh deeper and deeper."

"They are the same," remarked the stranger of the microscope to the iron-gray man.

"What is all this?" cried Mortmain in an unnatural voice. His head swam. On the mantel the verdigris-covered dragon's face grinned mockingly at him—it was the face of Flaggs.

"Sir Richard," replied the iron-gray man gravely, "I am Inspector Murtha, of Scotland Yard."

Mortmain started back and his right hand twitched again. Through the silence came the measures of "The Flower Song."

"I regret to say," continued the other, "that it is my most unpleasant duty to arrest you for the murder of Lord Gordon Russell."

At the same instant the veil of Sir Richard's mental temple was rent in twain; out of a blackness so intense that it seemed substantive he saw the two inspectors from Scotland Yard fleeing away and diminishing in size until they seemed but puppets gesturing at the edge of an infinity of white desert; then with equal velocity they were carried forward again, growing bigger and bigger until they loomed like giants in his immediate foreground swinging huge scimitars and waving their arms frantically; the strains of the violins changed to voices shouting so sharply that they pained his ears, and waves of light and cosmic darkness over which scintillated a dazzling aurora followed one another in startling succession, until suddenly his soul, shot out of a tunnel, as it were, landed abruptly in a warm meadow covered with daisies, which dissolved before his eyes into the familiar chamber on Milbank Street. A gray mist floated hissing up through the ceiling, the chairs rocked with a strange rotary swing, and the two inspectors smiled cheerfully at him through a broad and painful band of London sunshine. He swallowed rapidly, and a horrible faintness seized him which gave place to a queer sort of anger.

"There's—some—mistake!" he stuttered. The chairs anchored themselves and the ceiling assumed its normal tint.

"No mistake at all," replied Sir Penniston Crisp.

The problem was too much for the baronet and he gave it up. The murderer's hand no longer twitched, but it loomed white and loathsome from the bed before him, as if dead already, somehow—part of a—yes—what were those things? Bandages?

Crisp and Jermyn saw a look of agonized bewilderment pass over the baronet's face.

"Did they bring me here from the Old Bailey?" he asked. "Am I out on bail?"

Crisp laughed.

"That's one way of putting it," he remarked. "Yes, you're out on bail, and in another second or two you will be entirely free."

"I'm glad you're going to take that thing off again," said Mortmain. "How could you have done it?"

"It's all right," returned Crisp soothingly.

Then Mortmain suddenly understood. But he waited shrewdly.

"What day is this?" he asked in an innocent manner.

"December 5th," replied Jermyn.

"When did I have that fall; you know—the one that made it necessary for you to amputate?"

"Your accident happened yesterday evening, but there is no necessity for amputation," returned Crisp. "Now, my dear fellow, just lie back, will you?—and don't ask questions. That somni-chloride is still lingering in your head. I shall have to be going in a minute."

Mortmain obeyed the surgeon's instructions, but he was hard at work thinking the thing out logically. It was clear that there had been no amputation, no arrest, no inspectors from Scotland Yard. That scene with Flaggs, horribly distinct as it still was, had had no actuality. But where did fact end and illusion begin? Had the notes been taken? Had there been a murder? Was he a bankrupt? The different propositions entangled themselves helplessly with one another. At the end of a minute he asked deliberately:

"Miss Fickles, did a man take some papers from my table this morning?"

"Yes, Sir Richard," replied the nurse.

Mortmain's heart sank.

"Er—was—did anything happen to Lord Russell?" he asked the surgeon faintly.

"Yes. But don't talk or think of it, Mortmain. I order you! Do you understand?"

A ripple of perspiration broke out on his forehead and it seemed as if a film had rolled off his vision. Of course, he had taken the chloride just after Miss Fickles had gone downstairs for him, and then Crisp and Jermyn had come. He had felt so miserable! And now he felt so much better! He opened his eyes, the same Sir Richard that had inhaled the anæsthetic so obediently.

"I am quite myself now, Sir Penniston," he asserted quietly. "I want to ask one more question. Flynt was not here, was he?"

"No, of course not."

"And we have not left the room? No railroad trip, eh?"

"No."

"Thank you," said the baronet. "May I have a cup of coffee?"

What reply this preposterous demand would have invited will never be known, for at that moment a knock came upon the door and Joyce asked if Sir Richard could see Mr. Flynt.

"I must see him!" said Mortmain.

"Oh, very well!" laughed Crisp. "You're getting better rapidly."

Flynt entered with a breezy manner which he allowed himself to assume only when something really desirable had definitely occurred.

"Good morning, Sir Penniston! Good morning, Sir Richard!" he remarked without sitting down. "I really had to come in and tell you the good news. The executors have just read Lord Russell's will——"

"Mr. Flynt! Mr. Flynt!" interrupted Sir Penniston.

"Oh, it's all right!" continued Flynt with a laugh. "Better than a tonic. You see, Fowler, the only next of kin, was just sailing for New Guinea, and it had to be done at once. I really did Lord Russell an injustice. May I speak before these gentlemen?"

"Certainly," whispered Mortmain, his eyes fastened feverishly upon the lawyer.

"Well, to put it briefly, he has made you a great gift! Here, read it!" and he handed the baronet a typewritten sheet. Mortmain read it eagerly, although his eyes pained him somewhat:

"To my friend, Sir Richard Mortmain, I devise and bequeath the sum of five thousand pounds, and take it upon myself to express the earnest hope that he will before long publish his views upon art in such a form that the public at large may have the opportunity to profit by that which hitherto has been the privilege only of the few. I desire, moreover, to express my high personal regard for him and my admiration for his whole-souled devotion to the arts, and I hereby instruct my executors to cancel and destroy all evidences of indebtedness owing to me by said Mortmain and to treat said indebtedness as null, void and of no effect, provided, nevertheless, that within six months of my demise said Mortmain shall assign to the directors of the Corporation of the British Museum all his collections of ceramics, bronzes, china, chronometers, scarabs, including the Howard Collection, his cabinets of gems and cameos, including the famous head of Alexander on an onyx of two strata and the altissimo relievo on cornelian—Jupiter Ægiochus—the four paintings by Watteau in his music room, and the paintings by Corot and Whistler from his library. As the said moneys borrowed from me from time to time by said Mortmain were, to my knowledge, principally made use of by him for the purpose of purchasing and enlarging said collections, which have increased in value to no inconsiderable extent by virtue of his care and discrimination since he acquired them, I am prepared to regard said loans to him in effect as gifts impressed with a trust in favor of our National Museum, provided, however, that said Mortmain is willing to accept the same and execute the terms thereof as heretofore set forth within six months; but nothing herein shall be taken to affect the right of said Mortmain to take up and pay off said indebtedness within said time, if he shall see fit to do so, in which case the provisions of this codicil shall be without any force or effect whatsoever, save that I instruct my executors to receive said moneys and hold the same in trust, however, for such scientific and artistic uses as said Mortmain shall direct, preference being given to the needs of the British Museum along the lines of antique works of art and Egyptology."

As Sir Richard laid down the paper his eyes filled and he turned away his head.

"A good old man!" said Flynt reverently.

"Indeed he was!" assented Crisp.

"I must know one thing," whispered Mortmain after a few moments. "Did you send your clerk here this morning to get some papers?"

"Yes, to be sure. I had almost forgotten—I sent Flaggs after an envelope which I fancied I dropped last evening," answered the lawyer.

"Which you had dropped?" asked Mortmain stupidly.

"Why, certainly. I had the papers connected with Lord Russell's loans sent here. Flaggs brought 'em—and I dropped an envelope. I did drop it, because Flaggs found it here this morning."

"What was in it?" asked Sir Richard eagerly.

Flynt elevated his brows.

"Why, if you don't mind my speaking of it, there were some old notes of yours which had been renewed at various times. I make a practice of keeping the originals as a matter of precaution."

"Oh!" sighed Mortmain. "Old notes?"

"Old notes," answered Flynt. "Notes taken up and renewed by others."

"Ah!" sighed Mortmain again. "You did drop them, but not in the study. I found them on the street. They gave me quite a turn."

"Well, we will tear them up now," laughed Flynt.

"Pardon me, sir," said Joyce, opening the door and handing a long box to Miss Fickles; "some roses with Lady Bella Forsythe's compliments, and 'opin' as 'ow you'll soon be all right again, sir."

THE RESCUE OF THEOPHILUS NEWBEGIN

I

The Dirigo was a one-hundred-and-twenty-two foot gunboat, spick and span from the Cavite yard—lithe as a panther, swift as a petrel, gray as the mists off Hi-tai-sha—and she was his very own. The biggest, reddest day in all his twenty-three years of life was when the Admiral's order had come to leave the Ohio, where he had acted as a sort of apotheosized messenger boy and general escort to civilians' fat wives, and to proceed at once to Shanghai to assume command of her, provision and await further orders. It had cost him nine dollars and seventy-five cents to cable the joyful news adequately to his mother in Baltimore, and although the family resources were small—his father had died a lieutenant commander the year before—she had cabled back a "good luck and God bless you" to him. He only got as an ensign a paltry one hundred and twenty-eight dollars per month, and out of it came his mess bills and other expenses, but for all that he had enough to go down Nanking road and buy his mother a handsome mandarin cloak—Harry Dupont was going back on leave—and then to invite all the fellows he knew in Shanghai harbor to a jamboree at the club. It was going on at the time this story opens, boisterously and uproariously as befits the blow-out of a twenty-three-year old ensign who has just received his first command. The older civilians, who were drinking their comfortable "B & S" on the veranda, merely shrugged their shoulders as an impromptu refrain rose louder and louder to the pounding of bottles and the jingle of silverware.

Here's to the Kid and the Dirigo,
He's off for a cruise on the Hwang-ho!

The officers of the squadron, not wishing to spoil the fun, slipped off to the billiard room or the bridge tables, or strolled back to the bar. Most of them had letters to write for the American mail, which would leave the following morning, and more than one sighed as he glanced toward the upper veranda from below the club house. They knew how many and how long the years would be before any of those boys would be called "captain"—well, let them enjoy themselves! What was the use of croaking? There were compensations—of a sort. Even if one's people were all on the other side of the globe or migrating from boarding house to boarding house in a vain endeavor to keep up with the changes in the billets of their husbands and fathers, one was still an officer of Uncle Sam's navy.

So reflected Follansbee, executive officer of the flagship Ohio, which had slipped into Woosung, ten miles below Shanghai, just as the sunset gun on the forts was echoing over the closely packed junks along the water front, and while the boy was engrossed to the extent of total oblivion with the club steward over the decoration of his dinner table and the choice between various highly recommended brands of Scotch and Irish. Follansbee was a good sort, who had already waited thirty-five years to get his battleship and was waiting still, and he had seen Jack Russell, the boy's father, die the year before at Teng-chan of a combination of liver and disappointment, all too common among naval officers in the East. Follansbee's own liver was none of the best, but he had cut down on the drink, and, anyhow, his wife was coming out on the Empress of India next month. He hoped to God the Ohio wouldn't be ordered to Sulu or some place impossible for her to follow him. That boy of Russell's—he liked that boy, he was all to the good; knew his place and kept his mouth shut. Follansbee wasn't going to butt in and spoil his fun. It would do him good to get a little drunk. He remembered when he got his first gunboat—thirty years ago. Whew! Follansbee stared up at the veranda, then sighed again and started down the bund.

Shanghai harbor was alive with light. The murmur of the city rose and fell on the soft, fragrant air, shockingly penetrated every now and then by the discordant shrieks of swiftly hurrying launches. The bund was crowded with coolies, some toiling with heavy loads, others pulling their 'rikishas. Here and there flashed the colored lanterns of pedestrians. Beyond the junks lay many cruisers sweeping the starlit night with their quickly moving searchlights. Then one of these took him bang between the eyes and he stumbled and fell against some one coming up the walk.

"Where the deuce—!" shouted a clear young voice angrily. Then the note changed. "I beg pardon, sir—these confounded lights—I didn't see you at all."

Follansbee returned the midshipman's salute.

"Don't mention it!" he growled. "But what are you doing ashore? I thought you had the deck."

"I did, but I'm trying to find Russell. The Admiral wants him. I took the ship's launch to the Dirigo and they said there he was ashore and hadn't left any word, only that he'd be back late. Have you seen him?"

"Can't you hear him?" inquired Follansbee laconically.

A figure in white duck loomed suddenly into view on the veranda rail waving a bottle and shouting at the top of his lungs:

"I've got command of the Dirigo
An' I'm off for a cruise on the Hwang-ho!"

followed by a tremendous chorus accompanied by cracking glass and unearthly yells.

"Do I!" exclaimed the midshipman under his breath. "Is that him?"

At that moment a searchlight illumined the figure in question and the midshipman answering his own question, "Yes, that's him," scrambled on up the steps.

Follansbee wondered how long it would take to deliver the Admiral's order and felt his way gingerly through the crowded street.

When the midshipman burst panting upon them they were standing on their chairs with their arms around one another's necks shouting the swinging chorus of

"The good old summer ti-i-me!
Oh, the good old summer ti-i-me!
For she's my tootsie-wootsie in
The good old summer ti-i-me!"

"Come on up! There's plenty of room on my chair!" cried the boy excitedly, at sight of the midshipman, "we've only just begun." His face was very, very red and his eyes were very, very bright.

"Oh, the good old summer time!
Oh, the good old——"

"Here, what's the matter with you? Let me alone! What?"

He dropped his arms and climbed soberly enough down to the veranda floor while his comrades continued their refrain.

"Orders! From the Admiral! Is he here? I didn't know that the Ohio had come in. With you in a jiffy."

"Don't wait," urged the midshipman, "it's important!"

The boy turned white.

"It isn't—bad news?" he asked apprehensively.

"No, no," answered the other quickly, remembering the news the boy had had the year before. "Just orders."

"Well, I won't spoil their fun," said the boy, echoing the sentiments earlier expressed by Follansbee. "Back in a minute, fellows: I've got to telephone! On with the dance, let joy be unrefined!"

While they slipped through the door the chorus changed again, and as the boy seized his cap, sprang down the steps and started for the launch landing, high above and behind him, he could still hear them singing:

"Here's to the Kid and the Dirigo,
He's off for a cruise on the Hwang-ho!"

II

"You sent for me, sir?"

Jack Russell stood in the doorway of the Admiral's cabin on the Ohio, cap in hand. The Admiral had been poring over some papers on his desk and for a moment did not dissect the voice from the whirring of the electric fan over his head, but as the boy took a step or two forward he turned and nodded.

"Oh, it's you, Russell. I didn't mean to disturb you on shore, but I've something for you to do and the sooner you start the better."

The boy awaited his words breathlessly—his first orders.

"It's rather a mean job, but I've nobody else available and, if you make good—of course, you will make good—in fact, it's rather a chance to distinguish yourself."

"Thank you, sir."

The Admiral paused as if surely to observe the effect of his words.

"I want you to rescue a couple of missionaries."

The boy's countenance remained immobile.

"I received word this evening," continued the Admiral, picking up a half-smoked cigar, "that the rebellion has spread into Hu-peh and as far south as Kui-chan. They have murdered three American missionaries. Most of the others have escaped and have been reported safe, but nothing can be learned of two missionaries at Chang-Yuan—very estimable people, highly thought of in their denomination."

"Yes, sir," said the boy, his eyes beaming on the Admiral.

"You are to start at once—at once, understand, and go up the river past Hankow and Yochow. At Tung-an you reach the treaty limits, but you haven't time to explain, and probably explanations wouldn't do any good. There are two old forts there, and you'll just have to run by them—that's all. It is six hundred miles to Hankow. With luck you can be there easily inside of four days, but Chang-Yuan isn't on the Yang-tse-Kiang—it's on the Yuang-Kiang somewhere on Lake Tung-ting. You've got to find it first, and the charts are of no use. The trouble is that the lake dries up in winter and in summer overflows all the country round. If you can't get a local guide who knows the channel you will have to trust to luck. The fact that it's in the forbidden territory adds one more difficulty, but if I know Jack Russell's son——"

"Oh, thank you, sir!" cried the boy. "What a chance!" he added half to himself.

"Yes, it is a chance," answered the Admiral, "and I'm glad you've got it, but if you get aground among the rioting natives!—well, it's got to be done."

"I have no interpreter, sir," said the boy.

"Smith has secured one," replied the Admiral, "and through him we have found a Shan-si-man who says he knows the river above Hankow and is willing to act as guide. They are on the lower deck waiting. You will, of course, have the government pilot as far as Hankow. Now, good luck to you. I expect to be here for two weeks and you will report to me at once on your return your success or failure." He held out his hand. "Good luck to you again."

The boy shook hands with the Admiral but still remained standing beside him.

"Well?" said the Admiral. "Is there anything else?"

"Yes," replied the boy apologetically, "you have not given me the—gentleman's name."

"Bless my soul! So I haven't!" exclaimed the Admiral, fumbling among his papers, then raising one to the light: "The Rev. Theophilus Newbegin," he read slowly, "and wife."

The boy saluted his Admiral and retired with a respectful "Good night, sir." Once in the privacy of the wardroom companionway, however, he began to giggle, which giggle speedily expanded into a loud guffaw on his reaching the main deck. It sounded vaguely like "Newbegin." He leaned against the forward awning pole, shaking with laughter.

"I say, what's the joke?" inquired the midshipman approaching him from the shadow of the main turret. "Let a fellow in, won't you?"

But the boy still shook silently without replying.

"Oh, go on! What's the joke?" repeated the other. "Did 'Whiskers' give you a 'Laughing Julip'?"

"Newbegin!" exploded the boy. "Newbegin!"

"New begin what?" persisted the midshipman irritably. "Have you gone dotty? I hope you didn't act that way in 'Whiskers'' cabin. I believe you're drunk!"

The boy suddenly jerked himself together.

"Look here, Smith, you shut up. I'm your rankin' officer and I won't have such language. I'll tell you the joke—when I know whether it is one or not."

Smith made a face at him.

"By the way, smarty," continued the boy, "have you got two Chinks for me? If you have, send 'em along. I'm off to the Dirigo on the launch."

"Yes, I got 'em at the English consul's. Say, what's up? Can't you tell a feller?"

"Mr. Smith, send those two Chinks to the gangway!" thundered the boy.

The midshipman turned and walked hastily around the turret.

"Here you, Yen, come out of there!" he called.

Two Chinamen arose from the deck where they had been sitting crosslegged, leaning against the turret, and shuffled slowly forward.

"Here are your Chinks!" growled Smith, still aggrieved.

The ensign paid no further attention to him but pushed the nearest Chinaman toward the gangway.

"Get along, boys," he remarked, "your Uncle William is in a hurry." As the smaller of the two seemed averse to haste he gave him a slight forward impetus with his pipe-clayed boot. The two descended more rapidly and he followed. A sudden regret took possession of him as he thought of the possibility of his never seeing Smith again—of his dying of thirst, aground in a dried-up lake—or of being tortured to death in a cage in a Chinese prison.

"Good-by, Smithy," he called over his shoulder. But there was no answer.

The launch was bobbing at the foot of the steps, its screw churning the water into a boiling froth that reflected a million strange gleams against the warship's water line. The Chinamen hesitated.

"Get along, boys," he repeated, stepping into the stern sheets. "We've got a long way to go and we might as well begin—Newbegin."

The Chinamen huddled under the launch's canopy, the boy gave the word to go ahead, the bell rang sharply and the launch started on its long trip up to Shanghai.

Slowly the Ohio receded from him, somber, implacable, sphinxlike. On her bridge a man was wigwagging to the Oregon with an electric signal. The searchlights from the war vessels arose and wavered like huge antennæ feeling for something through the night, now and again paving a golden path from the launch to the ships. The illusion was that the vessels were moving away from the launch, not the launch from them. Out of the zone of the searchlights the water was black and lonesome. Just as soon as the ships got far enough away to appear stationary the launch seemed racing through the water at a hundred miles an hour. Other launches shrieked past bearing to their ships officers who had just come down by train to Woosung. Up the Whompoa River the ten-mile-distant lights of Shanghai cast a dim, nebulous glow against the midnight sky. Two hours later the little Dirigo seemed to loom out of the darkness and come rapidly toward them as the launch ran up to her gangway.

"Is that you, McGaw?" called the boy sharply. "Here are two Chinks, an interpreter and another one. Fix 'em up somewhere. We start up the Yang-tse as soon as you can get up steam. I want to make Nanking by day after to-morrow sunrise. Send ashore and get the pilot. Don't waste any time, either."

"All right, sir," answered the midshipman, "we can start in half an hour, sir."

The boy ran up the ladder, followed slowly by the Chinamen. At the cabin companionway he paused and looked at his watch. It was half after one o'clock.

"Here you, boys," he shouted after the Chinamen, "come down into my cabin, I want to speak to you."

He led the way down into his tiny wardroom and threw himself into a wicker chair placed at the focus of two electric fans. The thermometer registered ninety degrees Fahrenheit, but it was almost as hot on deck as below, and below various thirst alleviators were at hand. He poured out a whisky and soda and beckoned to the Chinamen to draw nearer. The first was short, fat, and jovial, with chronic humor creases about his mouth, and his hair done in a long orthodox cue which hung almost to the heels of his felt slippers. The other, the Shan-si man, was tall and square-shouldered, and he carried his chin high and his arms folded in front of him. His cue was curled flat on his head, and on his face was the expression of him who walks with the immortal gods.

"What's your name?" asked the boy, waving the Manila cheroot he was lighting at the fat Chinaman. The little man grinned instantly, his face breaking into stereotyped wrinkles like an alligator-skin wallet.

"Me—Yen. Charley Yen. Me belong good fella," he added with confidence. "Mucha laugh."

"Who's the other chap?" inquired the boy. "He no mucha laugh, eh?"

Yen shrugged his shoulders and, looking straight in front of him, held voluble discourse with his comrade.

"He no say," he finally replied. "He velly ploud. He say his ancestors belong number one men before Uncle Sam maka live. He say it maka no diffence. You maka pay, he maka show. Name no matter."

"Well, I'm sort of proud myself," remarked the boy, hiding a smile by sucking on his cheroot. "Tell this learned one that I know just how he feels. Tell him I'm going to call him 'Mr. Dooley' after the most learned man in America."

Yen addressed a few remarks to the Shan-si man who murmured something in reply.

"He tanka you."

"I suppose you're a Christian?" asked the boy, suddenly recollecting the object of his expedition.

"I belong Clistian, allasame you," answered Yen, assuming a quasi-devout expression. "Me believe foreign man joss allight."

The boy regarded him thoughtfully.

"Me b'lieve Chinee joss pigeon, too," added Yen cheerfully. "Me mucha b'lieve. B'lieve everyt'ing. Me good fun."

"Yes," said the boy, "how about 'Dooley'?—is he a Christian?"

Yen turned, but at his first liquid syllable the man from Shan-si drew himself up until it seemed that his shoulders would touch the cabin roof, and burst forth into a torrent of speech. Yen translated rapidly, scurrying along behind his sentences like a carriage dog beneath an axletree.

No, he was no Christian. The sword of Hung-hsui-chuen had slain his ancestors. Twenty millions of people had perished by the sword of the Taipings. The murderous cry of "Sha Yao"[1] had laid the land desolate. He was faithful to the gods of his ancestors.

[1] "Slay the Idolaters."

"Tell 'Dooley' I lika him. Say I think he's a good sport," said the boy, nodding at the Shan-si man.

"He say mucha tanks," translated Yen.

"Ask him if he knows Lake Tung-ting."

Mr. Dooley conveyed to the boy through Yen that he had been once to Chang-Yuan. The lake was wide in summer and he had been there at that time. He took pleasure in the service of the American Captain. But the Captain must be patient. He was a musk buyer, buying musk in western Szechuan on the Thibetan border. Two years ago he had saved five hundred taels and returned home to bury his family—nine persons counting his wife—all of whom had perished in the famine. The famine was very devastating. Then he married again one whom he had left at home. He allowed her ten taels a year. She could live on one pickle of wheat and she had the rest to spend as she liked. He preferred better the musk buying and returned. He gave the Captain much thanks.

"That is very interesting," said the boy. "You may go."

There was a tremendous rattling of chains along the sides, the steam winch began to click, and the two Chinamen vanished silently up the companionway. The boy leaned back in his wicker chair and gazed contemplatively about him at the shotgun and sporting rifle over the bookcase, the piles of paper-covered novels, the pointer dog coiled up on the transom, the lithographs fastened to the walls, and the photographs of his father and mother. He took another sip of whisky and water and, putting down the glass, thought of how proud his father would have been to see him in his first command. He had the happy consciousness of having done well, and he was going to make good—the Admiral had said so. He had had a bully time in the East so far, away ahead of what he had dreamed when at the Naval Academy. That winter at Newchwang, racing the little Manchurian ponies over the springy turf of the polo ground, shooting the big golden pheasants, wandering on leave through the country, stopping at the Chinese inns and taking chances among the Hanghousers. It had been great. Hong Kong had been great. It had been good fun to play tennis and drink tea with the pink-and-white-faced English girls. Well, he was off! His naval career had really begun. He lit another cheroot and strolled leisurely on deck to superintend the operation of heaving up the anchors.

Slowly the Dirigo floated away from the lights of Shanghai, felt her way cautiously down the Wompoa to Woosung and into the broad expanse of the Yang-tse. Anchored well out lay the Ohio black against the coming dawn. A band of crimson clouds swept the lowlands to the east and between them the tide flowed in an oily purple flood.

III

A heavy jar followed by a motionless silence awoke the boy at ten o'clock the next morning. The electric fans were still going and he had a thick taste in his mouth, but he had hardly time to notice these things before he dashed up the companionway and out upon the deck. To starboard the water extended to the horizon, to port a thin line of brown, a shade deeper in color than the water, marked the bank of the great river. Alongside helplessly floated a junk with a great gash in her starboard beam. She was loaded with crockery, and several bales of blue-and-white rice bowls had tumbled into the water, their contents bobbing about like a flock of clay pigeons. The boy saw instantly that owing to the fact that the junk was built in compartments she was in no danger of sinking, and could easily reach shore. Her captain, a half-naked man in a straw hat the size of a small umbrella, was chattering like a monkey at Charley Yen, and a Chinese woman, with a black-eyed baby of two years or thereabouts, sat idly in the stern evincing no particular interest in the accident. The man at the wheel explained that the junk had suddenly tacked. The boy felt in his pocket and, pulling out a Mexican dollar, tossed it to the junk man, who, having rubbed it on his sleeve and bitten it, began to chatter anew to Charley Yen.

"What does he say?" asked the boy.

"He say Captain belong number one man—he mucha tanks," answered Yen with a grin. What a waste! he added. The fellow had sailed on the feast day of Sai-Kao because on that day the Likin or native customs were closed. The gods had punished him. He had no complaint to make and had made none. As the Dirigo shot ahead the junk man sprang into the water and began rescuing his rice bowls. They passed no other junk that day, and the leaden sky did not change its shade. Save for the driving of the screw they might have been anchored in the midst of a coffee-colored ocean. Not even a bird relieved the eager search of the eye for relief from the immeasurable brown. The heat continued intense, and was even more unbearable than when the sun's rays created a fictitious contrast of shadow. Early in the afternoon Yen called the boy's attention to a couple of dolphins which were following them, racing first with the Dirigo and then with each other. Indeed, they were all three very much alike, and the majestic sweep and rush of the gray-white sides as they rose from the water inspired him with a sense of companionship. How far would they follow, these faithlessly faithful wanderers of the sea? At sunrise the next morning they picked up Nanking and the river gave more evidence of life, but they kept on and soon the city and its walls faded behind them. At noon they passed Wu-hu, at the same hour next day Kiukiang, and when the boy rose on the morning of the third day out, the black mass of crowded up-country junks on the water front of Hankow, swarming like mosquitoes or water flies about a stagnant pool, loomed into view. The river was full of sampans and fishing boats. The man from Shan-si, who had not spoken since the night in the cabin, raised his arm, and pointing to the pagoda repeated majestically to Yen the words of the ancient Chinese proverb:

"Above is Heaven's Hall,
Below are the cities of Su and Hang."

During the day they passed Kia-yu and Su-ki-kan, and late in the afternoon swept into sight of Yo-chow. The Shan-si man announced that Tung-ting was not so very far away. He even volunteered that this was the greatest country under "Heaven's Hall" for the exportation of bristles, feathers, fungus, musk, nutgalls, opium, and safflower. The place presented a crowded, if not particularly ambitious, appearance. The shore was jammed, as usual, with thousands of junks, and above the town the muddy banks were lined with Hunan timber and bamboo rafts. From the bridge of the Dirigo the boy caught from time to time swiftly shifting views of vast swampy plains, with a ragged line of scattered distant mountains. Then they passed beyond the bend in the river and suddenly entered what seemed another ocean, a northwest passage to Cathay. As far as the eye could reach stretched an illimitable void of waters, turbid, motionless. A rocky point, some ten feet higher than the surrounding plain, just gave a foothold for a small temple, a two-story Ting-tse or pavilion, and a lighthouse shaped like a square paper lantern. Ten minutes later it was a black spot in their boiling, brown wake. They were in Tung-ting, that desolate waste of mud, water, and sandhill islands, half swamp, half lake that rises into being by virtue of the expanding spring torrents, and sinks into its spongelike alluvial bed as mysteriously as it comes.

"Whew!" whistled the boy, "I only hope 'Dooley' knows where he's at. I wish we'd taken on a lao-ta at Hankow. This hole must be a hundred miles long and it's just about ten feet deep!"

In fact, the quartermaster had already called the boy's attention to the long grasses that swung idly upon the top of the water, and to the fact that here and there patches of bottom could be seen.

"Where is Chang-Yuan in all this mess?" he inquired of 'Dooley' who with Yen occupied a place beside him on the bridge.

The Shan-si pointed to a conical-shaped island several miles distant which raised itself steeply out of the water, on which the boy could see through his glasses clung a Chinese village. Flocks of wild fowl speckled the middle distance with a single lone fisherman on the starboard bow.

"He says," interrupted Yen, "Sim-wu have got on that island. This place belong very good for Chinaman—have got plenty of rice. Plenty water summer time. Winter time water all finish. He says he no think enough water for this boat. Little more far—about thirty li—have got 'nother island—after while catchee Chang-Yuan."

"Ask him how fast his bloomin' lake is drying up," directed the boy.

The Shan-si man shrugged his shoulders.

"He says," announced Yen, "if fish belong thirsty they drink water plenty quick. Fish no thirsty plenty water. Sometime fish drink one foot water in four days."

The sun, which up to this time had been visible only as a dim circle in the gray western sky, suddenly broke through with scorching intensity and at the same moment the Dirigo slid gracefully upon a mudbank, half turned, and slid gracefully off again. The boy bit his lips and stared hopelessly at the yellow plain of water all about him. Then he shook his fist at the Shan-si man.

"Tell him," he roared, "that if we get aground in his infernal lake, I'll hang him up by the thumbs and cut off his head."

Yen conveyed the message.

"Even so," replied the Shan-si, through the interpreter, "the will of the Captain is my will and my head is at the Captain's service, but even the gods cannot prevent the fish from drinking up the lake."

IV

"Ugh! What a town!" exclaimed the boy as the Dirigo dropped anchor Sunday morning a hundred yards off the embankment of Chang-Yuan. A broiling sun beat pitilessly upon the deck of the gunboat and upon the half mile of mud and ooze which lay along the water edge of the town. Even in summer Chang-Yuan was well above the water, the shore pitching steeply to the level of the lake. Down this incline was thrown all the waste and garbage of the town, and in the slime grubbed and rooted a horde of Chinese dogs and pigs and a score of human scavengers. Just above the Dirigo hung a house of entertainment, from the rickety balcony of which a throng of curious citizens stared down inquisitively. To the left stood a guild house and a pagoda, and five noble flights of stone steps crowned with archways led from the water to the roadway, but these last were so covered with slime that climbing up and over the muck seemed preferable to risking a fall on their treacherous surfaces.

"Ugh! What a hole!" repeated the boy. "Hah! Get away there you!" he shouted at the sampans which swarmed around the Dirigo. "Here you, Yen, tell the beggars to keep off!"

This Yen did, assuring the occupants of the boats that boiling oil would be distributed upon them if they did not retire.

So this was Chang-Yuan! The boy sniffed the malodorous air and wrinkled his nose.

"What though the spicy breezes blow soft o'er Ceylon's Isle,
Where every prospect pleases and only man is vile!

Gee! I wish the old boy that wrote that could have seen this place! Every prospect pleases! Only man is vile! This town is a sort of human pigsty so far as I can see. And I'll bet there is a fat old erfu hiding in the middle of this rabbit warren who makes a good thing out of it, you bet!"

The crowd on the embankment was growing momentarily larger, a silent, slit-eyed crowd of uncanny yellow faces. Beyond and under the distant line of blue hills thin columns of smoke marked the sites of the towns devastated by the inconsiderate Wu. A friend of Yen's had told the latter all about it. He had come aboard and had breakfasted, and for five hundred cash had been induced to admit that at the present juncture Chang-Yuan was a most unhealthy place for missionaries, that the inhabitants were quite ready to join Wu, and that when he arrived there would be the Chinese devil to pay. He offered for five hundred cash more to act as guide to the erfu's house. On the whole, it seemed desirable to accept his proposition. Half an hour later a boat put off from the Dirigo containing the boy, Yen, the friend, and four bluejackets. The crowd on the embankment almost pushed one another off the edge in their eagerness to watch the white devils climbing up the steps, and hardly allowed room for the boy and his squad to force a way through them.

Chang-Yuan was a typical example of an inland Chinese town, with dirty, narrow streets, swarming with human vermin. A throng followed close at the Americans' heels as they marched to the erfu's house, but quailed before the bodyguard who rushed out threateningly at them. It took half an hour before the erfu could receive them and then they were ushered into a dim room where a flabby old man, with a sly, vacant face sat crosslegged before a curtain. Through Yen, the boy explained that he had called as an act of official courtesy, and that he had come to remove certain American missionaries from danger which he understood existed by virtue of the proximity of the rebel Wu. The erfu listened without expression. Then he spoke into the air.

He was much honored at the visit of the American naval officer. But what could a poor old man like himself do against the great Wu? He had no soldiers. The townsfolk were ready to join the rebels. It was only a question of time. He could do nothing. He regretted extremely his inability to furnish assistance to the Americans.

The boy asked if it was true that the rioters were on their way and might reach the town that afternoon. The erfu said it was so. Then, after warning him that the United States Government would hold him responsible for the lives of its citizens, the boy retired, convinced that the sooner he got his missionaries away the better it would be for them.

V

The Rev. Theophilus Newbegin had just concluded divine service upon the veranda of the mission. Beyond the iron gateway a crowd of twenty or so onlookers still lingered, commenting upon the performance which they had witnessed, and jeering at the Chinese women who had just hurried away. Two of the women were carrying babies and all had had the cholera the season before. Because they had not died they attended service and were objects of hatred to their relatives. The Rev. Newbegin closed his Bible and wiped his broad, shining forehead with a red silk handkerchief. He was a large man who had once been fat and was now thin. Owing to the collapse of his too solid flesh his Chinese garments hung baggily upon his person and gave him an unduly emaciated appearance.

Mrs. Newbegin was still stout. Ten years of mission life had not disturbed her vague placidity and she sat as contentedly upon the veranda in Chang-Yuan as she had sat in her garden summer-house in distant Bangor, Maine, whence she and her husband had come. The fire of missionary zeal had not diminished in either of them. The word had come to them one July morning from the lips of an eloquent local preacher, and full of inspiration they had responded to the call and departed "for the glory of the Lord."

And China had swallowed them up. Twice a year, sometimes oftener, a boat brought bundles of newspapers and magazines, and a barrel or two containing all sorts of valueless odds and ends, antiquated books, games, and ill-assorted clothing. These barrels were the great annoyance of their lives. Often as he dug into their variegated contents the meek soul of the Rev. Theophilus rebelled at being made the repository of such junk.

"One would think, Henrietta," sadly sighed Newbegin, "that the good people at home imagined that we spent our time playing parchesi and the Mansion of Happiness, and reading Sandford and Merton."

Once came a suit of clothes entirely bereft of buttons, and most of the undergarments were adapted to persons about half the size of the missionary and his wife, but the Rev. Newbegin had a little private fortune of his own and it cost very little to live in Chang-Yuan.

The crowd at the gate had been bigger than usual this Sunday, and during the service had hurled a considerable quantity of mud and sticks and a few dead animals which now remained in the foreground, but this was due entirely to the new hatred of the foreign devils engendered by the rioters, and many of those who to-day howled at the gate of the compound had been glad enough six months before to creep to the veranda and beg for medicine and food. Now all was changed. The victorious Wu was coming to drive these child eaters from the land. Already he had laid the country waste for miles to the north and west, and had slain three witch doctors and hung their bodies upon pointed stakes before the temple gates. He was marching even now with his army from Tung-Kuan—a distance of fifteen miles. Nominally loyal to the dynasty, the inhabitants of Chang-Yuan eagerly awaited his coming. The white devils pretended to heal the sick but in reality they poisoned them and caused the sickness themselves. Those who survived their potions had an evil spirit. The crowd at the gate licked its lips at what would take place when Wu should arrive. There would be a fine bonfire and a great killing of child eaters. Their hatred even extended to the daughter of the foreign devil—her whom once they had been wont to call "The Little White Saint," who had nursed their children through the cholera and brought them rice and rhubarb during the famine. Wu would come during the day and then—! The uproar at the gate grew louder. Newbegin laid his moist hand upon that of his wife and looked warningly at her as there came a rustle of silk inside the open door and their niece made her appearance.

Margaret Wellington, now eighteen years old, had lived with them at Chang-Yuan for ten years. Her father, a naval officer, had died the year they had come out from America and they had picked up the little girl, the daughter of Newbegin's deceased only sister, at Hong Kong and brought her with them. Since then she had been as their daughter, working with them and entering enthusiastically into all their missionary labors. Sometimes they regretted not being able to give her a better education, and that she had no white companions but themselves, but the girl herself never seemed to miss these things and they believed that what was best for them was best for her. Were they not earning salvation? And was she not also? Was it not better for her to live in the Lord than to dwell in the tents of wickedness? Great as was their love for her it was nothing to their love for the Lord Jesus. For that they were ready and eager to lay down their lives—and hers.

"Chi says the rioters are coming," said Margaret. Her hair was done in the Chinese fashion, and she was clad in Chinese dress from head to foot, for she had outgrown all her English clothes years ago and there were no others to take their place.

"Yes, dear," answered her aunt, "I am afraid they are."

"He says they will kill us," continued the girl. She articulated her English words in a way peculiar to herself, due to her strange up-bringing, but there was no fear in her brown eyes, and the paleness of her face was due only to the heat.

The mob at the gate set up a renewed yelling at sight of her.

"Dear, dear!" said her uncle irresolutely, "I don't believe it will be as bad as that. They will calm down by and by." He really felt very badly about Margaret. To be killed was all in the day's work so far as Henrietta and he were concerned. They had anticipated it sooner or later almost as a matter of course, but Margaret——

A stick hurtled across the compound and fell on the veranda at his feet. He knew that it would take but little to excite the mob at the gate to frenzy, but he had made no preparations to defend the compound, for it would have been quite useless. In that swarming city what could one aged missionary and two women do to protect themselves? Chi, the only male convert, was hardly to be depended upon and all the rest were women. No, when the time came they would surrender their lives and accept martyrdom. It was for that that they had come to China. Newbegin's mind worked slowly, but he was a man of infinite courage.

"Dear, dear!" he repeated, looking toward the gate.

"Cowards!" cried the girl, her eyes flashing. "Ungrateful people! They will kill us, and Chi, and Om, and Su, and the other women and their babies. We must do something to protect them."

"Dear me! Dear me!" stammered her uncle again, rubbing his eyes. The crowd at the gate had fallen back and a strange vision had taken its place. Involuntarily he removed his hat. The girl uttered a cry of astonishment as the gate swung open and a young man in a white duck uniform entered the compound followed by four erect figures also in white and carrying rifles on their shoulders.

"Bless me!" exclaimed Newbegin, "it looks like a naval officer!"

The boy came straight to the veranda and touched his cap.

"Are you the Rev. Theophilus Newbegin?" he inquired.

"I am," answered the missionary, holding out his hand.

"I am John Russell, ensign in command of the U. S. gunboat Dirigo. I have been sent by Admiral Wheeler to assist you to leave Chang-Yuan."

"Bless me!" exclaimed the Rev. Theophilus. "Very kind of him, I'm sure! And you, too, of course, and you, too! Henrietta, let me introduce you to Ensign Russell. Er—won't those—er—gentlemen come inside and sit down?" he added, staring vaguely at the squad of bluejackets.

"Oh, they're all right!" said the boy, shaking hands with Mrs. Newbegin, and wondering what sort of a queer old guy this was whom he had been sent to rescue. "Beastly hot, isn't it? Do you have it like this often?"

"Eight months in the year," said Mrs. Newbegin, "but we're used to it."

At this moment the boy became conscious of the presence of one whom he at first took to be the prettiest Chinese girl he had ever seen.

"Let me present my niece—Ensign Russell," said Newbegin.

The boy held out his hand but the girl only smiled.

"It is very good of you to come so far to help us," said the girl.

"Oh, no trouble at all!" exclaimed the boy without taking his eyes from her face. "I'm glad I got here in time," he added.

"Did you come on a ship?" asked the girl.

"Just a little gunboat," he answered, "but that makes me think. This plagued lake is sinking all the time. I got aground in half a dozen places. We've got to start right along back. I'm by no means sure we can get out as it is, but it's better than staying here. You'd oblige me by packing up as quickly as possible."

"Eh?" said the Rev. Theophilus, with something of a start, "what's that?"

"Why, that we've got to start right along or we'll be stuck here and won't be able to get away at all."

"But I can't abandon the mission!" said Newbegin in wonder.

"Certainly not!" echoed his wife placidly. "After all these years we cannot desert our post!"

"But the rioters!" ejaculated the boy. "You'll be murdered! Wu will be here before night, they tell me, and there was a precious crowd of ruffians at the gate as I came along. Why, you can't stay to be killed!"

Newbegin shook his head.

"You do not understand," he said slowly. "We came out here to rescue these people from idolatry. Some of them have adopted Christianity. There are forty women and children converts. There are others who are almost persuaded; if we abandon them now we shall undo all our labor. No! we must stay with them, and die with them, if necessary, but we cannot go away now."

"Great Scott!" cried the boy, "do you mean to say that——"

"We cannot desert our post," repeated Mrs. Newbegin, looking fondly at her husband.

"But—but—" began the boy.

"Even if we die, there is the example," said Newbegin.

The boy was puzzled. Of missionaries he had a poor enough opinion in general, and this one looked like a great oaf and so did his fat wife, but in the most ordinary way and with the commonest of accents he was talking of "dying for the example." Then his eyes returned to the girl who had been watching him intently all the time.

"But," he exclaimed, "certainly you won't place your niece in such danger?"

"No," said Newbegin, "that would not be right."

"No," repeated the wife, "she had better go back."

"I will not go back," cried the girl, "unless you go, too! This is my home. Your work is my work. I cannot leave Om and Su and their babies."

"Good God!" muttered the boy hopelessly. "Don't you see you must come? You can't stay here to be murdered by the rioters! I can't let you! On the other hand, I can only stay here an hour or two at the most. The Dirigo is almost aground as it is and we shall have the dev—deuce of a time getting out of the lake."

"Well," said Newbegin calmly, "I have told you that we cannot accept your offer. We are very grateful, of course, but it's impossible. It would not do; no, it would not do. A missionary expects this kind of a thing. I wish Margaret would go, but what can I do, if she won't go? I can't make her go."

"I want to stay with you," said Margaret, taking his hand. "I will never leave you and Aunt Henrietta."

The boy swore roundly to himself. The crowd of Chinese had returned to the gate, and the air of the compound stank in his nostrils. He took out his watch.

"It's eleven o'clock," he said firmly. "At five I shall leave Chang-Yuan; till then you have to make up your minds. I will return in an hour or so."

Newbegin shook his head.

"Our answer will be the same. We are very grateful. I am sorry not to seem more hospitable. Have you seen the temple and the pagoda?"

"No," answered the boy. "I suppose I might as well do the town, now I'm here."

"I will show you the temple," said Margaret timidly. "They know me there, I nursed the child of the old priest. I will take you."

"Yes," said Newbegin, "they all like Margaret, and I seem to be unpopular now. Will you not take dinner with us?"

"Thank you," said the boy, "take dinner with me. Perhaps Mrs. Newbegin would like to see the gunboat, and I have some photographs of the new cruisers."

Margaret gazed beseechingly at her.

"Very well," said Newbegin, "if you will stop for us on your way back from the temple we shall be quite ready, but I must return at once after dinner in order to assemble the members of the mission."

The girl led the way to the gate.

"I'm sure you will not need the soldiers," she said; "it is but a short distance." The crowd, observing that the bluejackets had remained inside the compound, crowded close at the boy's heels as they threaded the streets to the temple.

"I spend a good deal of time here," said the girl; "sometimes it is the only cool place."

The boy paid the small charge for admission and followed his guide up the dim, winding stairs. It was dank and quiet; the priest had remained at the gate. From the blue-green shadows of the recesses upon the landings a score of Buddhas stared at them with sightless eyes. Suddenly they emerged into the clear air upon the platform of the top story and the girl spoke for the first time since they had entered.

"There is Chang-Yuan," she said.

The boy gazed down curiously. Below them blazed thousands of highly finished roofs, picturesque enough from this height, while beyond the town the soup-colored waters of the lake stretched limitless to the horizon. He could see the embankment and the little Dirigo at anchor, the sampans still swarming around it. To the south lay a country of swamps and of paddy fields; to the north the line of hills and the smoke of the burning towns.

They sat down on a stone bench and gazed together at the uninviting prospect. He was beset with curiosity to ask her a thousand questions about herself, yet he did not know how to begin. She solved the problem for him, however.

"I have lived here since I was eight years old," she remarked, apparently being unable to think of anything else to say.

The boy whistled between his teeth.

"Do you enjoy it?" he asked.

"I don't know," she replied, "I don't know anything else. Sometimes it seems dull and one has to work very hard, but I think I like it."

"But what do you do," he inquired, "to amuse yourself?"

"I read," she said, "and play with Om and Su. I have taught them some American games. Do you know parchesi and the Mansion of Happiness?"

"Yes, I've played them," he admitted cautiously. "But do you never see any white people except your uncle and aunt?"

"Why, no," she said. "Two summers ago, after the cholera, we visited Dr. Ferguson at Chang-Wing—that is over there. He is a medical missionary, but I did not like him because he asked me to marry him. He was sixty years old. Do you think it was right?"

"Right!" cried the boy. "It was a wicked sin."

"Well, he is the only white man I have met except you," said the girl. "Of course, I can remember a little playing with boys and girls a long, long time ago. Where is your ship?"

"That little white one down there. Can you see?" said the boy, pointing.

"Oh, is that it?" she asked. "Where are its sails?"

"There aren't any," he answered; "it goes by steam."

"I have read the 'Voyage of the Sunbeam,'" she said, "it is a beautiful book. It came out last year in a box. I have nearly twenty books in all."

The boy bit his lips. He was getting angry—angry that an American girl should have been imprisoned in such a hole all her young life—such a girl, too! What right had an elderly man and woman, even though they enjoyed the privilege of consanguinity, to exile a beautiful child from her native country and bring her up for the glory of God in a stewing, stinking, cholera-infested, famine-ridden Chinese village?

"It is strange to find you here," he said finally. "I expected only some freckle-faced, jimmy-jawed, psalm-singing woman, who would tumble all over herself to get away."

She looked at him puzzled for a moment and then burst into a ripple of laughter.

"What funny things you say!" she cried. "I suppose it is strange to find me here, but why should I have freckles or a—what did you call it—a jimmy-jaw? I do sing psalms. But my being here is no stranger than that you should be here. I have often wished some young man would come. You are the first I have known. I am tired of only women."

For a moment he was almost shocked at the open implication, but her frank eyes and matter-of-fact tone told him that the girl could not flirt. It was out of her sphere of existence.

"Would you like to get married?" he hazarded.

"Oh, yes!" she cried. "To a young man!"

"But suppose you had to go away?"

She looked a little puzzled for a moment.

"Of course, I should not like to leave Om and Su, and I wouldn't leave uncle and aunt, but sometimes—sometimes I have wondered if one couldn't serve God in a pleasanter place and do just as much good."

"Are there any men converts?" he asked.

"Only Chi," she replied, "and I am quite sure he is an idolater at heart. Besides," she added, with a droll look in her eyes, "Chi is a gambler and is always drinking samshu. He had been drinking it this morning. I have often spoken to uncle about it, but he has not got the heart to send him away."

The boy laughed.

"I have a certain amount of sympathy with Chi," said he. "If I lived here I should be as bad as he is. I should think you would die of the heat and the smells, and never seeing anybody."

"Oh, it's not so bad," she said spiritlessly. "You see, I have to work pretty hard. There are nearly twenty families now where there is sickness, and in case of anything contagious I go there and nurse. Sometimes I get very tired, but it keeps me occupied and so I suppose I don't think about—other things."

"It's terrible to think of leaving you here," he said. "Can't you persuade your uncle and aunt that their duty does not require them to lay down their lives needlessly?"

"No," she answered, "nothing would persuade them that it was not their duty to remain; nothing could persuade me of that."

"And you would not leave them?" he urged, almost tenderly.

"Oh, how could I? I must stay with them! Don't you see?" She took hold of his hand and held it. It was quite natural and totally unconscious. "That is what missionaries are for."

A thrill traveled up the nerves of his arm and accelerated the motion of his heart.

"That is not what you are for," he said quietly.

"I must! I must!" she repeated. "Oh, I should like to go with you, but I can't."

"But think of yourself!" he cried harshly. "Your uncle and aunt can die for the glory of God if they choose, but they've no right to let you die, too, just out of loyalty to them. It's cruel and wrong. It makes me sick to think of you penned up here in this nasty, yellow place all these years when you ought to have been going to school, and riding and sailing, and playing tennis, and having a good time."

"Oh!" she protested.

"No, hear me out," he insisted, "and having a good time! You can serve God and yet be happy, can't you? And your place isn't here in the midst of cholera and famine and malaria. It's different with people who have lived their lives, but with you, so young and fresh and pretty."

"Oh!" she cried joyfully, "do you think I am pretty? I'm so glad!"

"Do I!" he replied hotly. "Too pretty to be allowed to go wandering around these crooked Chinese streets—" he checked himself. "I say it's a shame! And now to stay here, after all, to be butchered!" He jumped to his feet and ground his teeth.

She gazed at him, startled, and said reproachfully:

"I don't think it is right for you to say things like that. 'Whoso loseth his life for my sake shall find it.' Don't you remember?"

He made no reply, realizing the hopelessness of his position.

"Come," he said, "let us go back."

She was afraid she had offended him but was too timid to do more than to take his hand and let him lead her gently down the winding stairs.

At the gate of the temple they found the crowd augmented by several hundred persons, who closed in behind and marched along to the compound.

Mr. and Mrs. Newbegin were waiting on the veranda and the marines had been having a little samshu. The boy was by no means sorry to have the company of his escort for the rest of their walk, and the party made good time to the Dirigo. The bund was alive with spectators and so was the whole long line of shore. There were Chinese everywhere, on the beach, on rafts, in sampans, swimming in the water, all around, wherever you looked there were a dozen yellow faces—waiting—waiting for something. Even in the broil of that inland sun the chills crept up the boy's spine.

The Rev. Theophilus and his wife were much pleased with the gunboat and sat in the cabin in the draught of the two electric fans sipping lemonade, while the boy showed the girl over the Dirigo. He had made one last passionate appeal to the missionary and his wife, who had again flatly refused to leave the city. Margaret had likewise reasserted her determination not to desert them. The boy was in despair and cursed them to himself for stupid, bigoted fools. He was showing the girl his little stateroom with its tiny bookcase and pictures and she had paused fascinated before one which showed a group of young people gathered on a smooth lawn with tennis rackets in their hands. All were smiling or laughing. Margaret could not tear herself away from it.

"How happy they look!" she whispered. "How fresh and clean and cool everything is! What are those things in their hands?"

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"The round things that look like nets," she explained.

The boy gasped.

"Tennis rackets! Do you mean to say you've never seen a tennis racket?"

"I don't think so." She hesitated. "Perhaps ever so long ago when I was a little girl, but I've forgotten."

The boy's anger flamed to a white heat as he glanced out through the stateroom door to where the Rev. Theophilus and wife sat stolidly luxuriating in the artificial draught.

"When I was a child we lived for a while in Shanghai. My father's ship was there," she added.

"Your father in the navy?" cried the boy hoarsely. "What was his name?"

"Wellington," she answered. "He was a commander. He died at Hong Kong ten years ago."

"Wellington! Richard Wellington? He was in my father's class at Annapolis!" cried the boy. Then he groaned and bit his lips. "Oh!—oh! it's a crime!"

He dropped on one knee and took her hands.

"Poor little girl!" he almost sobbed, "poor little girl! Think of it! Ten years! Poor child!"

Margaret laid one hand on his head.

"I am quite happy," she said calmly.

"Happy!" He gave a half-hysterical laugh and shook his fist at the door. Then he leaned over and whispered eagerly:

"You're tired, dear. Lie down for a few minutes and rest. Do—to please me."

She smiled. "To please you," she repeated, as she leaned back among the cushions which he placed for her, and he closed the door.

"Your niece is going to take a little nap," he explained to the missionary. "Here are some prints of the new battleships. I must ask you to excuse me for a moment. Saki will serve dinner directly."

"Oh, certainly—of course," murmured Newbegin, recovering from semi-consciousness.

The boy sprang up the hatch.

"Here, McGaw!" he ejaculated, rushing to where his midshipman stood watching the swarm of sampans that covered the lake around the Dirigo. "Get up steam! Do you hear? Get up steam as fast as you can! I'm going to hike out of this!"

"All right, sir," replied McGaw in a rather surprised tone. "We can't get off any too soon to please me. Did you ever see such a hole? Hello! What's all that?" He pointed to a highly decorated sampan coming rapidly toward them, before which the others parted of their own accord, making a broad line of water to the Dirigo.

"By Godfrey! It's the mandarin!" cried the boy. "Where's Yen? Here you, Yen! Go make mucha laugh for the erfu!"

The sampan, however, turned out not to contain the erfu. A small, fat Chinaman in the mandarin's livery stood up and bawled to Yen through his hands.

"He say," translated Yen over his shoulder, "Wu no come. Viceroy soldier man make big fight—kill plenty—Wu finish. Allight now everybody. Missionary come back. Wu no make smoke, anyway. He long, long way off. This fella lika Melican naval officer maka lil kumsha[2] for good news. Kumsha for maka mucha laugh."

[2] Present, gratuity.

"What!" roared the boy. "Pay him! Tell him to go to hell!"

McGaw watched the boy as he stamped up and down the deck running his hands through his hair and wondered if he had a touch of sun. The mandarin's messenger still remained in an attitude of expectancy in the bow of the sampan. Suddenly the midshipman saw his superior officer rush to the side of the Dirigo and throw a Mexican silver dollar at the Chinaman, who caught it with surprising dexterity.

"Tell him," shouted the boy to Yen, "to say to the erfu that he could not find us, that we had gone away before he could deliver his message!"

The fat Chinaman prostrated himself in the sampan.

"He say allight," remarked Yen.

"Do you believe what he said?" demanded the boy threateningly of McGaw.

"Sure," said the midshipman, "that's right enough! That old friend of Yen's was out here again about an hour ago, snooping around, drunk as a lord. He'd been loading up on samshu ever since he went ashore. He says that Wu was killed over a month ago, that his head is on a temple gate five hundred miles north of here, and that the smoke over there is caused by burning brush on the hillsides. The rebellion is all over until next year. It's a great note for us, isn't it?"

But the boy made no reply. He was staring straight through McGaw out across the lake. Suddenly he stepped close to the midshipman and muttered quietly:

"Say, old man, for the sake of old times, can you forget all that?"

"Sure," gasped McGaw, convinced that his previous suspicions had been correct.

"Then forget it and get up steam!" said the boy, turning sharply on his heel.

VI

The click of the anchor engine was followed by the throbbing of the Dirigo's screw, but both the Rev. Theophilus and wife supposed them to be the whirr of an unseen electric fan. Saki's dinner was exceptionally good, and there was a cold bottle of vichy for the missionary, who lingered a long time after the coffee to tell about the ravages of the cholera the year before. When at last they ascended to the deck there was nothing to be seen of Chang-Yuan but a glare of tile roofs on the distant horizon.

"Bless me!" remarked the Rev. Theophilus, gazing stupidly at the coffee-colored waves about them. "What is the meaning of all this? Where are we going? I must go ashore. I have no time for pleasure sailing!"

"Certainly not!" echoed his wife. "Kindly return at once! Why, we are miles from Chang-Yuan!"

And then it was, according to McGaw, that the boy more than rose to the occasion and verified the prophecy of the Admiral, though under a somewhat different interpretation, that he would "make good," for, standing by Margaret's side, he saluted the missionary and with eyes straight to the front delivered himself of the following preposterous statement:

"I exceedingly regret that my orders do not permit me to exercise the discretion necessary to return as you request. The Admiral commanding the Asiatic squadron specifically directed me to proceed at once to this place and rescue the Rev. Theophilus Newbegin and wife. I was given no option in the matter. I was to rescue you, that is all. I received no instructions as to what to do in the event that you preferred not to be rescued, and I interpret my orders to mean that I am to rescue you whether you like it or not. Everything will be done for your entire comfort and Saki has already prepared my stateroom for Mrs. Newbegin. I trust that you will not blame me for obeying my orders."

"Bless me!" stammered the Rev. Theophilus. "Dear me! I really do not know what to say! I am exceedingly disturbed. It seems to me like an unwarrantable interference—not on your part, of course, but on that of the Government. But," he added apologetically, "we cannot blame you for obeying your orders, can we, Henrietta?"

But Mrs. Newbegin's ordinarily vacuous face bore a new and radiant expression.

"I see the hand of Providence in this, Theophilus!" she said.

"Yes—yes!" he answered, wiping his forehead. "God moves in a mysterious way—in an astonishing way, I might say." He looked regretfully over his shoulder toward the fast-vanishing Chang-Yuan.

Margaret slipped her hand into his and laid her head on his arm. "I am so glad, uncle!" she whispered. He patted her cheek.

"Yes, yes, it is probably better this way," he sighed. "Henrietta, let us retire to the cabin and consider what has happened. My young friend, be assured we bear you no ill will for your involuntary action in this matter."

Four evenings later under the snapping stars of the midsummer heaven Margaret Wellington and Jack Russell sat side by side in two camp chairs on the bridge of the Dirigo. The gunboat was sweeping round the great curve of the Yang-tse above Hankow and to starboard the pagodas of Wu-chang rose dimly through the lights of the city. Below in the hot cabin sat the Rev. Theophilus and his wife reading "The Spirit of Missions."

"And now," said the boy, as he drew her hand through his, "you are going to be happy forever and always. The world is full of wonderful things and nice, kind people who are trying to do good and yet have a jolly time while they are doing it. And you will have the dearest mother a girl ever had. How proud she'll be of you! Now promise to forgive me; you know why I did it! Do you suppose I'd have dared to do it if I hadn't?"

"Yes," she answered happily, "I knew why you did it and I forgive you, only, of course, it really was very wicked. But——"

The sentence was never finished—to the delight of the government pilot behind them.

"What do you think my uncle will say when we tell him?" she laughed.

"He'll say, 'Bless me! Dear me! I don't know!'" answered the boy, and they both giggled hysterically.

Abaft the black shadow of the smokestack Yen and the Shan-si man stood in silence watching the two on the bridge. The Shan-si man raised his arm once more in the direction of Wu-chang and made a joke.

"Above is Heaven's Hall!" said he. "Below are—the two most foolish things in all the world—a boy and a girl!"

THE VAGABOND

"There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture."

—Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying."

It was five o'clock, Sunday afternoon, and the slanting sunbeams had crawled across the bed and up the walls and vanished somehow into the ceiling when Voltaire McCartney came to himself, kicked off the patchwork quilt, elevated his torso upon one elbow and took an observation out of the dingy window. The prospect of the Palisades to the northwest was undimmed, for the wind was blowing fresh from the sea and the smoke from the glucose factory on the Jersey side was making straight up the river in a long, black horizontal bar, behind which the horizon glowed in a brilliant, translucent mass of cloud. McCartney swung his thin legs clear of the bed and fumbled with his left hand in the pocket of a plaid waistcoat dangling from the iron post. The act was unconscious, equivalent to the automatic groping for one's slippers which perchance the reader's own well-regulated feet perform on similar occasions. The pocket in question yielded a square of white tissue, which the fingers deftly folded, transferred to the other hand, and then filled with tobacco. Like others nourished upon stimulants and narcotics, McCartney awoke absolutely, without a trace of drowsiness, nervously ready to do the next thing, whatever that might chance to be. His first act was to pull on his shoes, the second to slip his suspenders over his rather narrow shoulders, and the third to light the cigarette. Then he sauntered across the room to the window sill, upon which slept profoundly a small tortoise-shell cat, and picked up a pocket volume, well worn, which he shook open at a point designated by a safety match. For several moments he devoured the page with his eyes, his hollow face filled with peculiar exaltation. Then he expelled a cloud of smoke sucked from the glowing end of his cigarette, tossed away the butt, and thrust the book into his hip pocket.

"O would there were a heaven to hear!
O would there were a hell to fear!
Ah, welcome fire, eternal fire,
To burn forever and not tire!

"Better Ixion's whirling wheel,
And still at any cost to feel!
Dear Son of God, in mercy give
My soul to flames, but—let me live!"

He turned away from the window, and pale against the gaudy west his profile shone drawn and haggard. Restlessly he filched his pocket for another cigarette, and tossed himself wearily into a painted rocker. The cat awakened, elongated herself in a prodigious and voluptuous yawn of her whole body, dropped to the floor and leaped with a single spring into her master's lap. He stroked her sadly.

"Isabeau! My poor Isabeau! I envy you—creature perfect in symmetry, perfect in feeling!"

The cat rubbed her head against the buttons of his coat. McCartney leaned back his head. The little room was bare of ornament or of furniture other than the chair, save for a deal table at the foot of the bed, bearing a litter of newspapers and yellow pad paper.

"I am discouraged by the street,
The pacing of monotonous feet!"

murmured the man in the rocker. The light died out above the Palisades; the cat snuggled down between her master's legs.

"Dear Son of God, in mercy give
My soul to flames, but let me live!"

he added softly. Then he lifted the cat gently to the floor, threw on a short, faded reefer coat, and opened the door.

"Well, Isabeau, it's time for us to go out and earn our supper!"

McCartney gazed solemnly down from the small rostrum upon which he was standing at the end of the saloon without so much as a smile in answer to the roar of appreciation with which his time-worn anecdote had been received.

"Dot's goot!" shouted an abdominal "Dutchman," pounding the table with his beer mug. "Gif us 'n odder!"

"Ya!" exclaimed his confrère. "Dot feller, he was a corker, eh?" He put up his hands and making a trumpet of them bawled at McCartney: "Here, kommen sie unt haf a glass bier mit us!"

Three teamsters, a card sharp, a porter, two cabbies, and a dozen unclassables nodded their heads and stamped, while the bartender passed up a foaming stein to the performer. McCartney blew off the froth, bowed with easy grace to the assembled company, and drank. Then he descended to the table occupied by the Germans.

"May you all have better luck than the gentleman in my story," he remarked. "But I for one shall go straight to the other place. Heaven for climate—hell for society, eh? Hoch der Kaiser!"

The Germans threw back their heads and laughed boisterously.

"Make that beer a sandwich, will you? Here, Bill, bring me a slice of cold beef and a cheese sandwich!"

The bartender opened a small ice chest and produced the desired edibles, to which variation in their offered hospitality the two interposed no objection, being in fact somewhat in awe of their intellectual, if not distinguished, guest. As McCartney ate he produced a handful of transparent dice.

"Ever see any dice like those?" he asked, rolling them across the wet table. The first German examined them with approval.

"Dose is pooty, eh?" he remarked to his neighbor. "I trow you for die Schnapps, eh?"

McCartney watched them covetously as they emptied the leathern shaker, solemnly counting the spots at the conclusion of each cast.

"Here, let me show you how," volunteered their guest. "Poker hands." He rattled the dice and poured them forth. They came up indiscriminately.

"Not so goot, eh?" commented the German. "I'll trow you. I'll trow ennyboty mit clear dice. Venn dey ain't loated I can trow mit ennyboty." He held them up to the light. "Dese is clear—goot."

"Three times for a dollar," said McCartney.

"So," answered the German. He threw carefully, and counted two sixes, an ace, a three, and a five. He left in the sixes and threw the others. This time he got an ace and two fives. Once more he put them back, but accomplished no better result.

"Now, I'll show you," said McCartney, and emptied the shaker. The dice tumbled upon the table to the tune of two aces, two deuces, and a five. He put back the deuces and the five and threw another ace, a three, and a five.

"I win," he remarked. "You don't know how!"

"Vat's dot? Don't know how, eh!" roared the other. "I trow you for fife dollars, see? Gif me dose leetle dice." He threw with a heavy bang that shook the table. This time he got two sixes, two aces, and a five, and put back the latter. Securing another ace he leaned back and took a heavy draught of beer. "Full house! Beat dat eef you can!"

McCartney tossed the dice carelessly upon the board for two fours, one ace, and two fives. To the amazement of the Germans, he left in the ace and returned the other four to the shaker. This time he got two more aces. His last throw gave him another ace and a five.

"Zum teuffel!" growled the German, thrusting his hand into his pocket and drawing forth a dirty wad of bills. "Here, take your money!" He handed McCartney six dollars.

"Kind sirs, good night," remarked McCartney, thrusting the bills into his waistcoat pocket and arising from his place. "I must betake me hence. Experience is the only teacher. Let me advise you never to play games of chance with strangers."

The two Germans stared at him stupidly.

"You don't understand? Permit me. You saw the dice were not loaded? Very good! You examined them? Very good again. Your powers of observation are uncultivated, merely. The stern mother of invention—that is to say necessity—has obeyed the law of evolution. Three of the dice in my pocket bear no even numbers. The information is well worth your six dollars. Again, good night."

"Betrüger!" cried the loser of the six dollars, arising heavily and upsetting his beer. "Dot feller skivinded us mit dice geloaded! Sheet! Sheet!"

They blundered toward the side entrance, while McCartney side-stepped into an adjacent portal. Long Acre Square gleamed from end to end. Above him an electric display, momentarily vanishing and reappearing, heralded the attributes of the cigar sacred to the Scottish bard. Peering through the haze generated by the countless lights a few tiny stars repaid diligent search. A scanty number of pedestrians was abroad. The pantheon of delights shone silent save for an occasional clanging car. The Germans passed in search of an officer, excitedly jabbering about the "sheet," their angry expressions reverberating along the concrete, fading gradually into the hum of the lower town.

Then slowly into view crept one of those anachronisms of the metropolis—a huge, shaggy horse slowly stalking northward, dragging a rickety express wagon whereon reposed a semisomnolent yokel. Hitched by its shafts to the tail of the wagon trailed a decrepit brougham (destined, probably, for country-depot service), behind this a debilitated Stanhope buggy, followed by a dogcart, a phaeton, a buckboard, with last of all a hoodless Victoria. This picturesquely mournful procession of vanished respectability staggered hesitatingly past our hero, who regarded it with vast amusement. To his fanciful imagination it appeared like the fleshless vertebræ of a sea serpent slowly writhing into the obscurity of the night. Occasionally one of the component dorsals would strike an inequality in the pavement and start upon a brief frolic of its own, swinging out of line at a tangent until hauled back into place again by the pull of the shaggy horse. Sometimes all started in different directions at one and the same time, and the semblance to a skeleton snake was heightened—even the ominous rattle was not wanting. The Victoria looked restful to McCartney, whose legs were always tired.

"Why should we fret that others ride?
Perhaps dull care sits by their side,
And leaves us foot-men free!"

he hummed to himself, recollecting an old college glee.

"All the same that old bandbox looks not uncomfortable. How long is it since I have used a cushion! Poverty makes a poor bedfellow!"

As the last equipage swung by, McCartney took a few steps in the same direction and clambered in. He had become a "foot-man" in fact, but a very undignified and luxurious one, who lay back with his feet crossed against the box in front of him. Of all the lights on Broadway none glowed so comfortingly for McCartney as the tip of his cigarette.

"My prayer is answered," he remarked softly to himself. "Thus do I escape the 'monotonous feet.' Had I only Isabeau I should have attained the height of human happiness—to have dined, to smoke, to ride on cushions under the starlight, to have six dollars, and not to know where one is going—a plethora of gifts. So I can spare Isabeau for the nonce. Doubtless she would not particularly care for the delights of locomotion."

Thus Voltaire sailed northward, noticed only by solitary policemen and lonely wayfarers. Near Eightieth Street his eye caught the burning circle of a clock pointing at half-past nine, and he stretched himself and yawned again. They were passing the vestibule of an old church which contrasted quaintly with the more ambitious modern architecture of the neighborhood. From the interior floated out the gray unison of a hymn. McCartney swung himself to the ground and listened while the skeleton rattled up the avenue.

"Egad!" thought he, "yon prayerful folk are not troubled with my disorder. Hell is for them what Jersey City is for me—a vital reality."

A woman, her head shrouded in a worn gray shawl, approached timidly and stationed herself near the door. McCartney could see that she was weeping and that she had a baby in her arms. He grumbled a bit to himself at this business. It did not suit his fancy—his scheme. Having planned a continuation of this night of comedy so auspiciously begun, he disliked any incongruity.

"Broke?" he inquired without rising. The woman nodded.

"What's the matter?"

"Dan cleared out the flat and skipped yesterday afternoon. We've had nothing to eat—me and the kid—all day."

"Let's look at your hands."

The woman held out a thin, rough, red hand. McCartney gave it a glance and continued:

"What's your kid's name?"

"Catherine."

McCartney gazed at her intently.

"Look here, do you think those folks in there would help you?"

"I don't know. It's better than the Island."

"Don't try it," advised McCartney. "They'd think you were working some game on 'em. Leave this graft to me."

The woman started back, half frightened, but McCartney's smile reassured her.

"Here's yours on account." He handed her the five-dollar bill he had secured from the Germans. "I know how. You don't. You need it. I don't." He waved aside her thanks. "Now go home, and, listen to me, don't take Dan back—he's no good."

The woman hurried away, and with her departure silence fell again.

McCartney seated himself upon the curb and lit still another cigarette, eying the door expectantly. Once he arose and dropped a piece of silver into the poorbox inside the porch, listening intently to the loud rattle it made in falling. It was clearly the sole occupant, for no answering clink came in response.

"Alas for the rarity
Of Christian charity
Under the sun,"

softly murmured McCartney.

"You will be lonely in there all by yourself, little one. Here's a brother to keep you company," said he, pushing in another.

The hymn ceased and the congregation began to pass out. McCartney retired into the darkness of a corner, scrutinizing every face among the worshipers. Last of all came a little old man scuffling along with the aid of a cane. His snowy beard gave him an aspect singularly benign. McCartney laughed to himself.

"Grandpapa, I trust we shall become better acquainted," he remarked under his breath, as he followed the old fellow down the street.

The loud vibrations of the bell in the deserted rooms of the floor below brought no immediate response, and instead of a brighter blaze of hospitality, the light in the hall was hurriedly extinguished. McCartney only pressed his thumb to the round receptacle of the bell the more assiduously, repeating the process at varying intervals until the light again illumined the door. A shadow hesitated upon the lace curtain, then the door itself was slowly, doubtfully opened, and the old man shuffled into the vestibule, peering suspiciously through the iron fretwork. McCartney, without going too close—he knew well the dread of human eyes, face to face—looked nonchalantly up and down the street, realizing that he must give his quarry time to regain the self-possession this midnight visit had shattered. After a pause the bolt was shot and the door opened upon its chain.

"Was that you ringing? What do you want?"

"Yes, it was I who rang. I trust you'll excuse the lateness of my call. It's imperative for me to see you."

"Who are you? And what do you want to see me about?"

"My name is Blake. Blake of the Daily Dial. It is a personal matter."

"Don't know you. Don't know any Blake. Don't read the Dial. What is the personal matter?"

"For God's sake, sir, let me speak with you! It's a matter of life and death. Don't deny me, sir. Hear me first."

The little old man closed the door a couple of inches.

"Want money, eh?"

"Help, sir. Only a word of sympathy. I've a dying child——"

"Can't you come round in the morning?"

"It will be too late then. I implore you to listen to me for only a few moments. I've been waiting two hours upon the sidewalk for you to return, and it's too late for me to go elsewhere."

The door opened sufficiently for the old man to thrust his face close to the crack and inspect his visitor from head to heels. Evidently McCartney's appearance and the manner of his speech had made an impression which was now struggling with prudence and common sense. The deacon, moreover, had a reputation to support. It would not do to turn an applicant away who might be in dire extremity—and who might go elsewhere and carry the tale with him.

"Won't a bed ticket do you, eh? And come in the morning?"

McCartney saw the vacillation in the other's mind.

"I'm sorry, but I must see you now, if at all. To-morrow might be too late."

The owner of the house closed the door, unslipped the chain and retreated inside the hall to the foot of the stairs, leaving the way free for his visitor to follow. McCartney entered, hat in hand, and shut the door behind him, catching at a glance the austerity of the furniture and walls. To him every inch of the Brussels carpet, the ponderous, polished walnut hatrack, the massive blue china stand with its lonely umbrella and stout bamboo cane, and the heavily framed oil copy of St. John spoke eloquently.

"I must ask your pardon again, sir, for disturbing you. But a man of your character, as you have no doubt discovered, must suffer for the sake of his reputation. I——"

McCartney swayed and seized a yellow-plush portière for support. In a moment he had regained control of himself—apparently.

"A touch of faintness. I haven't eaten since morning." He looked around for a chair. The old man made a show of concern.

"Nothing to eat! Dear me! Well, well! Come in and sit down. Perhaps I can find something."

Deacon Andrews led the way past the stairs and swung open the door to the dining room. It had a musty smell, just a hint of the prison pen at noon time, and McCartney shuddered. The old man disappeared into the darkness, struck a sulphur match, a fact noted by his guest, and with some difficulty lighted a gas jet in a grotesquely proportioned chandelier. The gas, which had blazed up, he turned down to half its original volume.

"There, sit down," said he, pointing to a mahogany chair shrouded in a ticking cover, and settled himself in another on the opposite side of a great desert of table. McCartney did as he was bidden, mentally tabulating the additional facts offered to his observation by the remainder of the room. There was evident the same bare vastness as in the outer hall. Two more oils, one of mythological, the other of religious purport, balanced each other over the wings of a huge black carven sideboard. For the rest the yellow and brown wall paper repeated itself interminably into the shadow.

"Feel better?" asked the deacon.

"Yes, much," answered McCartney. "I'm used to going without food. The body can stand suffering better than the mind—and the heart."

"Let's try and fix up the body first," remarked the deacon, opening a compartment beneath the sideboard. "Here, try some of these," and he placed a plate of water biscuits upon the table.

McCartney essayed more or less successfully to eat one, while the old man retreated into the pantry and, after a hollow ringing of water upon an empty sink, returned with a thick tumbler of Croton.

"Good, eh? Nothing like plain flour food and Adam's ale! Now, what is it you want to say? I must be getting to bed."

McCartney hastily swallowed the last of the biscuit and leaned forward.

"If I could be sure my dear wife and child could have this to-night, I should be happy indeed. Oh, sir, poverty can be borne—but to see those whom we love suffer and be powerless to help them—I can hardly address myself to you, sir. I have never asked for charity before. I'm a hard-working man. I had a good position, a little home of my own, and a wife and child whom I loved devotedly. I care for nothing else in the world. Then came the chance that ended so disastrously for us. I thought it was the tide in my affairs, you know, that might lead on to fortune. My wife was offered a position in a traveling company at sixteen dollars a week, and they agreed to take me with them as press agent at thirty-five—fifty dollars a week all told. Can you blame us?"

"I don't approve of play acting," said the deacon.

"Don't think the less of my wife for that. She meant it for the best." McCartney's face worked and he brushed his eyes with the back of his hand.

"Look here, what's the use wasting time," interrupted the deacon. "How do I know who you are?"

"You have only my word, sir, that is true."

"What did you say you did for a living?"

"I'm a reporter. I live by my pen, sir, and I write articles on various subjects for the newspapers. I have even written a very modest book. But the modern public has crude taste in literature," sighed McCartney.

"Well, go on, now, and tell me about your trip or whatever it was," said the deacon.

"I gave up for the time, as I said, the precarious livelihood of a space writer. We sublet our rooms. I spent what little money I had saved upon a costume for my wife, and we started out making one-night stands."

"What was the name of your play?" inquired the deacon abruptly.

"'The two Orphans,'" replied McCartney without hesitation. "We got along well enough until we reached Rochester, and there the show broke down—went to the wall. We were stranded, without a cent, in a theatrical boarding house. My wife was taken down with pneumonia and little Cathie——"

"Little what?" asked the deacon.

"Short for Catherine—caught the croup. We had nowhere to turn. I pawned my watch to pay our board bill. We were sleeping in a single room—the three of us. For days I tramped the streets of Rochester looking for some work to do, but I was absolutely friendless and could find nothing. My wife got a little better, but little Catherine seemed to grow worse. I pawned my wife's wedding ring, all my clothes but those I have on, even my baby's tiny little bracelet we bought for her on her second birthday—O God, how I suffered! We talked it all over and decided that as New York was the only place where I was known, I had better return and earn enough money to send for them as soon as I could. The manager let me use his pass back to the city. I reached here three days ago, but I have found no work of any sort. Some of the press boys have shared their meals with me, but for the moment I'm penniless. Meantime my wife is lying sick in a strange household and my little girl may be dying!" McCartney sobbed brokenly. "I'm at my last gasp. I've nowhere to sleep to-night. No money to buy breakfast. I can't even pay for a postage stamp to write to them!"

"What street did you stay in at Rochester?"

"1421 Maple Avenue," shot back McCartney. "I wish you could see my little Catherine—she's such a tiny ball of sunshine. Every morning she used to come and wake me, and say, 'Come, daddy, come to breaf-crust!' She couldn't pronounce the word right—I hope she never will. She called the little dog I gave her a fox 'terrial' dog. Some people say children are all alike. If they could only see her—if she's still alive. Why I wouldn't give ten cents to live if I could only make sure Edith would have enough to get along on and give Catherine a decent education. I want that girl to grow up into a fine noble woman like her mother. And to think the last time I saw her she was lying in a stuffy hall bedroom in a third-class lodging house, her little forehead burning with fever, with my poor sick wife stretched beside her, fearing to move lest she should wake the child. She may be dead by this time, for I've had no work for three days, and I've been able to send them nothing—nothing! They may have been turned out into the streets, for the board bill was a week overdue when I left them. Don't you see it drives me nearly mad? I'm worse off a thousand times than if I stayed there with them. Sometimes I think there can't be any God, for if there was He'd never let me suffer so. And all for a little money—just because I can't pay the fare back to my sick wife and dying baby—my poor, sweet, little baby!"

McCartney's voice broke and he buried his haggard face on his arms. For a moment or two neither spoke, then the deacon sighed deeply.

"You do seem to have had hard luck," he remarked awkwardly. McCartney was still too overcome with emotion to reply.

"I reckon I'll have to break my rule and help you without references. I don't believe in giving, as a rule, unless you know who you are giving to."

He put his hand in his pocket.

"But I'll do it this time." He placed two quarters upon the table.

"There, half a dollar'll keep you nicely for a while. Of course, there's no use sendin' money to Rochester. Your landlady can't turn sick folks into the street, and if she does they can go to the hospital——"

He paused, startled by the look on McCartney's face, for the latter had risen like an avenging angel, white and trembling. Pointing at the two harmless coins, he cried:

"Is that your answer to the appeal of a starving man? Is that all your religion has done for you? Is that how you obey your Lord's teachings? 'Cup of cold water' indeed! Cold water! Cold water! That's what you've got instead of blood; you withered old epidermis! You miserable, dried-up apology for a human being!" He paused for breath, sweeping the room with indignant scorn.

"I know your kind! You old Christian Shylock! You bought those chromos at an auction! You took that old sideboard for a debt—yes, a debt at eighteen per cent interest. You don't pay a cent of taxes. You sing psalms and bag your trousers with kneeling on the platforms at prayer meetings and then loan out the church's money to yourself on worthless securities. You're too mean to keep a cat, for the cost of her milk. You read a penny newspaper and take books out of a circulating library. You put a petticoat on these chairs so your miserly little body won't wear out the seats."

The lean vagabond half shouted his anathema, the pallor of his face and brow darkening red from the violence of his passion. It was the very ecstasy of anger. Before it the little man with the white hair shrank into himself, diminishing into his chair, seeking moral opportunity of escape.

McCartney looked at the two coins contemptuously.

"Bah!" he exclaimed in disgust. "Half a dollar for a dying child and a starving woman, to say nothing of a shelterless man!" He broke into a mirthless laugh. "Allow me to return your generous answer to my application for assistance. A code of morals of my own, which doubtless you would not appreciate, compels me to restore what is obviously ten times more precious to the donor than to the recipient."

He filliped the two coins across the table into the lap of his host, who still crouched furtively with his head near the table.

"It makes me sick to look at you! Who could gaze without disgust upon the spectacle of an ossified creature like yourself, creeping through bare, deserted old age toward a grave mortgaged to the devil? Ugh! It is the horridest spectacle I have seen in a month."

"You're mad!" muttered the old man with hoarse fearfulness.

"Sometimes, but not now!" retorted McCartney. "I'll hold my evening session for Misers a moment longer. I pity you, Lord Pinhead Penurious! I pity you that you should have gone through life, a small term of say sixty years, in such stupidity. Sixty years of grubbing, of weighing meat and adding figures, of watching the prices fools pay for stocks, and how many days of life? How many good deeds? Oh, marvelous lack of wit! What know you of real happiness? Let me introduce myself, since you're so blind. What do you think I am, my good old Noddy Numbskull?"

"Crazy!" gasped the old man. "Do be quiet! Let me get you something more to eat."

"A thief, at your service. Oh, don't start! I'll not carry away your mahogany sideboard nor your bronze chandelier. I steal only to keep myself in purse—to eat. You dig to add to the column of figures in your pass book. I walk among the gods. My brain is worth twenty gray bags like yours. I have thoughts and dreams in terms to you unintelligible. I can live more in a week than haply you have done in the course of your whole crawling existence. What do you know of the spirit? Behind your altar sits a calf of gold. You grovel before it and slip out at the bottom the shekels you drop in at the top. To you the moon will always be made of green cheese, that 'orbed maiden with white fire laden'! Your hands are callous from counting money, your brain is——"

The old fellow arose. "Leave my house! Get out of here!"

He was an absurd figure, not more than five feet high, in his black broadcloth suit and string tie, as he faced McCartney's blazing eyes, and the latter laughed at him.

"I will fast enough. But you see I'm having a sensation—living. I'm doing good. Oh, yes, I am. If not to you, at least to myself. Do you think I'll ever forget little 'Cathie'? God! How I could have loved a real child! And I've only a cat." He laughed again. "I don't blame you for thinking me crazy—even you. Come, now, wasn't my picture of the phthisic wife and moaning child worth a place on the line—I mean, wasn't it good, eh? Worth more than two beggarly quarters? It gave me a thrill—what I need—it'll keep me alive for another twenty-four hours, without this." He held up a nickel-plated hypodermic syringe. It shone in the gaslight, and the old man started back and held out his hands.

"Don't shoot!" he cried in senile terror.

"Carrion!" cried McCartney. "Why do I waste my time on you? Why? Because I'm in your debt. I owe you little Catherine. I shall never forget her. And you, you—you are her foster father! God forbid!"

The old man sat down resignedly at the extreme side of the table.

"By God, I pity you!" exclaimed the lean man. "Do you hear that? I pity you—I!—a wretched, drugged, wilted, useless bundle of nerves twisted into the image of a man; a chap born with a silver spoon, with gifts, who tossed them all into the gutter—threw 'a pearl away richer than all his tribe'; a miserable creature who can't live without this" (he pressed the needles into his wrist), "and yet I wouldn't change with you! I'm more of a man than you. My very wants are sweeter than any joys your brutish senses can ever feel.

"O would there were a heaven to hear!
O would there were a hell to fear!
Dear Son of God, in mercy give
My soul to flames, but let me live!

"You don't know what that means! Haven't the vaguest idea. You're a mummy. You'll be the same ten thousand years from now. I suppose you think I made it up, eh?

"I am discouraged by the street,
The pacing of monotonous feet.

"That's all you want. You couldn't understand anything else, and yet it's my torture, and my salvation!"

The glow came back into McCartney's eyes and he repeated:

"Yes, that picture of little Catherine was worth more than two quarters. It ought to have been good for twenty dollars. It's worth more than that to me."

McCartney's voice had grown strong and clear.

The old fellow looked at him sharply and changed his tone. He must get this madman out of his house. He must humor him.

"Come, come, that's all right. Cheer up! Why, I had a little girl of my own once."

McCartney pierced him through and through with swimming eyes.

"And her memory was only worth two miserable quarters? You lie, you wretched old man, you lie!"

The old fellow started back. The door banged. McCartney was gone.

THE MAN HUNT

I

Note.—Action takes place about the year 1915.

Ralston strode briskly up Fifth Avenue, conscious all about him of the electric pressure of War. It was six o'clock—the hour when the hard outlines of the tops of office buildings and the prosaic steeples of contemporary religion, flushed with rose, and "fretted with golden fire," melt with a glow of unreality into the darkening blue. Here and there in the eastern sky tiny points trembled elusively, and a molten crescent followed him along the housetops, its pale disk growing each instant brighter.

Wheel traffic on the avenue, between the hours of nine and seven, had been suspended, and many pedestrians preferred the icy inequality of the street to the crowds upon the pavements. For the most part the movement was northward, meeting at the corners transverse streams of clerks and salesgirls jostling one another, arm in arm, down the side streets. Here and there could be seen an officer in service coat, with sword dangling beneath, and occasional knots of soldier boys in the uniform of the National Guard.

A little lad with an air of vast importance ran just ahead of Ralston, unlocking the bases of the electric lights and, in some mysterious way, turning them on. To his intense gratification he had succeeded in distancing his fellow across the way by half a block. Above the shuffle of feet could be heard the cries of the newsmen, "Extra! Extra! President calls for twenty new regiments! Latest extra! Twelfth to the front." These, clutching huge bundles of papers to their breasts, hurled themselves against the tide of humanity, appearing from all directions and sweeping down like vultures upon any individual wayfarer so unfortunate as to have his hand momentarily in his pocket. Their bundles quickly disappeared. Then they would run panting to the corners where the paper wagons were in waiting. It was a scene full of inspiration to Ralston, but it impressed him that, after all, the crowd seemed primarily interested in its own affairs—its business, its cold ears, its suppers.

For the newspapers the war had created a fierce, insatiable public maw. Circulations sprang by leaps into the millions. Extras followed one another by minutes. For the people in the shops it meant night work and longer hours; for society, something new to talk about; for the theaters, packed houses which roared at topical songs in which "war" rhymed with "bore," "rations" with "nations," "company" with "bump any," "foes" with "toes," "sword" with "board," and gloried in "Eddie" Foy and "Jo" Weber dressed as major generals. "Light Cavalry" and "Dixie" had superseded all other selections upon the musical programmes, and special rows of seats were reserved for "officers in uniform." The bars were jammed, traveling men sat in more thickly serried ranks than usual in the hotel windows, and Slosson's Billiard Parlors were lined with standing spectators. The commercial life of the city boiled over. Only the brokers came home early.

As Ralston entered Madison Square he found himself entangled in a dense throng wedged around an improvised scaffolding, upon which was displayed the electric-lighted bulletin of one of the big dailies. A man in a yellow-and-black-striped sweater was rapidly painting with a brush upon a blackboard in some white liquid the latest marching orders:

"Twelfth Regiment leaves via Penn. R. R. to-morrow 7 A.M."

"Terrible Riots in Tokio."

"R. W. Ralston appointed Second Assistant Secretary of the Navy."

As he fought his way through the crush he heard his name repeated on all sides, and a strange exaltation took possession of him. He had a curious desire to call out: "Yes. I'm Ralston! The Ralston up there! I'm he! That one! I'm Ralston!"

He felt like a prince suddenly called from seclusion to rule his people. He was going to do things which these garlic-breathing folk would spell out and marvel at. How often his name would flash across the square or play duskily upon the curtains at the theaters, linked with generals and "fighting" admirals. He laughed with the joy of it, that he, the settled-down man of the world, the hunter, the manager of estates, the student of literature, the lover of poetry, was going to play the popular hero.

He broke through the outer ring of the crowd and made for the park. A huge flag draped the porch of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. The flush in the west had faded to a streaky white and the stars had sprung from behind their curtains. A white beam of light played steadily from the tower of the Garden into the north. When it should swing to the south actual hostilities would have commenced. All the windows in the office buildings gleamed with activity. As he looked back he could see the man in the sweater erasing his name with a sponge, and his heart sank with momentary disappointment. Some new thing was coming over the wires hot with the fire of war. At the same moment he heard up the avenue the faint tapping of drums and the shriek of the fifes.

A line of mounted police burst into the square. The throng in front of the bulletin board surged over to the park. Then with a clash of cymbals and a prolonged rattle from the drums a full band burst into "There'll be a Hot Time in the Old Town To-night." The regimental flags came into view. In the light of the stars, in the dying of the day, in the moment of his exaltation, Ralston recognized the colors of his old regiment. Had he chosen he might have been marching at the head of his company even then. The crowd, cheering, forced him to the curb and into the street. With brimming eyes he doffed his hat and saluted the colors.

As he did so a sudden wild yell went up from the multitude. From one side of the square to the other reigned pandemonium. The very sound of the band was drowned in the uproar. From the top of the Flatiron Building a stream of rockets broke into the sky, and with a single movement the throng turned and gazed tensely at the Garden Tower, as the white shaft of light slowly swung into the south.

II

The little white house on East Twenty-fifth Street was ablaze with light as Ralston eagerly mounted the low stoop and pressed the bell. The visitor knocked the slush from his overshoes, slapped the left pocket of his coat as if to make certain that something was still safely there, stepped quickly across the threshold when the butler opened the door, handed the man his hat, threw off his fur coat upon an ebony chair, and only paused, and that but for a moment, at the entrance of the drawing-room. He was a tall, clean-built, brisk young man, thoroughly American in type, with an alert face, which, if not handsome, was nevertheless agreeable and attractive—a man, in a word, whom one would not hesitate to address upon the street, provided the question was pertinent and the information essential.

It was clear from his manner that he was no stranger, but to-day there were more women than usual at Miss Evarts's Monday afternoon, and the lights and chatter seemed a bit confusing to one whose mind was charged with the importance of a newly acquired responsibility. Miss Evarts was an old friend of his mother's, who, somewhat to his amused annoyance, took it upon herself to assume toward him a sort of sisterly attitude, which allowed her the privileges of relationship without prejudice to a certain degree of elderly sentiment. Attendance upon her selectly Bohemian gatherings was a duty which he performed when in town, with a regularity attributable less to a regard for Miss Evarts herself than to the fact that Ellen Ferguson was usually to be found there presiding over the tea table and ready for a brisk walk uptown afterwards.

"Ha! There he is now!" exclaimed a middle-aged man, with iron-gray hair and pointed mustaches, as the newcomer parted the portières.

The group about the warrior turned with one accord and stared, at present teacups, in his direction.

"Good afternoon, ladies and soldier," said Ralston. "I am the torchbearer of war. Firing has begun. The searchlight on the Garden is leveled south—like the lance of the horseman on the tower in Irving's 'Legend of the Arabian Astrologer.'"

The colonel set down his cup and pulled his mustaches with a heavy frown. He took pains to let it be seen that he was overcome with conflicting emotions—that stern duty summoned him from home and dear ones, but that his heart was throbbing to avenge his country's honor. They all looked toward him as if expecting a few appropriate remarks. The colonel's hands trembled, the veins upon his forehead swelled, and he seemed about to speak. Then he did.

"You don't say!" he remarked.

There was a sigh of disappointment from the ladies, and in the hiatus which followed Miss Evarts shook hands with Ralston and introduced him to the others as "the newly appointed secretary, you know." Which, or what of, she did not disclose.

"I always thought Ralston was cast for a topliner," continued the hostess, as he modestly evaded their congratulations.

"It's about time I left the chorus," answered her guest, adapting his language to Miss Evarts's open predilection for the footlights.

"Kicked your way up?" inquired, in a hoarse voice, a stout lady of stage traditions, who was clad in a wall-paper effect of gay brocade.

"My dear Mrs. Vokes, don't judge everybody by your own professional experience," remarked a young lady in brown, whose aquiline features were accounted "perfectly lovely" by a large suburban, theater-going public.

"Come! Come!" interrupted Miss Evarts loudly. "Miss Warren, order yourself more humbly before your betters."

The two popular favorites glared at one another defiantly.

"Well, in any event, Colonel Duer, he'll soon be giving you your sealed orders," said Miss Evarts, thus disposing of a situation which might have become awkward.

"Not unless the colonel gets a transfer. I'm steering the navy, not the army," laughed Ralston.

"The man behind!" murmured Mrs. Vokes.

Ralston bowed. "Very good, Mrs. Vokes," said he. "Yes, too far behind!"

"The navy, of course," Miss Evarts corrected herself, letting fall a lump of sugar and following it with an attenuated rivulet of cream. "Just a drop, as usual?"

"Did you read the President's proclamation?" asked a young girl in a gray picture hat. "Wasn't it splendid?"

"Mr. Ralston will probably write the next one," interjected another.

"No, only correct the proof," amended the hostess.

"And point it with 'Maxims'?" ventured the Vokes, now restored to complete good humor.

"Very sweet of you, Mrs. Vokes," said Ralston, recognizing the artificial dove of theatrical peace.

"You leave very soon, don't you, colonel?" asked Miss Evarts. "Is your kit-bag ready?"

"Yes, we leave by the Pennsylvania, at seven o'clock. The armory's a perfect bedlam. It looks as if every man in New York had collected all his worldly goods and chattels and dumped them on the tan bark," replied the colonel.

"The confusion must be something delightful. I suppose you have plenty of canned peaches?" inquired the brown girl innocently. "I understand that they are the staple food of heroes."

"They're certainly an indispensable stage property," admitted the colonel with something of an effort, recalling various evaporated valiants of the Cuban campaign.

During this profound discussion Ralston's eyes had been wandering from group to group, and at this moment the object of their search herself joined the party upon the other side of the table.

"Have another cup of tea, Ellen," urged Miss Evarts.

"I can't, positively, Aunt Bess," responded the girl; "I must go presently."

"How are things?" said the girl in brown, looking significantly at the colonel. "Have all your officers turned up?"

"Ye-es," he replied. "Constructively."

"Constructively?" persisted his inquisitor. "What a queer way to be present! Rather bad for an officer in a swell regiment to be dilatory, isn't it?"

"Every man has shown up," replied the rather nettled veteran, "except one, and he'll be along, all right."

"Oh, of course!" murmured the girl. "By the way, have you seen John Steadman? My cousin Fred, you know, is an officer in the same company, and he said last night at dinner that he hadn't seen him at the armory. Some one was mean enough to suggest that these ferocious military men aren't always 'warlike.'"

"There are no tin soldiers in my regiment," answered the colonel severely, turning for reënforcement to Mrs. Vokes.

Ellen Ferguson bit her lip, flashed a glance at the girl in brown and pulling her chinchilla boa into place departed with her nose in the air toward the next room. She paused for a moment to read the faded inscription, framed and hanging beneath an old cavalry saber on the opposite wall, then turning toward Ralston, raised her eyebrows inquiringly as if to ask how long he was going to occupy himself with fat old ladies and cheap actresses, and vanished. But the brown girl turned her guns on Ralston again before he could get away.

"I didn't know you had any drag at Washington," she remarked. "Who have you got on your staff—a senator or just a common garden M.C.?"

"Neither," he answered politely. "I don't know either of our senators, and I couldn't name a single congressman from the State."

"And then you have been away so long," added Miss Evarts. "Why, it's eight months, isn't it? If you ever had any pull I should think it would have faded away long ago."

"I was certainly the most surprised of all," said Ralston. "I haven't a blessed qualification for the job. I suppose the fact that I've just come from the Philippines and have seen something of the Asiatic Squadron may have had a little to do with it."

"For the navy as against the army, perhaps," said the brown girl. "But it doesn't explain your getting an appointment in the first place. You must be a politician in sheep's clothing."

"Well, to be perfectly frank," answered Ralston, seeing that he was in for it, "a year ago last September, when I was shooting out at Jackson's Hole, I ran across the President and saw something of him for a week or so. I was able to help him in a matter of no importance, and you know he isn't the kind that forgets anything. He's a good fellow!"

"Just like him," commented the young lady. "Now, why didn't he give it to my brother George, who got nervous prostration making stump speeches for him at the last election?"

"Oh, I admit it's entirely undeserved, but I must plead guilty to being glad of a branch office in the White House and of a chance to be one of the boys in the conning tower," answered Ralston.

"Well, you're only an assistant secretary, anyway," said the girl. "I'm green with jealousy as it is. But aren't you sorry not to be going with your old company?"

"Don't!" he exclaimed. "You make me feel as if I belonged to the Home Guard. Honestly, I'd rather be back with the regiment, but, you see, I had served my five years ages before you were born. I ought to give the younger fellows a chance."

"I see," said the girl. "When do you go?"

"To-morrow morning at ten. I reach Washington in time to dine at the White House."

Several of the women arose and the group about the table gradually drifted away. The crowd was thinning out. Ralston, knowing very well that Ellen would be waiting for him, mumbled something to Miss Evarts and escaped.

"Well!" he exclaimed, entering the other room, and seizing her hands as she stood with her back to the fire. "Pretty good, isn't it?"

"I should say it was!" she cried delightedly. "Why, Dick, it's the chance of your life. If you make good only a little bit you may get anywhere. It's perfectly splendid! I'm so glad!"

Genuine pleasure shone in her eyes. Ralston's heart beat faster. Of course she cared for him. She must care for him. There was a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood— He stepped closer and bent his head toward hers.

"Nell—" he began.

But she apparently was not listening, and the glad look had quickly given place to another. He paused, wondering at the change. Her dark eyes, with their Oriental, upturned corners, were half veiled and her high-arched brows were contracted in a frown. He drew back and pulled out his cigarette case.

"Dick," she cried suddenly, "I want to tell you something! I'm sorry to bother you when you're so happy, and I'm so proud of you, but I'm terribly worried about something."

"Dear! Dear!" laughed Ralston, striking a match and seeing that his opportunity had somehow vanished. "What's up? Been losing at bridge?"

She smiled faintly.

"Don't make fun of me," she replied. "No, I'm really bothered." She put her hand to her forehead and pushed back her hair. "I'm afraid one of my friends isn't— Oh, I don't know how to explain it!"

A momentary suspicion flashed across his mind.

"Do you think I ought to go to the front?" he asked, relieved.

She gave a little laugh.

"You? What a goose! Of course not!"

Ralston experienced a shock of disappointment.

"What is it, then?"

"Dick," said she in quick, subdued tones, "I can't help speaking about it, and you're the best friend I've got. It's about John."

Ralston moved uneasily.

"John Steadman?"

"We're old friends, you know."

"Yes, I remember."

"I don't suppose you've seen him?"

"Not since I came back. Before that, often."

Ellen again passed her hand wearily across her forehead and turned abruptly away from the fire. The action was unconscious, involuntary. He had never associated Ellen with Steadman.

"What is it?" he asked sympathetically.

"Oh, nothing definite. Only he's been a little irregular of late. I haven't seen him for over a week. I don't think anybody has."

"He's a captain in the Twelfth, isn't he?"

"Yes. O Dick! You heard what that spiteful Warren girl said about tin soldiers?"

"Of course. Nonsense!"

"I can't help it. It's Honor, you know!"

"You mean you think he mayn't turn up?"

"I can't—I won't think that."

"But he hasn't?—and they're beginning to talk?"

"You heard for yourself."

"Oh, that!"

"Some people never live down less."

"But if he does turn up, why there's an end to it," he said.

"But why isn't he here?" she cried.

"How do I know? He may be on a business trip."

"Of course I thought of that," she replied.

"Oh, he'll be there, all right, when the time comes."

She began arranging her furs. One thing Ralston always admired about her was her care in dress. He did not know how few clothes she really had. She seemed always elegantly, if not luxuriously, clad.

They strolled slowly toward the door.

"Well," he said, "I'm awfully sorry you're upset. I'm sure he'll turn up all right. A man couldn't afford not to. Don't worry. If there was anything that I could do, no matter what, you know I'd be glad to do it for your sake, Ellen."

"Thank you, Dick. I know that," she answered.

"Well, good-by," said he. "Say good night to Miss Evarts for me, will you? I've got to run. I'm late for dinner as it is."

She gave him her hand and he held it for a moment. As he did so he looked her full in the face.

"Ellen," said he, "tell me something. Do you care about—Steadman?"

She turned her head slightly from him before replying. Then she looked back again and answered hesitatingly:

"I think—I care."

As she spoke the words she withdrew her hand. Then she flushed and her eyes brightened.

"Dick," she said slowly, in a voice that trembled a little, "I know I care."

The portières fell behind him. Mechanically he put on his overcoat and left the house, pausing for a moment at the top of the steps. A little smile hovered on his lips, but his eyes were very sad.

III

Ralston walked as far as the Twenty-eighth Street subway station, where he caught a local for Forty-second Street. Thence he hurried to Delmonico's. It was now seven o'clock, and already the restaurant was nearly full.

"Philip, have you seen Mr. Scott?" he asked of the doorman.

"In the palm room, Mr. Ralston," answered the servant at once. "The head waiter told me to say that your dinner was ready."

Ralston checked his coat, and soon caught sight of his newly engaged private secretary at a small table in a corner. They shook hands, and Scott pointed to a pile of letters and papers beside him.

"This stuff came while you were out. I thought I'd better bring it along to save time."

"Good!" commented Ralston. "What is most of it?"

"Eight letters of congratulation, which I listed. A long letter from some old lady friend of yours when you were in Exeter——"

"I know—Mrs. Gorringe."

"Then that power of attorney from Bee, Single & Quick, that you expected. Oh, I don't know—a lot of circulars: 'Red Cross,' 'Special Relief,' 'Society for Assisting Wives and Children of Enlisted Men.'"

"Send 'em twenty-five apiece."