PAWNED

A HANSOM cab, somewhat woebegone in appearance, threaded its way in a curiously dejected manner through the heart of New York's East Side. A fine drizzle fell, through which the street lamps showed as through a mist; and, with the pavements slippery, the emaciated looking horse, the shafts jerking and lifting up at intervals around its ears, appeared hard put to it to preserve its footing.

The cabman on his perch drove with his coat collar turned up and his chin on his breast. He held the reins listlessly, permitting the horse to choose its own gait. At times he lifted the little trap door in the roof of the cab and peered into the interior; occasionally his hand, tentatively, hesitantly, edged toward a bulge in his coat pocket-only to be drawn back again in a sort of panic haste.

The cab turned into a street where, in spite of the drizzle, hawkers with their push-carts under flaring, spitting gasoline banjoes were doing a thriving business. The horse went more slowly. There was very little room. With the push-carts lining the curbs on both sides, and the overflow of pedestrians from the sidewalks into the street, it was perhaps over-taxing the horse's instinct to steer a safe course for the vehicle it dragged behind it. Halfway along the block a wheel of the hansom bumped none too gently into one of the push-carts, nearly upsetting the latter. The hawker, with a frantic grab, saved his wares from disaster-by an uncomfortably narrow margin, and, this done, hurled an impassioned flood of lurid oratory at the two-wheeler.

The cabman lifted his chin from his breast, stared stonily at the hawker, slapped the reins mechanically on the roof of the cab as an intimation to the horse to proceed, and the cab wended its way along again.

At the end of the block, it turned the corner, and drew up before a small building that was nested in between two tenements. The cabman climbed down from his perch, and stood for a moment surveying the three gilded balls that hung over the dingy doorway, and the lettering—“Paul Veniza. Pawnbroker”—that showed on the dully-lighted windows which confronted him.

He drew his hand across his eyes; then, reaching suddenly inside the cab, lifted a bundle in his arms, and entered the shop. A man behind the counter stared at him, and uttered a quick ejaculation. The cabman went on into a rear room. The man from behind the counter followed. In the rear room, a woman rose from a table where she had been sewing, and took the bundle quickly from the cabman's arms, as it emitted a querulous little cry.

The cabman spoke for the first time.

“She's dead,” he said heavily.

The woman, buxom, middle-aged, stared at him, white-faced, her eyes filling suddenly with tears.

“She died an hour ago,” said the cabman, in the same monotonous voice. “I thought mabbe you'd look after the baby girl for a bit, Mrs. Veniza—you and Paul.”

“Of course!” said the woman in a choked voice. “I wanted to before, but—but your wife wouldn't let the wee mite out of her sight.”

“She's dead now,” said the cabman. “An hour ago.”

Paul Veniza, the pawnbroker, crossed to the cabman's side, and, placing his hands on the other's shoulders, drew the man down into a chair.

“Hawkins,” he said slowly, “we're getting on in years, fifty each of us, and we've known each other for a good many of those fifty.” He cleared his throat. “You've made a mess of things, Hawkins.”

The woman, holding the baby, started suddenly forward, a red flush dyeing her cheeks.

“Paul!” she cried out sharply. “How can you be so cruel at such an hour as this?”

The pawnbroker shook his head. He had moved to the back of the cabman's chair. Tall, slight, grave and kindly-faced, with high forehead and the dark hair beginning to silver at the temples, there seemed something almost esthetic about the man.

“It is the hour,” he said deliberately; “the one hour in which I must speak plainly to my old friend, the one hour that has come into his life which may mean everything to him.” His right hand slipped from the cabman's shoulder and started, tentatively, hesitantly, toward a bulge in the cabman's coat pocket—but was drawn back again, and found its place once more on the cabman's shoulder. “I was afraid, Hawkins, when you married the young wife. I was afraid of your curse.”

The cabman's elbows were on the table; he had sunk his chin in his hands. His blue eyes, out of a wrinkled face of wind-beaten tan, roved around the little room, and rested finally on the bundle in the woman's arms.

“That's finished now,” he said dully.

“I pray God it is,” said Paul Veniza earnestly; “but you said that before—when you married the young wife.”

“It's finished now—so help me, God!” The cabman's lips scarcely moved. He stared straight in front of him.

There was silence in the little, plainly furnished room for a moment; then the pawnbroker spoke again:

“I was born here in New York, you know, after my parents came from Italy. There was no money, nothing—only misery. I remember. It is like that, Hawkins, isn't it, where you have just come from, and where you have left the young wife?”

“Paul!” his wife cried out again. “How can you say such things? It—it is not like you!” Her lips quivered. She burst into tears, and buried her face in the little bundle she snuggled to her breast.

The cabman seemed curiously unmoved—as though dazed, almost detached from his immediate surroundings. He said nothing.

The pawnbroker's hands still rested on the cabman's shoulders, a strange gentleness in his touch that sought somehow, it seemed, to offer sympathy for his own merciless words.

“I have been thinking of this for a long time, ever since we knew that Claire could not get better,” he said. “We knew you would bring the little one here. There was no other place, except an institution. And so I have been thinking about it. What is the little one's name?”

The cabman shook his head.

“She has no name,” he said.

“Shall it be Claire, then?” asked the pawnbroker gently.

The cabman's fingers, where they rested on his cheeks, gathered a fold of flesh and tightened until the blood fled, leaving little white spots. He nodded his head.

Again the pawnbroker was silent for a little while.

“My wife and I will take little Claire—on one condition,” he said at last, gravely. “And that condition is that she is to grow up as our child, and that, though you may come here and see her as often as you like, she is not to know that you are her father.”

The cabman turned about a haggard face.

“Not to know that I am her father—ever,” he said huskily.

“I did not say that,” said Paul Veniza quietly. He smiled now, leaning over the cabman. “I am a pawnbroker; this is a pawn-shop. There is a way in which you may redeem her.”

The cabman pressed a heavy hand over his eyes.

“What is that way?” He swallowed hard as he spoke.

“By redeeming yourself.” The pawnbroker's voice was low and earnest. “What have you to offer her to-day, save a past that has brought only ruin and misery? And for the future, my old friend? There is no home. There was no home for the young wife. You said when you married Claire, as you have said to-night, that it was all finished. But it was not finished. And your curse was the stronger. Well, little Claire is only a baby, and there would be years, anyhow, before just a man could take care of her. Do you understand, my old friend? If, at the end of those years, enough of them to make sure that you are sure of yourself, you have changed your life and overcome your weakness, then you shall have little Claire back again, and she shall know you as her father, and be proud of you. But if you do not do this, then she remains with us, and we are her parents, and you pledge me your word that it shall be so.”

There was no answer for a long time. The woman was still crying—but more softly now. The cabman's chin had sunk into his hands again. The minutes dragged along. Finally the cabman lifted his head, and, pushing back his chair, stumbled to his feet.

“God—God bless you both!” he whispered. “It's all finished now for good, as I told you, but you are right, Paul. I—I ain't fit to have her yet. I'll stand by the bargain.” He moved blindly toward the door.

The pawnbroker interposed.

“Wait, Hawkins, old friend,” he said. “I'll go with you. You'll need some help back there in the tenement, some one to look after the things that are to be done.”

The cabman shook his head.

“Not to-night,” he said in a choked way. “Leave me alone to-night.”

He moved again toward the door, and this time Paul Veniza stepped aside, but, following, stood bareheaded in the doorway as the other clambered to his perch on the hansom cab.

Hawkins slapped his reins on the roof of the cab. The horse started slowly forward.

The drizzle had ceased; but the horse, left to his own initiative, was still wary of the wet pavements and moved at no greater pace than a walk. Hawkins drove with his coat collar still turned up and his chin on his breast.

And horse and man went aimlessly from street to street—and the night grew late.

And the cabman's hand reached tentatively, hesitantly, a great many times, toward a bulge in his coat pocket, and for a great many times was withdrawn as empty as it had set forth. And then, once, his fingers touched a glass bottle neck... and then, not his fingers, but his lips... and for a great many times.

It had begun to rain again.

The horse, as if conscious of the futility of its own movements, had stopped, and, with head hanging, seemed to cower down as though seeking even the slender protection of the shafts, whose ends now made half circles above his ears.

Something slipped from the cabman's fingers and fell with a crash to the pavement. The cabman leaned out from his perch and stared down at the shattered glass.

“Broken,” said the cabman vacantly.

TWENTY YEARS LATER

IT was silver light. Inside the reefs the water lay placid and still, mirroring in a long, shimmering line the reflection of the full tropic moon; beyond, ever and anon, it splashed against its coral barriers in little crystal showers. It was a soundless night. No breeze stirred the palms that, fringing white stretches of beach around the bay, stood out in serene beauty, their irregular tops etched with divine artistry into the sky-line of the night.

Out from the shore, in that harbor which holds no sanctuary in storm, the mail boat, dark save for her riding lights, swung at her moorings; shoreward, the perspective altered in the moonlight until it seemed that Mount Vaea had lowered its sturdy head that it might hover in closer guardianship over the little town, Apia straggled in white patches along the road. And from these white patches, which were dwellings and stores, there issued no light.

From a point on the shore nearest the mail boat, a figure in cotton drawers and undershirt slipped silently into the water and disappeared. Thereafter, at intervals, a slight ripple disturbed the surface as the man, coming up to breathe, turned upon his back and lay with his face exposed; for the rest he swam under water. It was as though he were in his natural element. He swam superbly even where, there in the Islands, all the natives were born to the sea; but his face, when visible on the few occasions that it floated above the surface, was the face, not of a native, but of a white man.

And now he came up in the shadow of the steamer's hull where, near the stern, a rope dangled over the side, almost touching the water's edge. And for a moment he hung to the rope, motionless, listening. Then he began to swarm upward with fine agility, without a sound, his bare feet finding silent purchase against the iron plates of the hull.

Halfway up he paused and listened intently again. Was that a sound as of some one astir, the soft movement of feet on the deck above? No, there was nothing now. Why should there be? It was very late, and Nanu, the man who lisped, was no fool. The rope had hung from exactly that place where, of all others, one might steal aboard without attracting the attention of the watch.

He went on again, and finally raised his head above the rail. The deck, flooded with moonlight, lay white and deserted below him. He swung himself over, dropped to the deck—and the next instant reeled back against the rail as a rope-end, swung with brutal force, lashed across his face, raising a welt from cheek to cheek. Half stunned, he was still conscious that a form had sprung suddenly at him from out of the darkness of the after alleyway, that the form was one of the vessel's mates, that the form still swung a short rope-end that was a murderous weapon because it was little more flexible than iron and was an inch in thickness, and that, behind this form, other forms, big forms, Tongans of the crew, pressed forward.

A voice roared out, hoarse, profane, the mate's voice:

“Thought you'd try it again, did you, you damned beachcomber? I'll teach you! And when I find the dog that left that rope for you, I'll give him a leaf out of the same book! You bloody waster! I'll teach you! I'll——”

The rope-end hissed as it cut through the air again, aiming for the swimmer's face. But it missed its mark. Perhaps it was an illusion of the white moonlight, lending unreality to the scene, exciting the imagination to exaggerate the details, but the swimmer seemed to move with incredible speed, with the lithe, terrible swiftness of a panther in its spring. The rope-end swished through the air, missing a suddenly lowered head by the barest fraction of an inch, and then, driven home with lightning-like rapidity, so quick that the blows seemed as one, the swimmer's fists swung, right and left, crashing with terrific impact to the point of the mate's jaw. And the mate's head jolted back, quivered grotesquely on his shoulders for an instant like a tuning fork, sagged, and the great bulk of the man collapsed and sprawled inertly on the deck.

There was a shuffle of feet from the alleyway, cries. The swimmer swung to face the expected rush, and it halted, hesitant. It gave him time to spring and stand erect upon the steamer's rail. On the upper deck faces and forms began to appear. A man in pajamas leaned far out and peered at the scene.

There was a shout from out of the dark, grouped throng in the alleyway; it was chorused. The rush came on again for the rail; and the dripping figure that stood there, with the first sound that he had made—a laugh, half bitter, half of cool contempt—turned, and with a clean dive took the water again and disappeared.

Presently he reached the shore. There were more than riding lights out there on the steamer now. He gave one glance in that direction, shrugged his shoulders, and started off along the road. At times he raised his hand to brush it across his face where the welt, raw and swollen now, was a dull red sear. He walked neither fast nor slow.

The moonlight caught the dripping figure now and then in the open spaces, and seemed to peer inquisitively at the great breadth of shoulder, and the rippling play of muscle under the thin cotton drawers and shirt, which, wet and clinging, almost transparent, scarce hid the man's nakedness; and at the face, that of a young man, whose square jaw was locked, whose gray eyes stared steadily along the road, and over whose forehead, from the drenched, untrimmed mass of fair hair, the brine trickled in little rivulets as though persistent in its effort to torture with its salt caress the raw, skin-broken flesh across the cheeks.

Then presently a point of land ran out, and, the road ignoring this, the bay behind was shut out from view. And presently again, farther on, the road came to a long white stretch of beach on the one hand, and foliage and trees on the other. And here the dripping figure halted and stood hesitant as though undecided between the moonlit stretch of sand, and the darkness of a native hut that was dimly outlined amongst the trees on the other side of the road.

After a moment he made his way to the hut and, groping around, secured some matches and a box of cigarettes. He spoke into the empty blackness.

“You lose, Nanu,” he muttered whimsically. “They wouldn't stand water and I left them for you. But now, you see, I'm back again, after all.”

He lighted a cigarette, and in the flame of the match stared speculatively at the small, broken pieces of coral that made the floor of the hut, and equally, by the addition of a thin piece of native matting, his bed.

“The sand is softer,” he said with a grim drawl.

He went out from the hut, crossed the road, flung himself upon his back on the beach, and clasped his hands behind his head. The smoke from his cigarette curled languidly upward in wavering spirals, and he stared for a long time at the moon.

“Moon madness,” he said at last. “They say if you look long enough the old boy does you in.”

The cigarette finished, he flung the stub away. After a time, he raised his head and listened. A moment later he lay back again full length on the sand. The sound of some one's footsteps coming rapidly along the road from the direction of the town was now unmistakably audible.

“The jug for mine, I guess,” observed the young man to the moon. “Probably a file of native constabulary in bare feet that you can't hear bringing up the rear!”

The footsteps drew nearer, until, still some distance away, the white-clad figure of a man showed upon the tree-fringed road. The sprawled figure on the beach made no effort toward flight, and less toward concealment. With a sort of studied insolence injected into his challenge, he stuck another cigarette between his lips and deliberately allowed full play to the flare of the match.

The footsteps halted abruptly. Then, in another moment, they crunched upon the sand, and a tall man, with thin, swarthy face, a man of perhaps forty or forty-five, who picked assiduously at his teeth with a quill toothpick, stood over the recumbent figure.

“Found you, have I?” he grunted complacently.

“If you like to put it that way,” said the young man indifferently. He raised himself on his elbow again, and stared toward the road. “Where's the army?” he inquired.

The tall man allowed the point of the quill toothpick to flex and strike back against his teeth. The sound was distinctive. Tck! He ignored the question.

“When the mate came out of dreamland,” he said, “he lowered a boat and came ashore to lay a complaint against you.”

“I can't say I'm surprised,” admitted the young man. “I suppose I am to go with you quietly and make no trouble or it will be the worse for me—I believe that's the usual formula, isn't it?”

The man with the quill toothpick sat down on the sand. He appeared to be absorbed for a moment in a contemplation of his surroundings.

“These tropic nights are wonderful, aren't they? Kind of get you.” He plied the quill toothpick industriously. “I'm a passenger on the steamer, and I came ashore with the mate. He's gone back—without laying the complaint. There's always a way of fixing things—even injured feelings. One of the native boat's-crew said he knew where you were to be found. He's over there.” He jerked his head in the direction of the road.

The young man sat bolt upright.

“I don't get you,” he said slowly, “except that you are evidently not personifying the majesty of the law. What's the idea?”

“Well,” said the other, “I had three reasons for coming. The first was that I thought I recognized you yesterday when they threw you off the steamer, and was sure of it to-night when—I am a light sleeper—I came out on the upper deck at the sound of the row and saw you take your departure from the vessel for the second time.”

“I had no idea,” said the young man caustically, “that I was so well known. Are you quite sure you haven't made a mistake?”

“Quite!” asserted the other composedly. “Of course, I am not prepared to say what your present name is—you may have considered a change beneficial—so I will not presume in that respect. But you are, or were, a resident of San Francisco. You were very nice people there. I have no knowledge of your mother, except that I understand she died in your infancy. A few years ago your father died and left you, not a fortune, but quite a moderate amount of money. I believe the pulpits designate it as a 'besetting sin.' You had one—gambling. The result was that you traveled the road a great many other young men have traveled; the only difference being that, in so far as I am competent to speak, you hold the belt for speed and all-round proficiency. You went utterly, completely and whole-heartedly to hell.”

The tall man became absorbed again in his surroundings. “And I take it,” he said presently, “that in spite of the wonders of a tropic night, you are still there.”

The young man shrugged his shoulders.

“You have put it very delicately,” he said, with a grim smile. “I'm sorry, but I am obliged to confess that the recognition isn't mutual. Would you mind telling me who you are?”

“We'll get to that in due course,” said the other. “My second reason was that it appeared to me to be logical to suppose that, having once been the bona fide article, you could readily disguise yourself as a gentleman again, and your interpretation of the rôle would be beyond suspicion or——”

“By God!” The welt across the young man's face grew suddenly white, as though the blood had fled from it to suffuse his temples. He half rose, staring levelly into the other's eyes.

The tall man apparently was quite undisturbed.

“And the third reason is that I have been looking for just such a—there really isn't any other word—gentleman, providing he was possessed of another and very essential characteristic. You possess that characteristic in a most marked degree. Your actions tonight are unmistakable evidence that you have nerve.”

“It strikes me that you've got a little of it yourself,” observed the young man evenly.

The quill toothpick under the adroit guidance of his tongue traveled from the left- to the right-hand side of the other's mouth.

“It is equally as essential to me,” he said dryly. “You appear to fill the bill; but there is always the possibility of a fly in the ointment; complications—er—unpleasant complications, perhaps, you know, that might have arisen since you left San Francisco, and that might—er—complicate matters.”

The young man relapsed into a recumbent position upon the sand, his hands clasped under his head again, and in his turn appeared to be absorbed in the beauty of the night.

“Moon-madness!” he murmured pityingly.

“A myth!” said the tall man promptly. “Would you mind sketching in roughly the details of your interesting career since you left the haunts of the aristocracy?”

“I don't see any reason why I should.” The young man yawned.

“Do you see any reason why you shouldn't?” inquired the other composedly.

“None,” said the young man, “except that the steamer sails at daybreak, and I should never forgive myself if you were left behind.”

“Nor forgive yourself, perhaps, if you failed to sail on her as a first-class passenger,” said the tall man quietly.

“What?” ejaculated the young man sharply.

The other shrugged his shoulders.

“It depends on the story,” he said.

“I—I don't understand.” The young man frowned. “There's a chance for me to get aboard the mail boat?”

“It depends on the story,” said the other again.

“Moon-mad!” murmured the young man once more, after a moment's silence. “But it's cheap at the price, for it's not much of a story. Beginning where you left off in my biography, I ducked when the crash came in San Francisco, and having arrived in hell, as you so delicately put it, I started out to explore. Mr. Dante had it right—there's no use stopping in the suburbs. I lived a while in his last circle. It's too bad he never knew the 'Frisco water-front; it would have fired his imagination! I'm not sure, though, but Honolulu's got a little on 'Frisco, at that! Luck was out. I was flat on my back when I got a chance to work my way out to Honolulu. One place was as good as another by then.”

The young man lit a cigarette, and stared at the glowing tip reminiscently with his gray eyes.

“You said something about gambling,” he went on; “but you didn't say enough. It's a disease, a fever that sets your blood on fire, and makes your life kind of delirious, I guess—if you get it chronic. I guess I was born with it. I remember when I was a kid I—but I forgot, pardon me, the mail boat sails at daybreak.”

“Go as far as you like,” said the tall man, picking at his teeth with the quill toothpick.

The young man shook his head.

“Honolulu is the next stopping place,” he said. “On the way out I picked up a few odd dollars from my fellow-members of the crew, and——”

“Tck!” It was the quill toothpick.

The young man's eyes narrowed, and his jaw set challengingly.

“Whatever else I've done,” he stated in a significant monotone, “I've never played crooked. It was on the level.”

“Of course,” agreed the tall man hastily.

“I sat in with the only stakes I had,” said the young man, still monotonously. “A bit of tobacco, a rather good knife that I've got yet, and a belt that some one took a fancy to as being worth half a dollar.”

“Certainly! Of course!” reiterated the tall man in haste.

The quill toothpick was silent.

“A pal of mine, one of the stokers, said he knew of a good place to play in Honolulu where there was a square deal,” continued the young man; “so, a night or so after we reached there, we got shore leave and started off. Perhaps you know that part of Honolulu. I don't. I didn't see much of it. I know there's some queer dumps, and queer doings, and the scum of every nationality under the sun to run up against. And I know it was a queer place my mate steered me into. It was faro. The box was run by an old Chinaman who looked as though he were trying to impersonate one of his ancestors, he was so old. My mate and I formed the English-speaking community. There were a Jap or two, and a couple of pleasant-looking cutthroats who cursed in Spanish, and a Chink lying on a bunk rolling his pill. Oh, yes, the place stunk! Every once in a while the door opened and some other Godforsaken piece of refuse drifted in. By midnight we had a full house of pretty bad stuff.

“It ended in a row, of course. Some fool of a tout came in chaperoning a party of three men, who were out to see the sights; they were passengers, I found out later, from one of the ships in port. I don't know what started the rumpus; some private feud, I guess. The first thing I knew one of the Spaniards had a knife out and had jumped for the tout. It was a free-for-all in a minute. I saw the tout go down, and he didn't look good, and the place suddenly struck me as a mighty unhealthy place to be found in on that account. The stoker and I started to fight our way through the jam to the door. There was a row infernal. I guess you could have heard it a mile away. Anyway, before we could break from the clinches, as it were, the police were fighting their way in just as eagerly as we were fighting our way out.

“I didn't like the sight of that tout lying on the floor, or the thought of what might happen in the police court the next morning if I were one of the crowd to adorn the dock. And things weren't going very well. The police were streaming in through the doorway. And then I caught sight of something I hadn't seen before because it had previously been hidden by a big Chinese screen—one of those iron-shuttered windows they seem so fond of down there. Things weren't very rosy just at that moment because about the worst hell-cat scramble on record was being made a little worse by some cheerful maniac starting a bit of revolver practice, but I remember that I couldn't help laughing to save my soul. In the mêlée one of the folding wings of the screen had suddenly doubled up, and, besides the window, I saw hiding behind there for dear life, his face pasty-white with terror, a very courageous gentleman—one of the rubbernecks who had come in with the tout. He was too scared, I imagine, even to have the thought of tackling such formidable things as iron shutters enter his head. I yelled to the stoker to get them open, and tried to form a sort of rear guard for him while he did it. Then I heard them creak on their hinges, and heard him shout. I made a dash for it, but I wasn't quite quick enough. One of the policemen grabbed me, but I was playing in luck then. I got in a fortunate swing and he went down for the count. I remember toppling the screen and the man behind it over on the floor as I jumped sideways for the window; and I remember a glimpse of his terrorized face, his eyes staring at me, his mouth wide open, as I took a headlong dive over the window sill. The stoker picked me up, and we started on the run.

“The police were scrambling through the window after us. I didn't need to be told that there wouldn't be a happy time ahead if I were caught. Apart from that tout who, though I had nothing to do with it, gave the affair a very serious aspect, I was good for the limit on the statute books for resisting arrest in the first place, and for knocking out an officer in the second. But the stoker knew his way about. We gave the police the slip, and a little later on we landed up in a sailors' boarding-house run by a one-eyed cousin of Satan, known as Lascar Joe. We lay there hidden while the tout got better, and the Spanish hidalgo got sent up for a long term for murderous assault. Finally Lascar Joe slipped the stoker aboard some ship; and a week or so later he slipped me, the transfer being made in the night, aboard a frowsy tramp, bound for New Zealand.”

The young man paused, evidently inviting comment.

“Go on,” prompted the man with the quill toothpick softly.

“There isn't very much more,” said the young man. He laughed shortly. “As far as I know I'm the sole survivor from that tramp. She never got to New Zealand; and that's how I got here to Samoa. She went down in a hurricane. I was washed ashore on one of this group of islands about forty or fifty miles from here. I don't know much about the details; I was past knowing anything when the bit of wreckage on which I had lashed myself days before came to port. There weren't any—I was going to say white people on the island, but I'm wrong about that. The Samoans are about the whitest people on God's green earth. I found that out. There were only natives on that island. I lived with them for about two months, and I got to be pretty friendly with them, especially the old fellow who originally picked me up half drowned and unconscious on the beach, and who took me into the bosom of his family. Then the missionary boat came along, and I came back with it to Apia here.”

The young man laughed again suddenly, a jarring note in his mirth.

“I don't suppose you've heard that original remark about the world being such a small place after all! I figured that back here in Apia a shipwrecked and destitute white man would get the glad hand and at least a chance to earn his stake. Maybe he would ordinarily; but I didn't. I hadn't said anything to the missionary about that Honolulu escapade, and I was keeping it dark when I got here and started to tell the shipwreck end of my story over again. Queer, isn't it? Lined up in about the first audience I had was the gentleman with the pasty face that I had toppled over with the screen in the old Chink's faro dump. He was one of the big guns here, and had been away on a pleasure trip, and Honolulu had been on his itinerary. That settled it. The missionary chap spoke up a bit for me, I'll give him credit for that, though I had a hunch he was going to use that play as an opening wedge in an effort to reform me later on. But I had my fingers crossed. The whites here turned their backs on me, and I turned my back on the missionary. That's about all there was to it. That was about two weeks ago, and for those two weeks I've lived in another of Mr. Dante's delightful circles.”

He sat suddenly upright, a clenched fist flung outward.

“Not a cent! Not a damned sou-marquee! Nothing but this torn shirt, and what's left of these cotton pants! Hell!”

He lay back on the sand quite as suddenly again, and fell to laughing softly.

“Tck!” It was the quill toothpick.

“But at that,” said the young man, “I'm not sure you could call me a cynic, though the more I see of my own breed as compared with the so-called heathen the less I think of—my own breed! I still had a card up my sleeve. I had a letter of introduction to a real gentleman and landed proprietor here. His name was Nanu, and he gave me his house to live in, and made me free of his taro and his breadfruit and all his worldly possessions; and it was the old native who took care of me on the other island that gave me the letter. It was a queer sort of letter, too—but never mind that now.

“Splendid isolation! That's me for the last two weeks as a cross between a pariah and a mangy cur! What amazes me most is myself. The gentleman of the Chinese screen is still in the land of the living and walking blithely around. Funny, isn't it? That's one reason I was crazy to get away—before anything happened to him.” The tanned fist closed fiercely over a handful of sand, then opened and allowed the grains to trickle slowly through the fingers, and its owner laughed softly again. “I've lived through hell here in those two weeks. I guess we're only built to stand so much. I was about at the end of my rope when the mail steamer put in yesterday. I hope I haven't idealized my sojourn here in a way that would cause you to minimize my necessity for getting away, no matter to where or by what means! Nanu and I went out to the ship in his outrigger. Perhaps I would have had better luck if I had run into any other than the particular mate I did. I don't know. I offered to work my passage. Perhaps my fame had already gone abroad—or aboard. He invited me to make another excursion into Dante-land. But when he turned his back on me I slipped below, and tucked myself in behind some of the copra sacks they were loading. Once the steamer was away I was away with her, and I was willing to take what was coming. But I didn't get a chance. I guess the mate was sharper than I gave him credit for. After about four hours of heat and stink down there below decks that I had to grit my teeth to stand, he hauled me out as though he knew I had been there all the time. I was thrown off the steamer.

“But I wasn't through. Steamers do not call here every day. I wonder if you'll know what I mean when I say I was beginning to be afraid of myself and what might happen if I had to stick it out much longer? That mangy cur I spoke of had me lashed to the mast from a social standpoint. I tried it again—to-night. Nanu fixed it for me with one of the crew to hang that rope over the side, and—well, I believe you said you had seen what happened. I believe you said, too, that a chance still existed of my sailing with the mail boat, depending upon my story.” He laughed a little raucously. “I hope it's been interesting enough to bail me out; anyway, that's all of it.”

The tall man sat for a moment in silence.

“Yes,” he said at last; “I am quite satisfied. Dressed as a gentleman, with money in your pockets, and such other details as go with the rôle, you would never be associated with that affair in Honolulu. As a matter of fact your share in it was not so serious that the police would dog you all over the world on account of it. In other words, and what really interests me, is that you are not what is commonly designated as a 'wanted' man. Yes, I may say I am thoroughly satisfied.”

The young man yawned and stretched himself.

“I'm delighted to hear it. I haven't any packing to do. Shall we stroll back to the ship?”

“I hope so.” The quill toothpick was busy again. “The decision rests with you. I am not a philanthropist. I am about to offer you a situation—to fill which I have been searching a good many years to find some one who had the necessary qualifications. I am satisfied you are that man. You do not know me; you do not know my name, and though you have already asked what it is, I shall still withhold that information until your decision has been given. If you agree, I will here and now sign a contract with you to which we will both affix our bona fide signatures; if you refuse, we will shake hands and part as friends and strangers who have been—shall we use your expression?—moon-mad under the influence of the wonders of a tropic night.”

“Something tells me,” said the young man softly, “that the situation is not an ordinary one.”

“And you are right,” replied the other quietly. “It is not only not ordinary, but is, I think I may safely say, absolutely unique and without its counterpart. I might mention in passing that I am not in particularly good health, and the sea voyage I was ordered to take explains my presence here. I am the sole owner of one of the largest, if not the largest, business enterprises in America; certainly its turn-over, at least, is beyond question the biggest on the American continent. I have establishments in every city of any size in both the United States and Canada—and even in Mexico. The situation I offer you is that of my confidential representative. No connection whatever will be known to exist between us; your title will be that of a gentleman of leisure—but your duties will be more arduous. I regret to say that in many cases I fear my local managers are not—er—making accurate returns to me, and they are very hard to check up. I would require you to travel from place to place as a sort of, say, secret inspector of branches, and furnish me with the inside information from the lack of which my business at present, I am afraid, is suffering severely.”

“And that business?” The young man had raised himself to his elbow on the sand.

“The one that is nearest to your heart,” said the tall man calmly. “Gambling.”

The young man leaned slowly forward, staring at the other.

“I wonder if I quite get you?” he said.

“I am sure you do.” The tall man smiled. “My business is a chain of select and exclusive gambling houses where only high play is indulged in, and whose clientele is the richest in the land.”

The young man rose to his feet, walked a few steps away along the beach, and came back again.

“You're devilishly complimentary!” he flung out, with a short laugh. “As I understand it, then, the price I am to pay for getting away from here is the pawning of my soul?”

“Have you anything else to pawn?” inquired the other—and the quill toothpick punctuated the remark: “Tck!”

“No,” said the young man, with a twisted smile. “And I'm not sure I've got that left! I am beginning to have a suspicion that it was in your 'branch' at San Francisco that I lost my money.”

“You did,” said the other coolly. “That is how I came to know you. Though not personally in evidence in the 'house' itself, San Francisco is my home, and my information as to what goes on there at least is fairly accurate.”

The young man resumed his pacing up and down the sand.

“And I might add,” said the tall man after a moment, “that from a point of ethics I see little difference in the moral status between one who comes to gamble and one who furnishes the other with the opportunity to do so. You are perhaps hesitating to take the hurdle on that account?”

“Moral status!” exclaimed the young man sharply. He halted abruptly before the other. “No—at least I am not a hypocrite! What right have I to quarrel with moral status?”

“Very well, then,” said the other; “I will go farther. I will give you everything in life that you desire. You will live as a gentleman of wealth surrounded by every luxury that money can procure, for that is your rôle. You may gamble to your heart's content, ten, twenty, fifty thousand a night—in my houses. You will travel the length and breadth of America. I will pay every expense. There is nothing that you may not have, nothing that you may not do.”

The young man was silent for a full minute then, with his hands dug in his pockets, he fell to whistling under his breath very softly—but very deliberately.

An almost sinister smile spread over the tall man's lips as he listened.

“If I am not mistaken,” he observed dryly, “that is the aria from Faust.”

“Yes,” said the young man—and stared the other in the eye. “It is the aria from Faust.”

The tall man nodded—but now his lips were straight.

“I accept the rôle of Mephistopheles, then,” he said softly. “Doctor Faustus, you know, signed the bond.”

The young man squatted on the sand again. His face was curiously white; only the ugly welt, dull red, across his cheeks, like the mark of some strange branding-iron, held color.

“Then, draw it!” he said shortly. “And be damned to you!”

The tall man took a notebook and a fountain pen from his pocket. He wrote rapidly, tore out the leaf, and on a second leaf made a copy of the first. This, too, he tore out.

“I will read it,” he said. “You will observe that no names are mentioned; that I have still reserved the privilege of keeping my identity in abeyance until the document is signed. This is what I have written: For good and valid consideration the second signatory to this contract hereby enters unreservedly into the employ of the first signatory for a period which shall include the lifetime of one or other of the undersigned, or until such time as this agreement may be dissolved either by mutual consent or at the will of the first signatory alone. And the first signatory to this contract agrees to maintain the second signatory in a station in life commensurate with that of a gentleman of wealth irrespective of expense, and further to pay to the second signatory as a stated salary the sum of one thousand dollars a month.” He looked up. “Shall I sign?”

“Body and soul,” murmured the young man. He appeared to be fascinated with the restless movement of the quill toothpick in the other's mouth. “Have you another toothpick you could let me have?” he inquired casually.

The tall man mechanically thrust his fingers into his vest pocket; and then, as though but suddenly struck with the irrelevancy, and perhaps facetiousness, of the request, frowned as he found himself handing over the article in question.

“Shall I sign?” His tone was sterner. “It is understood that the signatures are to be bona fide and——”

“Yes, sign it. It is quite understood.” The young man spoke without looking up. He seemed to be engrossed in carefully slitting the point of the quill toothpick he had acquired with his knife.

The other signed both sheets from the notebook.

The young man accepted the two slips of paper, but refused the proffered fountain pen. In the moonlight he read the other's signature: Gilbert Larmon. His lips tightened a little. It was a big name in San Francisco, a name of power. Few dreamed perhaps where the sinews of that power came from! He drew from his pocket a small bottle, uncorked it, dipped in the quill toothpick, and with his improvised pen wrote with a rasping, spluttering noise beneath the other's signature on each of the two slips of paper. One of these slips he returned to the other—but beneath the tall man's signature there was no mark of any kind whatever.

Through narrowing eyes the tall man had been watching, and now his face darkened ominously, and there was something of deadly coolness in his voice as he spoke.

“What tomfoolery is this?” he demanded evenly.

“No; it's quite all right,” said the young man placidly. “Just a whim of mine. I can't seem to get that Doctor Faustus thing out of my head. According to the story, I think, he signed in a drop of blood—and I thought I'd carry a sort of analogy along a bit. That stuff's all right. I got it from my old native friend on that island I was telling you about. It's what my letter of introduction to Nanu was written with. And—well, at least, I guess it stands for the drop of blood, all right! Take it down there to the shore and dip that part of the paper in the salt water.”

The tall man made no answer. For a moment he remained staring with grim-set features at the other, then he got up, walked sharply to the water's edge, and, bending down, moistened the lower portion of the paper. He held it up to the moonlight. Heavy black letters were slowly taking form just beneath his own signature. Presently he walked back up the beach to the young man, and held out his hand.

“Let us get back to the ship—John Bruce,” he said.

CHAPTER ONE—ALADDIN'S LAMP

JOHN BRUCE, stretched at full length on a luxurious divan in the most sumptuous apartment of the Bayne-Miloy, New York's newest and most pretentious hostelry, rose suddenly to his feet and switched off the lights. The same impulse carried him in a few strides to the window. The night was still, and the moon rode high and full. It was the same moon that, three months ago, he had stared at from the flat of his back on the beach at Apia. A smile, curiously tight, and yet curiously whimsical, touched his lips. If it had been “moon-madness” that had fallen upon the gambler king and himself that night, it had been a madness that was strangely free in its development from hallucination! That diagnosis no longer held. It would be much more apposite to lay it bluntly to the door of—Mephistopheles! From the moment he had boarded the mail steamer he had lived as a man possessed of unlimited wealth, as a man with unlimited funds always in his possession or at his instant command.

He whistled softly. It was, though, if not moon-madness, perhaps the moon, serene and full up there as it had been that other night, which he had been watching from the divan a few moments before, that had sent his mind scurrying backward over those intervening months. And yet, perhaps not; for there would come often enough, as now, moments of mind groping, yes, even the sense of hallucination, when he was not quite sure but that a certain bubble, floating at one moment in dazzlingly iridescent beauty before his eyes, would dissolve the next into blank nothingness, and—— Well, what would it be then? Another beach at some Apia, until another Mephistopheles, in some other guise, came to play up against his rôle of Doctor Faustus again?

He looked sharply behind him around the darkened room, whose darkness did not hide its luxury. His shoulder brushed the heavy silken portière at his side; his fingers touched a roll of banknotes in his pocket, a generous roll, whose individual units were of denominations more generous still. These were realities!

Mephistopheles at play! He had left Larmon at Suva, Fiji. Thereafter, their ways and their lives lay apart—outwardly. Actually, even here in New York with the continent between them, for Larmon had resumed his life in which he played the rôle of a benevolent and retired man of wealth in San Francisco, they were in constant and extremely intimate touch with each other.

A modern Mephistopheles! Two men only in the world knew Gilbert Larmon for what he was! One other besides himself! And that other was a man named Maldeck, Peter Maldeck. But only one man knew him, John Bruce, in his new rôle, and that was Gilbert Larmon. Maldeck was the manager of the entire ring of gambling houses, and likewise the clearing house through which the profits flowed into Larmon's coffers; but to Maldeck, he, John Bruce, was exactly what he appeared to be to the world at large, and to the local managers of the gambling houses in particular—a millionaire plunger to whom gambling was as the breath of life. The “inspector of branches” dealt with Gilbert Larmon alone, and dealt confidentially and secretively over Maldeck's head—even that invisible writing fluid supplied by the old Samoan Islander playing its part when found necessary, for it had been agreed between Larmon and himself that even the most innocent appearing document received from him, John Bruce, should be subjected to the salt water test; and he had, indeed, already used it in several of the especially confidential reports that he had sent Larmon on some of the branches.

He shrugged his shoulders. The whole scheme of his changed existence had all been artfully simple—and superbly efficient. He was under no necessity to explain the source of his wealth except in his native city, San Francisco, where he was known—and San Francisco was outside his jurisdiction. With both Larmon and Maldeck making that their headquarters, other supervision of the local “branch” was superfluous; elsewhere, his wealth was inherited—that was all. So, skipping San Francisco, he had come leisurely eastward, gambling for a week or two weeks, as the case might be, in the various cities, following as guidance apparently but the whim of his supposedly roué inclinations, and he had lost a lot of money—which would eventually find its way back to its original source in the pockets of Gilbert Larmon, via the clearing house conducted by Peter Maldeck. It was extremely simple—but, equally, extremely systematic. The habitues of every branch were carefully catalogued. He had only—and casually—to make the acquaintance of one of these in each city, and, in turn, quite inevitably, would follow an introduction to the local “house”; and, once introduced, the entrée, then or on any subsequent visit to that city, was an established fact.

John Bruce laughed suddenly, softly, out into the night. It had been a good bargain that he had made with Mephistopheles! Wealth, luxury, everything he desired in life was his. On the trail behind him in the cities he had already visited he had nightly lost or won huge sums of money until he had become known as the millionaire plunger. It was quite true that, in as much as the money, whether lost or won, but passed from his right- to his left-hand pocket—the pockets being represented by one Gilbert Larmon—the gambler craving within him was but ill served, almost in a sense mocked; but that phase of it had sunk into insignificance. The whole idea was a gigantic gamble—a gamble with life. The whole fabric was of texture most precarious. It exhilarated him. Excitement, adventure, yes, even peril, beckoned alluringly and always from around the corner just ahead. He stood against the police; he stood a very excellent chance of being discovered some morning minus his life if the men he was set to watch, and who now fawned upon him and treated him with awe and an unholy admiration, should get an inkling of his real identity and his real purpose in their houses!

He yawned, and as though glorying in his own strength flexed his great shoulders, and stretched his arms to their full length above his head. God, it was life! It made of him a superman. He had no human ties to bind him; no restraint to know; no desire that could not be satiated. The past was wiped away. It was like some reincarnation in which he stood supreme above his fellow men, and they bowed to their god. And he was their god. And if he but nodded approval they would lie, and cheat, and steal, and commit murder in their greed of worship, they whose souls were in pawn to their god!

He turned suddenly from the window, switched on the lights, drew from his pocket a great sum of money in banknotes, and stood staring at it. There were thousands in his hand. Thousands and thousands! Money! The one universally-orthodox god! For but one of these pieces of paper in his hand he could command what he would, play upon human passions at his whim, and like puppets on a stage of his own setting move the followers of the Great Creed, that were numbered in their millions, at his will! It was only over the few outcasts, the unbelievers, that he held no sway. But he could afford to ignore the minority! Was he not indeed a god?

And it had cost him nothing. Only the pawning of his soul; and, like Faustus, the day of settlement was afar off. Only the signing of a bond that postulated a denial of what he had already beforehand held in light esteem—a code of canting morals. It was well such things were out of the way! Life stretched the fuller, the rosier, the more red-blooded before him on that account. He was well content. The future lured him. Nor was it money alone. There was the spice of adventure, the battle of wits, hardly inaugurated yet, between himself and those whose underground methods were the raison d'être of his own magically enhanced circumstances.

John Bruce replaced the money in his pocket abruptly, and frowned. That was something, from still another standpoint, which he could not afford to lose sight of. He had to justify his job. Gilbert Larmon had stated that he was not a philanthropist, and it was written in the bond that Larmon could terminate the agreement at will. Yes, and that was queer, too! What kind of a man was Larmon? He knew Larmon, as Larmon superficially subjected himself to inspection and speculation; but he was fully aware that he did not know Larmon the man. There seemed something almost sinister in its inconsistency that Larmon should at one and the same time reserve the right to terminate that bond at will while his very signature upon it furnished a weapon which, if he, John Bruce, chose to use it, placed the other at his mercy. What kind of a man was Larmon? No fool, no weakling—that was certain. And yet at a word he, John Bruce, could tear the other from the pseudorighteous pedestal upon which he posed, strip the other naked of the garments that clothed his criminal activities, and destroy utterly the carefully reared structure of respectability that Larmon had built up around himself. It might be very true that he, John Bruce, would never use such a weapon, even under provocation; but Larmon could not be sure of that. How then did Larmon reconcile his reservation to terminate the contract at will and yet furnish his co-signatory with the means of black-mailing him into a continuance of it? What kind of a man was Larmon? What would he be like with his back to the wall? What other reservation had been in Larmon's mind when he had drawn that bond?

And then a queer and bitter smile came to John Bruce's lips. The god of money! Was he so sure that he was the god and not the worshiper? Was that it? Was that what Larmon counted upon?—that only a fool would risk the sacrifice of the Aladdin's lamp that had been thrust into his hands, and that only a fool but would devote body and soul to Larmon's interests under the circumstances!

The smile grew whimsical. It was complimentary in a sense. It was based on the premise that he, John Bruce, was not a fool. He shrugged his shoulders. Well, therein Larmon was right. It would not be his, John Bruce's, fault if anything short of death terminated the bond which had originated that tropic night on the moon-lit beach in Samoa three months ago!

He looked at his watch. It was nine o'clock. It was still early for play; but it was not so early that his arrival in the New York “branch,” where he had been a constant visitor for the last four nights, could possibly arouse any suspicion, and one's opportunities for inside observation were very much better when the play was desultory and but few present than in the crowded rooms of the later hours.

“If I were in England now,” said John Bruce, addressing the chandelier, as he put on a light coat over his evening clothes, “I couldn't get away with this without a man to valet me—and at times, though he might be useful, he might be awkward. Damned awkward! But in America you do, or you don't, as you please—and I don't!”

CHAPTER TWO—THE MILLIONAIRE PLUNGER

JOHN BRUCE left the hotel and entered a taxi. A little later, in that once most fashionable section of New York, in the neighborhood of Gramercy Square, he was admitted to a stately mansion by a white-haired negro butler, who bowed obsequiously.

Thereafter, for a little while, John Bruce wandered leisurely from room to room in the magnificently appointed house, where in the rich carpets the sound of footsteps was lost, where bronzes and paintings, exquisite in their art, charmed the eye, where soft-toned draperies and portières were eloquent of refinement and good taste; he paused for a moment at the threshold of the supper room, whose table was a profusion of every delicacy to tempt the palate, where wines of a vintage that was almost priceless were to be had at no greater cost than the effort required to lift a beckoning finger to the smiling ebony face of old Jake, the attendant. And here John Bruce extended a five-dollar bill, but shook his head as the said Jake hastened toward him. Later, perhaps, he might revisit the room—when a few hours' play had dimmed the recollection of his recent dinner, and his appetite was again sharpened.

In the card rooms there were, as yet, scarcely any “guests.” He chatted pleasantly with the “dealers”—John Bruce, the millionaire plunger, was persona grata, almost effusively so, everywhere in the house. Lavergne, the manager, as Parisian as he was immaculate from the tips of his patent-leathers to the tips of his waxed mustache, joined him; and for ten minutes, until the other was called away, John Bruce proceeded to nourish the already extremely healthy germ of intimacy that, from the first meeting, he had planted between them.

With the manager's million apologies for the unpardonable act of tearing himself away still sounding in his ears, John Bruce placidly resumed his wanderings. The New York “branch,” which being interpreted meant Monsieur Henri de Lavergne, the exquisite little manager, was heavily underscored on Gilbert Larmon's black-list!

The faint, musical whir of the little ivory ball from the roulette table caught John Bruce's attention, and he strolled in that direction. Here a “guest” was already at play. The croupier smiled as John Bruce approached the table. John Bruce smiled pleasantly in return, and sat down. After a moment, he began to make small five-dollar bets on the “red.” His fellow-player was plunging heavily—and losing. Also, the man was slightly under the influence of liquor. The croupier's voice droned through half a dozen plays. John Bruce continued to make five-dollar bets. The little by-play interested him. He knew the signs.

His fellow-player descended to the supper room for another drink, it being against the rules of the house to serve anything in the gambling rooms. The croupier laughed as he glanced at the retreating figure and then at another five-dollar bet that John Bruce pushed upon the “red.”

“He'll rob you of your reputation, Mr. Bruce, if you don't look out!” the croupier smiled quizzically. “Are you finding a thrill in playing the minimum for a change?”

“Just feeling my way.” John Bruce returned the smile. “It's a bit early yet, isn't it?”

The other player returned. He continued to bet heavily. He made another excursion below stairs. Other “guests” drifted into the room, and the play became more general.

John Bruce increased his stakes slightly, quite indifferent naturally as to whether he lost or won—since he could neither lose nor win. He was sitting beside the player he had originally joined at the table, and suddenly his interest in the other became still more enlivened. The man, after a series of disastrous plays, was palpably broke, for he snatched off a large diamond ring from his finger and held it out to the croupier.

“Give me—hic!—somethin' on that,” he hiccoughed. “Might as well make a clean-up, eh?”

The croupier took the ring, examined it critically for an instant, and handed it back.

“I'm sorry,” he said; “but you know the rules of the house. I couldn't advance anything on it if it were worth a million. But the stone's valuable, all right. You'd better take a trip to Persia.”

The man replaced the ring with some difficulty upon his finger, and stared owlishly at the croupier.

“T' hell with your—hic!—trip to Persia!” he said thickly. “Don't like Persia! Been—hic!—there before! Guess I'll go home!”

The man negotiated his way to the door; the game went on. John Bruce began to increase his stakes materially. A trip to Persia! What, exactly, did that mean? It both piqued his curiosity and stirred his suspicions. He smiled as he placed a heavy stake upon the table. It would probably be a much more expensive trip to this fanciful Persia than to the Persia of reality, for it seemed that one must go broke first! Well, he would go broke—though it would require some little finesse for John Bruce, the millionaire plunger, to attain that envious situation without exciting suspicion. He was very keenly interested in this personally conducted tour, obviously inaugurated by that exquisite little man, Monsieur Paul de Lavergne!

John Bruce to his inward chagrin—won. He began to play now with a zest, eagerness and excitement which, heretofore, the juggling of Mephistopheles' money had deprived him of. Outwardly, however, the calm impassiveness that, in the few evenings he had been in the house, had already won him the reputation of being par excellence a cool and nervy plunger, remained unchanged.

He continued to win for a while; and then suddenly he began to lose. This was much better! He lost steadily now. He staked with lavish hand, playing numerous long chances for the limit at every voyage of the clicking little ivory ball. Finally, the last of his visible assets were on the table, and he leaned forward to watch the fall of the ball. He was already fingering the magnificent jeweled watch-fob that dangled from the pocket of his evening clothes.

“Zero!” announced the croupier.

The “zero” had been one of his selections. The “zero” paid 35 for 1.

A subdued ripple of excitement went up from around the table. The room was filling up. The still-early comers, mostly spectators for the time being, lured to the roulette table at the whisper that the millionaire plunger was out to-night to break the bank, were whetting their own appetites in the play of Mr. John Bruce, who had obviously just escaped being broke himself by a very narrow margin.

John Bruce smiled. He was in funds again—more so than pleased him!

“It's a 'zero' night, Mr. Croupier,” observed John Bruce pleasantly. “Roll her again!”

But now luck was with John Bruce. The “zero” and his other combinations were as shy and elusive as fawns. At the expiration of another half hour the net result of John Bruce's play consisted in his having transferred from his own keeping into the keeping of the New York branch thirty thousand dollars of Mephistopheles' money. He was to all appearances flagrantly broke as far as funds in his immediate possession were concerned.

“I guess,” said John Bruce, with a whimsical smile, “that I didn't bring enough with me. I don't know where I can get any more to-night, and—oh, here!” He laughed with easy grace, as he suddenly tossed his jeweled watch-fob to the croupier. “One more fling anyhow—I've still unbounded faith in 'zero'! Let me have a thousand on that. It's worth about two.”

The croupier, as on the previous occasion, examined the article, but, as before, shook his head.

“I'm awfully sorry, Mr. Bruce, but it's strictly against the rules of the house,” he said apologetically. “I can fix it for you easily enough though, if you care to take a trip to Persia.”

“A trip to Persia?” inquired John Bruce in a puzzled way. “I think I heard you suggest that before this evening. What's the idea?”

Some of those around the table were smiling.

“It's all right,” volunteered a player opposite, with a laugh. “Only look out for the conductor!”

“Shoot!” said John Bruce nonchalantly. “That's good enough! You can book my passage, Mr. Croupier.”

The croupier called an attendant, spoke to him, and the man left the room.

“It will take a few minutes, Mr. Bruce—while you are getting your hat and coat. The doorman will let you know,” said the croupier, and with a bow to John Bruce resumed the interrupted game.

John Bruce strolled from the room, and descended to the lower floor. He entered the supper room, and while old Jake plied him with delicacies he saw the doorman emerge from the telephone booth out in the hall, hurry away, and presently return, talking earnestly with Monsieur Henri de Lavergne. The manager, in turn, entered the booth.

Monsieur Henri de Lavergne came into the supper room after a moment.

“In just a few minutes, Mr. Bruce—there will be a slight delay,” he said effusively. “Too bad to keep you waiting.”

“Not at all!” responded John Bruce. He held a wine glass up to the light. “This is very excellent, Monsieur de Lavergne.”

Monsieur Henri de Lavergne accepted the compliment with a gratified bow.

“Mr. Bruce is very kind to say so,” he said—and launched into an elaborate apology that Mr. Bruce should be put to any inconvenience to obtain the financial accommodation asked for. The security that Mr. Bruce offered was unquestioned. It was not that. It was the rule of the house. Mr. Bruce would understand.

Mr. Bruce understood perfectly.

“Quite so!” he said cordially.

Monsieur Henri de Lavergne excused himself, and left the room.

“A fishy, clever little crook,” confided John Bruce to himself. “I wonder what's the game?”

He continued to sip his wine in apparent indifference to the passing minutes, nor was his indifference altogether assumed. His mind was quite otherwise occupied. It was rather neat, that—a trip to Persia. The expression in itself held a lure which had probably not been overlooked as an asset. It suggested Bagdad, and the Arabian Nights, and a Caliph and a Grand Vizier who stalked about in disguise. On the other hand, the inebriated gentleman had evidently had his fill of it on one occasion, and would have no more of it. And the other gentleman who had, as it were, indorsed the proceeding, had, at the same time, taken the occasion to throw out a warning to beware of the conductor.

John Bruce smiled pleasantly into his wine glass. Not very difficult to fathom, perhaps, after all! It was probably some shrewd old reprobate with usurious rates in cahoots with the sleek Monsieur Henri de Lavergne, who made a side-split on the said rates in return for the exclusive privilege accorded the other of acting as leech to the guests of the house when in extremity.

It had been perhaps twenty minutes since he had left the roulette table. He looked at his watch now as he saw the doorman coming toward the supper room with his hat and coat. The night was still early. It was a quarter to eleven.

He went out into the hall.

“Yassuh,” said the gray-haired and obsequious old darky, as he assisted John Bruce into his coat, “if yo'all will just come with me, Mistuh Bruce, yo'all will be 'commodated right prompt.”

John Bruce followed his guide to the doorstep.

The darky pointed to a closed motor car at the curb by the corner, a few houses away.

“Yo'all just say 'Persia' to the shuffer, Mistuh Bruce, and———-”

“All right!” John Bruce smiled his interruption, and went down the steps to the sidewalk.

John Bruce approached the waiting car leisurely, scrutinizing it the while; and as he approached, it seemed to take on more and more the aspect of a venerable and decrepit ark. The body of the car was entirely without light; the glass front, if there were one, behind the man whom he discerned sitting in the chauffeur's seat, was evidently closely curtained; and so, too, he now discovered as he drew nearer, were the windows and doors of the car as well.

“The parlor looks a little ominous,” said John

Bruce softly to himself. “I wonder how far it is to the spider's dining room?”

He halted as he reached the vehicle.

“I'm bound for Persia, I believe,” he suggested pleasantly to the chauffeur.

The chauffeur leaned out, and John Bruce was conscious that he was undergoing a critical inspection. In turn he looked at the chauffeur, but there was very little light. The car seemed to have chosen a spot as little disturbed by the rays of the street lamps as possible, and he gained but a vague impression of a red, weather-beaten face, clean shaved, with shaggy brows under grizzled hair, the whole topped by an equally weather-beaten felt hat of nondescript shape and color.

The inspection, on the chauffeur's part at least, appeared to be satisfactory.

“Yes, sir,” said the man. “Step in, sir, please.”

The door swung open—just how, John Bruce could not have explained. He stepped briskly into the car—only to draw back instinctively as he found it already occupied. But the door had closed behind him. It was inky black in the interior now with the door shut. The car was jolting into motion.

“Pardon me!” said John Bruce a little grimly, and sat down on the back seat.

A woman! He had just been able to make out a woman's form as he had stepped in. It was clever—damned clever! Of both the exquisite Monsieur Henri de Lavergne and the money-lending spider at the other end of this pleasant little jaunt into unexplored Persia! A woman in it—a luring, painted, fair and winsome damsel, no doubt—to make the usurious pill of illegal interest a little sweeter! Oh, yes, he quite understood now that warning to beware of the conductor!

“I did not anticipate such charming company,” said John Bruce facetiously. “Have we far to go?”

There was no answer.

Something like a shadow, deeper than the surrounding blackness, seemed to pass before John Bruce's eyes, and then he sat bolt upright, startled and amazed. In front of him, let down from the roof of the car, was a small table covered with black velvet, and suspended some twelve inches above the table, throwing the glow downward in a round spot of light over the velvet surface, was a shaded electric lamp. A small white hand, bare of any ornament, palm upward, lay upon the velvet table-top under the play of the light.

A voice spoke now softly from beside him:

“You have something to pawn?”

John Bruce stared. He still could not see her face. “Er—yes,” he said. He frowned in perplexity. “When we get to Persia, alias the pawn-shop.”

“This is the pawn-shop,” she answered. “Let me see what you have, please.”

“Well, I'm da——” John Bruce checked himself.

There was a delicacy about that white hand resting there under the light that rebuked him. “Er—pardon me,” said John Bruce.

He felt for his jeweled watch-fob, unfastened it, and laid it in the extended palm. He laughed a little to himself. On with the game! The lure was here, all right; the stage setting was masterly—and now the piper would be paid on a basis, probably, that would relegate Shylock himself to the kindergarten class of money lenders!

And then, suddenly, it seemed to John Bruce as though his blood whipping through his veins was afire. A face in profile, bending forward to examine the diamonds and the setting of the fob-pendant, came under the light. He gazed at it fascinated. It was the most beautiful face he had ever seen. His eyes drank in the rich masses of brown, silken hair, the perfect throat, the chin and lips that, while modelled in sweet womanliness, were still eloquent of self-reliance and strength. He had thought to see a pretty face, a little brazen perhaps, and artfully powdered and rouged; what he saw was a vision of loveliness that seemed to personify the unsullied, God-given freshness and purity of youth.

He spoke involuntarily; no power of his could have kept back the words.

“My God, you are wonderful!” he exclaimed in a low voice.

He saw the color swiftly tinge the throat a coral pink, and mount upwards; but she did not look at him. Her eyes! He wanted to see her eyes—to look into them! But she did not turn her head.

“You probably paid two thousand dollars for this,” she said quietly, “and——”

“Nineteen hundred,” corrected John Bruce mechanically.

“I will allow you seventeen hundred on it, then,” she said, still quietly. “The interest will be at seven per cent. Do you wish to accept the offer?”

Seventeen hundred! Seven per cent! It was in consonance with the vision! His mind was topsy-turvy.

He did not understand.

“It is very liberal,” said John Bruce, trying to control his voice. “Of course, I accept.”

The shapely head nodded.

He watched her spellbound. The watch-fob had vanished, and in its place now under the little conical shaft of light she was swiftly counting out a pile of crisp, new, fifty-dollar banknotes. To these she added a stamped and numbered ticket.

“You may redeem the pledge at any time by making application to the same person to whom you originally applied for a loan to-night,” she said, as she handed him the money. “Please count it.”

Her head was in shadow now. He could no longer even see her profile. She was sitting back in her corner of the car.

“I—I am quite satisfied,” said John Bruce a little helplessly.

“Please count it,” she insisted.

With a shrug of protest, John Bruce obeyed her. It was not at all the money that concerned him, nor the touch of it that was quickening his pulse.

“It is quite correct,” he said, putting money and ticket in his pocket. He turned toward her. “And now——”

His words ended in a little gasp. The light was out. In the darkness that shadow passed again before his eyes, and he was conscious that the table had vanished—also that the car had stopped.

The door opened.

“If you please, sir!” It was the chauffeur, holding the door open.

John Bruce hesitated.

“I—er—look here!” he said. “I——”

“If you please, sir!” There was something of significant finality in the man's patient and respectful tones.

John Bruce smiled wryly.

“Well, at least, I may say good-night,” he said, as he backed out of the car.

“Certainly, sir—good-night, sir,” said the chauffeur calmly—and closed the door, and touched his hat, and climbed back to his seat.

John Bruce glared at the man.

“Well, I'm damned!” said John Bruce fervently.

CHAPTER THREE—SANCTUARY

THE car started off. It turned the corner. John Bruce looked around him. He was standing on precisely the same spot from which he had entered the car. He had been driven around the block, that was all!

He caught his breath. Was it real? That wondrous face which, almost as though at the touch of some magician's wand, had risen before him out of the blackness! His blood afire was leaping through his veins again. That face!

He ran to the corner and peered down the street. The car was perhaps a hundred yards away—and suddenly John Bruce started to run again, following the car. Madness! His lips had set grim and hard. Who was she that prowled the night in that bizarre traveling pawn-shop? Where did she live? Was it actually the Arabian Nights back again? He laughed at himself—not mirthfully. But still he ran on.

The car was outdistancing him. Fool! For a woman's face! Even though it were a divine symphony of beauty! Fool? Love-smitten idiot? Not at all! It was his job! Nice sound to that word in conjunction with that haunting memory of loveliness—job!

The traveling pawn-shop turned into Fourth Avenue, and headed downtown. John Bruce caught the sound of a street car gong, spurted and swung breathlessly to the platform of a car going in the same direction.

Of course, it was his job! The exquisite Monsieur Henri de Lavergne was mixed up in this.

“Hell!”

The street car conductor stared at him. John Bruce scowled. He swore again—but this time under his breath. It brought a sudden wild, unreasonable rage and rebellion, the thought that there should be anything, even of the remotest nature, between the glorious vision in that car and the mincing, silken-tongued manager of Larmon's gambling hell. But there was, for all that, wasn't there? How else had she come there? It was the usual thing, wasn't it? And—beware of the conductor! The warning now appeared to be very apt! And how well he had profited by it! A fool chasing a siren's beauty!

His face grew very white.

“John Bruce,” he whispered to himself, “if I could get at you I'd pound your face to pulp for that!”

He leaned out from the platform. The traveling pawn-shop had increased its speed and was steadily leaving the street car behind. He looked back in the opposite direction. The street was almost entirely deserted as far as traffic went. The only vehicle in sight was a taxi bowling along a block in the rear. He laughed out again harshly. The conductor eyed him suspiciously.

John Bruce dropped off the car, and planted himself in the path of the on-coming taxi. Call it his job, then, if it pleased him! He owed it to Larmon to get to the bottom of this. How extremely logical he was! The transaction in the traveling pawn-shop had been so fair-minded as almost to exonerate Monsieur Henri de Lavergne on the face of it, and if it had not been for a certain vision therein, and a fire in his own veins, and a fury at the thought that even her acquaintance with the gambling manager was profanity, he could have heartily applauded Monsieur Henri de Lavergne for a unique and original——

The taxi bellowed at him, hoarsely indignant.

John Bruce stepped neatly to one side—and jumped on the footboard.

“Here, you! What the hell!” shouted the chauffeur. “You——”

“Push your foot on it a little,” said John Bruce calmly. “And don't lose sight of that closed car ahead.”

“Lose sight of nothin'!” yelled the chauffeur. “I've got a fare, an'——”

“I hear him,” said John Bruce composedly. He edged in beside the chauffeur, and one of the crisp, new, fifty-dollar banknotes passed into the latter's possession. “Keep that car in sight, and don't make it hopelessly obvious that you are following it. I'll attend to your fare.”

He screwed around in his seat. An elderly, gray-whiskered gentleman, a patently irate gentleman, was pounding furiously on the glass panel.

“We should be turnin' down this street we're just passin',” grinned the chauffeur.

John Bruce lowered the panel.

“What's the meaning of this?” thundered the fare.

“I'm very sorry, sir,” said John Bruce respectfully.

“A little detective business.” He coughed. It was really quite true. His voice became confidential. “The occupants of that car ahead got away from me. I—I want to arrest one of them. I'm very sorry to put you to any inconvenience, but it couldn't be helped. There was no other way than to commandeer your taxi. It will be only for a matter of a few minutes.”

“It's preposterous!” spluttered the fare. “Outrageous! I—I'll——”

“Yes, sir,” said John Bruce. “But there was nothing else I could do. You can report it to headquarters, of course.”

He closed the panel.

“Fly-cop—not!” said the chauffeur, with his tongue in his cheek. “Any fly-cop that ever got his mitt on a whole fifty-dollar bill all at one time couldn't be pried lose from it with a crowbar!”

“It lets you out, doesn't it?” inquired John Bruce pleasantly. “Now let's see you earn it.”

“I'll earn it!” said the chauffeur with unction. “You leave it to me, boss!”

The quarry, in the shape of the traveling pawn shop, directed its way into the heart of the East Side. Presently it turned into a hiving, narrow street, where hawkers with their push-carts in the light of flaring, spitting gasoline banjoes were doing a thriving business. The two cars went more slowly now. There was very little room. The taxi almost upset a fish vendor's wheeled emporium. The vendor was eloquent—fervently so. But the chauffeur's eyes, after an impersonal and indifferent glance at the other, returned to the car ahead. The taxi continued on its way, trailing fifty yards in the rear of the traveling pawn-shop.

At the end of the block the car ahead turned the corner. As the taxi, in turn, rounded the corner, John Bruce saw that the traveling pawn-shop was drawn up before a small building that was nested in between two tenements. The blood quickened in his pulse. The girl had alighted, and was entering the small building.

“Hit it up a little to the next corner, turn it, and let me off there,” directed John Bruce.

“I get you!” said the chauffeur.

The taxi swept past the car at the curb. Another minute and it had swung the next corner, and was slowing down. John Bruce jumped to the ground before the taxi stopped.

“Good-night!” he called to the chauffeur.

He waved his hand debonairly at the scowling, whiskered visage that was watching him from the interior of the cab, and hurriedly retraced his way back around the corner.

The traveling pawn-shop had turned and was driving away. John Bruce moderated his pace, and sauntered on along the street. He smiled half grimly, half contentedly to himself. The “trip to Persia” had led him a little farther afield than Monsieur Henri de Lavergne had perhaps counted on—or than he, John Bruce, himself had, either! But he knew now where the most glorious woman he had ever seen in his life lived, or, at least, was to be found again. No, it wasn't the moon! To him, she was exactly that. And he had not seen her for the last time, either! That was what he was here for, though he wasn't so mad as to risk, or, rather, invite an affront to begin with by so bald an act as to go to the front door, say, and ring the bell—which would be tantamount to informing her that he had—er—played the detective from the moment he had left her in the car. To-morrow, perhaps, or the next day, or whenever fate saw fit to be in a kindly mood, a meeting that possessed all the hall-marks of being quite inadvertent offered him high hopes. Later, if fate still were kind, he would tell her that he had followed her, and what she would be thoroughly justified in misconstruing now, she might then accept as the tribute to her that he meant it to be—when she knew him better.

John Bruce was whistling softly to himself.

He was passing the house now, his scrutiny none the less exhaustive because it was apparently casual. It was a curious little two-story place tucked away between the two flanking tenements, the further one of which alone separated the house from the corner he was approaching. Not a light showed from the front of the house. Yes, it was quite a curious place! Although curtains were on the lower front windows, indicating that it was purely a dwelling, the windows themselves were of abnormal size, as though, originally perhaps, the ground floor had once been a shop of some kind.

John Bruce turned the corner, and from a comparatively deserted street found himself among the vendors' push-carts and the spluttering gasoline torches again. He skirted the side of the tenement that made the corner, discovered the fact that a lane cut in from the street and ran past the rear of the tenement, which he mentally noted must likewise run past the rear of the little house that was now so vitally interesting to him—and halted on the opposite side of the lane to survey his surroundings. Here a dirty and uninviting café attracted his attention, which, if its dingy sign were to be believed, was run by one Palasco Ratti, a gentleman of parts in the choice of wines which he offered to his patrons. John Bruce surveyed Palasco Ratti's potential clientele—the street was full of it; the shawled women, the dark-visaged, ear-ringed men. He smiled a little to himself. No—probably not the half-naked children who sprawled in the gutter and crawled amongst the push-carts' wheels! How was it that she should ever have come to live in a neighborhood to which the designation “foreign,” as far as she was concerned, must certainly apply in particularly full measure? It was strange that she——

John Bruce's mental soliloquy came to an abrupt end. Half humorously, half grimly his eyes were riveted on the push-cart at the curb directly opposite to him, the proprietor of which dealt in that brand of confection so much in favor on the East Side—a great slab of candy from which, as occasion required, he cut slices with a large carving knife. A brown and grimy fist belonging to a tot of a girl of perhaps eight or nine years of age, who had crept in under the pushcart, was stealthily feeling its way upward behind the vendor's back, its objective being, obviously, a generous piece of candy that reposed on the edge of the push-cart. There was a certain fascination in watching developments. It was quite immoral, of course, but his sympathies were with the child. It was a gamble whether the grimy little hand would close on the coveted prize and disappear again victorious, or whether the vendor would turn in time to frustrate the raid.

The tot's hand crept nearer and nearer its goal.

No one, save himself of the many about, appeared to notice the little cameo of primal instinct that was on exhibition before them. The small and dirty fingers touched the candy, closed on it, and were withdrawn—but were withdrawn too quickly. The child, at the psychological moment under stress of excitement, eagerness and probably a wildly thumping heart, had failed in finesse. Perhaps the paper that covered the surface of the push-cart and on which the wares were displayed rattled; perhaps the sudden movement in itself attracted the vendor's attention. The man whirled and made a vicious dive for the child as she darted out from between the wheels. And then she screamed. The man had hit her a brutal clout across the head.

John Bruce straightened suddenly, a dull red creeping from his set jaw to his cheeks. Still clutching the candy in her hand the child was running blindly and in terror straight toward him. The man struck again, and the child staggered, and, reeling, sought sanctuary between John Bruce's legs. A bearded, snarling face in pursuit loomed up before him—and John Bruce struck, struck as he had once struck before on a white moon-flooded deck when a man, a brute beast, had gone down before him—and the vendor, screaming shrilly, lay kicking in pain on the sidewalk.

It had happened quickly. Not one, probably, of those on the street had caught the details of the little scene. And now the tiny thief had wriggled through his legs, and with the magnificent irresponsibility of childhood had darted away and was lost to sight. It had happened quickly—but not so quickly as the gathering together of an angry, surging crowd around John Bruce.

Some one in the crowd shrieked out above the clamor of voices:

“He kill-a Pietro! Kill-a da dude!”

It was a fire-brand.

John Bruce backed away a little—up against the door of Signor Pascalo Ratti's wine shop. A glance showed him that, with the blow he had struck, his light overcoat had become loosened, and that he was flaunting an immaculate and gleaming shirt-front in the faces of the crowd. And between their Pietro with a broken jaw and an intruder far too well dressed to please their fancy, the psychology of the crowd became the psychology of a mob.

The fire-brand took.

“Kill-a da dude!” It was echoed in chorus—and then a rush.

It flung John Bruce heavily against the wine shop door, and the door crashed inward—and for a moment he was down, and the crowd, like a snarling wolf pack, was upon him. And then the massive shoulders heaved, and he shook them off and was on his feet; and all that was primal, elemental in the man was dominant, the mad glorying in strife upon him, and he struck right and left with blows before which, again and again, a man went down.

But the rush still bore him backward, and the doorway was black and jammed with reenforcements constantly pouring in. Tables crashed to the floor, chairs were overturned. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a white-mustached Italian leap upon the counter and alternately wave his arms and wring his hands together frantically.

“For the mercy of God!” the man screamed—and then his voice added to the din in a flood of impassioned Italian.

It was Signor Pascalo Ratti, probably.

John Bruce was panting now, his breath coming in short, hard gasps. It was not easy to keep them in front of him, to keep his back free. He caught the glint of knife blades now.

He was borne back foot by foot, the space widening as he retreated from the door, giving room for more to come upon him at the same time. A knife blade lunged at him. He evaded it—but another glittering in the ceiling light at the same instant, flashing a murderous arc in its downward plunge, caught him, and, before he could turn, sank home.

A yell of triumph went up. He felt no pain. Only a sudden sickening of his brain, a sudden weakness that robbed his limbs of strength, and he reeled and staggered, fighting blindly now.

And then his brain cleared. He flung a quick glance over his shoulder. Yes, there was one chance. Only one! And in another minute, with another knife thrust, it would be too late. He whirled suddenly and raced down the length of the café. In the moment's grace earned through surprise at his sudden action, he gained a door he had seen there, and threw himself upon it. It was not fastened, though there was a key in the lock. He whipped out the key, plunged through, locked the door on the outside with the fraction of a second to spare before they came battering upon it—and stumbled and fell headlong out into the open.

It was as though he were lashing his brain into action and virility. It kept wobbling and fogging. Didn't the damned thing understand that his life, was at stake! He lurched to his feet. He was in a lane.

In front of him, like great looming shadows, shadows that wobbled too, he saw the shapes of two tenements, and like an inset between them, a small house with a light gleaming in the lower window.

That was where the vision lived. Only there was a fence between. Sanctuary! He lunged toward the fence. He had not meant to—to make a call to-night—she—she might have misunderstood. But in a second now they would come sweeping around into the lane after him from the street.

He clawed his way to the top of the fence, and because his strength was almost gone fell from the top of the fence to the ground on the other side.

And now he crawled, crawled with what frantic haste he could, because he heard the uproar from the street. And he laughed. The kid was probably munching her hunk of candy now. Queer things—kids! Got her candy—happy——

He reached up to the sill of an open window, clawed his way upward, as he had clawed his way up the fence, straddled the sill unsteadily, clutched at nothingness to save himself, and toppled inward to the floor of the room.

A yell from the head of the lane, a cry from the other end of the room, spurred him into final effort. He gained his feet, and swept his hand, wet with blood, across his eyes. That was the vision there running toward him, wasn't it?—the wonderful, glorious vision!

“Pardon me!” said John Bruce in a sing-song voice, and with a desperate effort reached up and pulled down the window shade. He tried to smile “Queer—queer things—kids—aren't they? She—she just ducked out from under.”

The girl was staring at him wildly, her hands tightly clasped to her bosom.

“Pardon me!” whispered John Bruce thickly. He couldn't see her any more, just a multitude of objects whirling like a kaleidoscope before his eyes. “She—she got the candy,” said John Bruce, attempting to smile again—and pitched unconscious to the floor.

CHAPTER FOUR—A DOCTOR OF MANY DEGREES

DEAD! The girl was on her knees beside John Bruce. Dead—he did not move! It was the man who had pawned his watch-fob hardly half an hour before! What did it mean? What did those angry shouts, that scurrying of many feet out there in the lane mean? Hurriedly, her face as deadly white as the face upturned to her from the floor, she tore open the once immaculate shirt-front, that was now limp and wet and ugly with a great crimson stain, and laid bare the wound.

The sounds from without were receding, the scurrying footsteps were keeping on along the lane. A quiver ran through the form on the floor. Dead! No, he was not dead—not—not yet.

A little cry escaped from her tightly closed lips, and for an instant she covered her eyes with her hands. The wound was terrible—it frightened her. It frightened her the more because, intuitively, she knew that it was beyond any inexperienced aid that she could give. But she must act, and act quickly.

She turned and ran into the adjoining room to the telephone, but even as she reached out to lift the receiver from the hook she hesitated. Doctor Crang! A little shudder of aversion swept over her—and then resolutely, even pleading with central to hurry, she asked for the connection. It was not a matter of choice, or aversion, or any other consideration in the world save a question of minutes. The life of that man in there on the floor hung by a thread. Doctor Crang was nearby enough to respond almost instantly, and there was no one else she knew of who she could hope would reach the man in time. And—she stared frantically at the instrument now—was even he unavailable? Why didn't he answer? Why didn't——

A voice reached her. She recognized it.

“Doctor Crang, this is Claire Veniza,” she said, and it did not seem as though she could speak fast enough. “Come at once—oh, at once—please! There's a man here frightfully wounded. There isn't a second to lose, so——”

“My dear Claire,” interrupted the voice suavely, “instead of losing one you can save several by telling me what kind of a wound it is, and where the man is wounded.”

“It's a knife wound, a stab, I think,” she answered; “and it's in his side. He is unconscious, and——”

The receiver at the other end had been replaced on its hook.

She turned from the telephone, and swiftly, hurrying, but in cool self-control now, she obtained some cloths and a basin of warm water, and returned to John Bruce's side. She could not do much, she realized that—only make what effort she could to staunch the appalling flow of blood from the wound; that, and place a cushion under the man's head, for she could not lift him to the couch.

The minutes passed; and then, thinking she heard a footstep at the front door, she glanced in that direction, half in relief, and yet, too, in curious apprehension. She listened. No, there was no one there yet. She had been mistaken.

Suddenly she caught her breath in a little gasp, as though startled. Doctor Crang was clever; but faith in Doctor Crang professionally was one thing, and faith in him in other respects was quite another. Why hadn't she thought of it before? It wasn't too late yet, was it?

She began to search hastily through John Bruce's pockets. Doctor Crang would almost certainly suggest removing the man from the sitting room down here and getting him upstairs to a bedroom, and then he would undress his patient, and—and it was perhaps as well to anticipate Doctor Crang! This man here should have quite a sum of money on his person. She had given it to him herself, and—yes, here it was!

The crisp new fifty-dollar bills, the stamped and numbered ticket that identified the watch-fob he had pawned, were in her hand. She ran across the room, opened a little safe in the corner, placed the money and ticket inside, locked the safe again, and returned to John Bruce's side once more.

And suddenly her eyes filled. There was no tremor, no movement in the man's form now; she could not even feel his heartbeat. Yes, she wanted Doctor Crang now, passionately, wildly. John Bruce—that was the man's name. She knew that much. But she had left him miles away—and he was here now—and she did not understand. How had he got here, why had he come here, climbing in through that window to fall at her feet like one dead?

The front door opened without premonitory ring of bell, and closed again. A footstep came quickly forward through the outer room—and paused on the threshold.

Claire Veniza rose to her feet, and her eyes went swiftly, sharply, to the figure standing there—a man of perhaps thirty years of age, of powerful build, and yet whose frame seemed now woefully loose, disjointed and without virility. Her eyes traveled to the man's clothing that was dirty, spotted, and in dire need of sponging, to the necktie that hung awry, to the face that, but for its unhealthy, pasty-yellow complexion, would have been almost strikingly handsome, to the jet-black eyes that somehow at the moment seemed to lack fire and life. And with a little despairing shrug of her shoulders, Claire Veniza turned away her head, and pointed to the form of John Bruce on the floor.

“I—I am afraid it is very serious, Doctor Crang,” she faltered.

“That's all right, Claire,” he said complacently. “That's all right, my dear. You can leave it with confidence to Sydney Angus Crang, M.D.”

She drew a little away as he stepped forward, her face hardening into tight little lines. Hidden, her hands clasped anxiously together. It—it was what she had feared. Doctor Sydney Angus Crang, gold medalist from one of the greatest American universities, brilliant far beyond his fellows, with additional degrees from London, from Vienna, from Heaven alone knew where else, was just about entering upon, or emerging from, a groveling debauch with that Thing to which he had pawned his manhood, his intellect and his soul, that Thing of gray places, of horror, of forgetfulness, of bliss, of torture—cocaine.

Halfway from the threshold to where John Bruce lay, Doctor Crang halted abruptly.

“Hello!” he exclaimed, and glanced with suddenly darkening face from Claire Veniza to the form of John Bruce, and back to Claire Veniza again.

“Oh, will you hurry!” she implored. “Can't you see that the wound——”

“I am more interested in the man than in the wound,” said Doctor Crang, and there was a hint of menace in his voice. “Quite a gentleman of parts! I had expected—let me see what I had expected—well, say, one of the common knife-sticking breed that curses this neighborhood.”

Claire Veniza stamped her foot.

“Oh, hurry!” she burst out wildly. “Don't stand there talking while the man is dying! Do something!”

Doctor Crang advanced to John Bruce's side, set down the little handbag he was carrying, and began to examine the wound.

“Yes, quite a gentleman of parts!” he repeated. His lips had thinned. “How did he get here?”

“I do not know,” she answered. “He came in through that window there and fell on the floor.”

“How peculiar!” observed Doctor Crang. “A gentleman down here in this locality, who is, yes, I will state it as a professional fact, in a very critical state, climbs in through Miss Claire Veniza's window, and——”

The telephone in the other room rang. Claire Veniza ran to it. Doctor Crang's fingers nestled on John Bruce's pulse; he made no other movement save to cock his head in a listening attitude in the girl's direction; he made no effort either to examine further or to dress the wound.

Claire Veniza's voice came distinctly:

“Yes... No, I do not think he will return to-night”—she was hesitating—“he—he met with an—an accident——-”

Doctor Crang had sprung from the other room and had snatched the receiver from the girl's hand. A wave of insensate fury swept his face now. He pushed her roughly from the instrument, and clapped his hand over the transmitter.

“That's one lie you've told me!” he said hoarsely. “I'll attend to the rest of this now.” He withdrew his hand from the transmitter. “Yes, hello!” His voice was cool, even suave. “What is it?... Monsieur Henri de Lavergne speaking—yes... Mister—who?... Mister John Bruce—yes.” He listened for a moment, his lips twitching, his eyes narrowed on Claire Veniza, who had retreated a few steps away. “No, not to-night,” he said, speaking again into the transmitter. “Yes, a slight accident.... Yes.., Good-by.”

Doctor Sydney Angus Crang hung up the receiver, and with a placid smile at variance with the glitter that suddenly brought life into his dulled eyes, advanced toward the girl. She stepped backward quickly into the other room, retreating as far as the motionless form that lay upon the floor. Doctor Crang followed her.

And then Claire Veniza, her face grown stony, her small hands clenched, found her voice again.

“Aren't you going to help him? Aren't you going to do something? Is he to die there before your eyes?” she cried.

Doctor Crang shrugged his shoulders.

“What can I do?” he inquired with velvet softness. “I am helpless. How can I bring the dead back to life?”

“Dead!” All color had fled her face; she bent and looked searchingly at John Bruce.

“Oh, no; not yet,” said Doctor Crang easily. “But very nearly so.”

“And you will do nothing!” She was facing him again. “Then—then I will try and get some one else.”

She stepped forward abruptly.

Doctor Crang barred her way.

“I don't think you will, Claire, my dear!” His voice was monotonous; the placid smile was vanishing. “You see, having spoken to that dear little doll of a man, Monsieur Henri de Lavergne, I'm very much interested in hearing your side of the story.”

“Story!” the girl echoed wildly. “Story—while that man's life is lost! Are you mad—or a murderer—or——”

“Another lover,” said Doctor Crang, and threw back his head and laughed.

She shrank away; her hands tight against her bosom. She glanced around her. If she could only reach the telephone and lock the connecting door! No! She did not dare leave him alone with the wounded man.

“What—what are you going to do?” she whispered.

“Nothing—till I hear the story,” he answered.

“If—if he dies”—her voice rang steadily again—“I'll have you charged with murder.”

“What nonsense!” said Doctor Crang imperturbably. “Did I stab the gentleman?” He took from his pocket a little case, produced a hypodermic syringe, and pushed back his sleeve. “A doctor is not a magician. If he finds a patient beyond reach of aid what can he be expected to do? My dear Claire, where are your brains to-night—you who are usually so amazingly clever?”

“You are mad—insane with drug!” she cried out piteously.

He shook his head, and coolly inserted the needle of the hypodermic in his arm.

“Not yet,” he said. “I am only implacable. Shall we get on with the story? Monsieur de Lavergne says he sent a gentleman by the name of John Bruce out in your father's car a little while ago for the purpose of obtaining a loan in order that the said John Bruce might return to the gambling joint and continue to play. But Mr. Bruce did not return, and the doll, for some reason being anxious, telephones here to make inquiries. Of course”—there was a savage laugh in his voice—“it is only a suspicion, but could this gentleman on the floor here by any chance be Mr. John Bruce?”

“Yes,” she said faintly. “He is John Bruce.”

“Thanks!” said Doctor Crang sarcastically. He very carefully replaced his hypodermic in his pocket. “Now another little matter. I happen to know that your father is spending the evening uptown, so I wonder who was in the car with Mr. John Bruce.”

She stared at him with flashing eyes.

“I was!” she answered passionately. “I don't know what you are driving at! I never did it before, but father was away, and Monsieur de Lavergne was terribly insistent. He said it was for a very special guest. I—I didn't, of course, tell Monsieur de Lavergne that father couldn't go. I only said that I was afraid it would not be convenient to make any loan to-night. But he wouldn't listen to a refusal, and so I went—but Monsieur de Lavergne had no idea that it was any one but father in the car.”

Doctor Crang's lips parted wickedly.

“Naturally!” he snarled. “I quite understand that you took good care of that! Who drove you?”

“Hawkins.”

“Drunk as usual, I suppose! Brain too fuddled to ask questions!”

“That's not true!” she cried out sharply. “Hawkins hasn't touched a drop for a year.”

“All right!” snapped Doctor Crang. “Have it that way, then! Being in his dotage, he makes a good blind, even sober. And so you went for a little ride with Mr. John Bruce to-night?”

Claire Veniza was wringing her hands as she glanced in an agony of apprehension at the wounded man on the floor.

“Yes,” she said; “but—but won't you——”

“And where did you first meet Mr. John Bruce, and how long ago?” he jerked out.

Claire Veniza's great brown eyes widened.

“Why, I never saw him in my life until to-night!” she exclaimed. “And he wasn't in the car ten minutes. Hawkins drove back to the corner just as he always does with father, and Mr. Bruce got out. Then Hawkins drove me home and went uptown to get father. I—I wish they were here now!”

Doctor Crang was gritting his teeth together. A slight unnatural color was tinging his cheeks. He moved a little closer to the girl.

“I'm glad to hear you never saw Mr. Bruce before,” he said cunningly. “You must have traveled fast then—metaphorically speaking. Love at first sight, eh? A cooing exchange of confidences—or was it all on one side? You told him who you were, and where you lived, and——”

“I did nothing of the kind!” Claire Veniza interrupted angrily. “I did not tell him anything!”

“Just strictly business then, of course!” Doctor Crang moved a step still nearer to the girl. “In that case he must have pawned something, and as Lavergne sends nothing but high-priced articles to your father, we shall probably find quite a sum of money in Mr. Bruce's pockets. Eh—Claire?”

She bit her lips. She still did not quite understand—only that she bitterly regretted now, somehow, that she had removed the money from John Bruce's person; only that the drug-crazed brain of the man in front of her was digging, had dug, a trap into which she was falling. What answer was she to make? What was she to——

With a sudden cry she shrank back—but too late to save herself. A face alight with passion was close to hers now; hands that clamped like a steel vise, and that hurt, were upon her shoulder and throat.

“You lie!” Doctor Crang shouted hoarsely. “You've lied from the minute I came into this room. John Bruce—hell! I know now why you have always refused to have anything to do with me. That's why!” He loosened one hand and pointed to the figure on the floor. “How long has this been going on? How long have you been meeting him? To-night is nothing, though you worked it well. Hawkins to take you for a little joy ride with your lover while father's away. Damned clever! You left him on that corner—and he's here wounded! How did he get wounded? You never saw him before! You never heard of him! You told him nothing about yourself! He didn't know where you lived—he could only find the private entrance! Just knows enough about you to climb in through your back window like a skewered dog! But, of course, your story is true, because in his pockets will be the money you gave him for what he pawned! Shall we look and see how much it was?”

She tore herself free and caught at her throat, gasping for breath.

“You—you beast!” she choked. “No; you needn't look! I took it from him, and put it in the safe over there before you came—to keep it away from you.”

Doctor Crang swept a hand across his eyes and through his hair with a savage, jerky movement, and then he laughed immoderately.

“What a little liar you are! Well, then, two can play at the same game. I lied to you about your lover there. I said there was nothing could save him. Yes, yes, Claire, my dear, I lied.” He knelt suddenly, and suddenly intent and professional studied John Bruce's face, and felt again for the pulse beat at John Bruce's wrist. “Pretty near the limit,” he stated coolly. “Internal bleeding.” He threw back his shoulders in a strangely egotistical way. “Not many men could do anything; but I, Sydney Angus Crang, could! Ha, ha! In ten minutes he could be on the road to recovery—but ten minutes, otherwise, is exactly the length of time he has to live.”

An instant Claire Veniza stared at him. Her mind reeled with chaos, with terror and dismay.

“Then do something!” she implored wildly. “If you can save him, do it! You must! You shall!”

“Why should I?” he demanded. His teeth were clamped hard together. “Why should I save your lover? No—damn him!”

She drew away from him, and, suddenly, on her knees, buried her face in her hands and burst into sobs.

“This—this is terrible—terrible!” she cried out. “Has that frightful stuff transformed you into an absolute fiend? Are you no longer even human?” Flushed, a curious look of hunger in his eyes, he gazed at her.

“I'm devilishly human in some respects!” His voice rose, out of control. “I want you! I have wanted you from the day I saw you.”

She shivered. Her hands felt suddenly icy as she pressed them against her face.

“Thank God then,” she breathed, “for this, at least—that you will never get me!”

“Won't I?” His voice rose higher, trembling with passion. “Won't I? By God, I will! The one thing in life I will have some way or another! You understand? I will! And do you think I would let him stand in the way? You drive me mad, Claire, with those wonderful eyes of yours, with that hair, those lips, that throat——”

“Stop!” She was on her feet, and in an instant had reached him, and with her hands upon his shoulders was shaking him fiercely with all her strength. “I hated you, despised you, loathed you before, but with that man dying here, you murderer, I——”

Her voice trailed off, strangled, choked. He had caught her in his arms, his lips were upon hers. She struggled like a tigress. And as they lurched about the room he laughed in mad abandon. She wrenched herself free at last, and slipped and fell upon the floor.

“Do you believe me now!” he panted. “I will have you! Neither this man nor any other will live to get you. His life is a snap of my fingers—so is any other life. It's you I want, and you I will have. And I'll tame you! Then I'll show you what love is.”

She was moaning now a little to herself. She crept to John Bruce and stared into his face. Dying! They were letting this man die. She tried to readjust the cloths upon the wound. She heard Doctor Crang laugh at her again. It seemed as though her soul were sinking into some great bottomless abyss that was black with horror. She did not know this John Bruce. She had told Doctor Crang so. It was useless to repeat it, useless to argue with a drug-steeped brain. There was only one thing that was absolute and final, and that was that a man's life was ebbing away, and a fiend, an inhuman fiend who could save him, but whom pleading would not touch, stood callously by, not wholly indifferent, rather gloating over what took the form of triumph in his diseased mind. And then suddenly she seemed so tired and weary. And she tried to pray to God. And tears came, and on her knees she turned and flung out her arms imploringly to the unkempt figure that stood over her, and who smiled as no other man she had ever seen had smiled before.

“For the pity of God, for anything you have ever known in your life that was pure and sacred,” she said brokenly, “save this man.”

He looked at her for a moment, still with that sardonic smile upon his lips, and then, swift in its transition, his expression changed and cunning was in his eyes.

“What would you give?” he purred.

“Give?” She did not look up. She felt a sudden surge of relief. It debased the man the more, for it was evidently money now; but her father would supply that. She had only to ask for it. “What do you want?” she asked eagerly.

“Yourself,” said Doctor Crang.

She looked up now, quickly, startled; read the lurking triumph in his eyes, and with a sudden cry of fear turned away her head.

“My—myself!” Her lips scarcely moved.

“Yes, my dear! Yourself—Claire!” Doctor

Crang shrugged his shoulders. “Edinburgh, London, Vienna, Paris, degrees from everywhere—ha, ha!—am I a high-priced man? Well, then, why don't you dismiss me? You called me in! That is my price—or shall we call it fee? Promise to marry me, Claire, and I'll save that man.”

Her face had lost all vestige of color. She stood and looked at him, but it did not seem as though she any longer had control over her limbs. She did not seem able to move them. They were numbed; her brain was mercifully numbed—there was only a sense of impending horror, without that horror taking concrete form. A voice came to her as though from some great distance:

“Don't take too long to make up your mind. There isn't much time. It's about touch and go with him now.”

The words, the tone, the voice roused her. Realization, understanding swept upon her. A faintness came. She closed her eyes, swayed unsteadily, but recovered herself. Something made her look at the upturned face on the floor. She did not know this man. He was nothing to her. Why was he pleading with her to pawn herself for him? What right had he to ask for worse than death from her that he might live? Her soul turned sick within her. If she refused, this man would die. Death! It was a very little thing compared with days and months and years linked, fettered, bound to a drug fiend, a coward, a foul thing, a potential murderer, a man only in the sense of physical form, who had abused every other God-given attribute until it had rotted away! Her hands pressed to her temples fiercely, in torment. Was this man to live or die? In her hands was balanced a human life. It seemed as though she must scream out in her anguish of soul; and then it seemed as though she must fling herself upon the drug-crazed being who had forced this torture upon her, fling herself upon him to batter and pommel with her fists at his face that smiled in hideous contentment at her. What was she to do? The choice was hers. To let this man here die, or to accept a living death for herself—no, worse than that—something that was abominable, revolting, that profaned.... She drew her breath in sharply. She was staring at the man on the floor. His eyelids fluttered and opened. Gray eyes were fixed upon her, eyes that did not seem to see for there was a vacant stare in them—and then suddenly recognition crept into them and they lighted up, full of a strange, glad wonder. He made an effort to speak, an effort, more feeble still, to reach out his hand to her—and then the eyes had closed and he was unconscious again.

She turned slowly and faced Doctor Crang.

“You do not know what you are doing.” She formed the words with a great effort.

“Oh, yes, I do!” he answered with mocking deliberation. “I know that if I can't get you one way, I can another—and the way doesn't matter.”

“God forgive you, then,” she said in a dead voice, “for I never can or will! I—I agree.”

He took a step toward her.

“You'll marry me?” His face was fired with passion.

She retreated a step.

“Yes,” she said.

He reached out for her with savage eagerness.

“Claire!” he cried. “Claire!”

She pushed him back with both hands.

“Not yet!” she said, and tried to steady her voice. “There is another side to the bargain. The price is this man's life. If he lives I will marry you, and in that case, as you well know, I can say nothing of what you have done to-night; but if he dies, I am not only free, but I will do my utmost to make you criminally responsible for his death.”

“Ah!” Doctor Crang stared at her. His hands, still reaching out to touch her, trembled; his face was hectic; his eyes were alight again with feverish hunger—and then suddenly the man seemed transformed into another being. He was on his knees beside John Bruce, and had opened his handbag in an instant, and in another he had forced something from a vial between John Bruce's lips; then an instrument was in his hands. The man of a moment before was gone; one Sydney Angus Crang, of many degrees, professional, deft, immersed in his work, had taken the other's place. “More water! An extra basin!” he ordered curtly.

Claire Veniza obeyed him in a mechanical way. Her brain was numbed, exhausted, possessed of a great weariness. She watched him for a little while. He flung another order at her.

“Make that couch up into a bed,” he directed. “He can't be moved even upstairs to-night.”

Again she obeyed him; finally she helped him to lift John Bruce to the couch.

She sat down in a chair and waited—she did not know what for. Doctor Crang had drawn another chair to the couch and sat there watching his patient. John Bruce, as far as she could tell, showed no sign of life.

Then Doctor Crang's voice seemed to float out of nothingness:

“He will live, Claire, my dear! By God, I'd like to have done that piece of work in a clinic! Some of 'em would sit up! D'ye hear, Claire, he'll live!”

She was conscious that he was studying her; she did not look at him, nor did she answer.

An eternity seemed to pass. She heard a motor stop outside in front of the house. That would be her father and Hawkins.

The front door opened and closed, footsteps entered the room—and suddenly seemed to quicken and hurry forward. She rose from her chair.

“What's this? What's the matter? What's happened?” a tall, white-haired man cried out.

It was Doctor Crang who answered.

“Oh—this, Mr. Veniza?” He waved his hand indifferently toward the couch. “Nothing of any importance.” He shrugged his shoulders in cool imperturbability, and smiled into the grave, serious face of Paul Veniza. “The really important thing is that Claire has promised to be my wife.”

For an instant no one moved or spoke—only Doctor Crang still smiled. And then the silence was broken by a curious half laugh, half curse that was full of menace.

“You lie!” Hawkins, the round, red-faced chauffeur, had stepped from behind Paul Veniza, and now faced Doctor Crang. “You lie! You damned coke-eater! I'd kill you first!”

“Drunk—again!” drawled Doctor Crang contemptuously. “And what have you to do with it?”

“Steady, Hawkins!” counselled Paul Veniza quietly. He turned to Claire Veniza. “Claire,” he asked, “is—is this true?”

She nodded—and suddenly, blindly, started toward the door.

“It is true,” she said.

“Claire!” Paul Veniza stepped after her. “Claire,

“Not to-night, father,” she said in a low voice. “Please let me go.”

He stood aside, allowing her to pass, his face grave and anxious—and then he turned again to Doctor Crang.

“She is naturally very upset over what has happened here,” said Doctor Crang easily—and suddenly reaching out grasped Hawkins' arm, and pulled the old man forward to the couch. “Here, you!” he jerked out. “You've got so much to say for yourself—take a look at this fellow!”

The old chauffeur bent over the couch.

“My God!” he cried out in a startled way. “It's the man we—I—drove to-night!”

“Quite so!” observed Doctor Crang. He smiled at Paul Veniza again. “Apart from the fact that the fellow came in through that window with a knife stab in his side that's pretty nearly done for him, Hawkins knows as much about it as either Claire or I do. He's in bad shape. Extremely serious. I will stay with him to-night. He cannot be moved.” He nodded suggestively toward the door. “Hawkins can tell you as much as I can. It's got to be quiet in here. As for Claire”—he seemed suddenly to be greatly disturbed and occupied with the condition of the wounded man on the couch—“that will have to wait until morning. This man's condition is critical. I can't put you out of your own room, but——-” Again he nodded toward the door.

For a moment Paul Veniza hesitated—but Doctor Crang's back was already turned, and he was bending over the wounded man, apparently oblivious to every other consideration. He motioned to Hawkins, and the two left the room.

Doctor Crang looked around over his shoulder as the door closed. A malicious grin spread over his face. He rubbed his hands together. Then he sat down in his chair again, and began to prepare a solution for his hypodermic syringe.

“Yes, yes,” said Doctor Crang softly, addressing the unconscious form of John Bruce, “you'll live, all right, my friend, I'll see to that, though the odds are still against you. You're too—ha, ha!—valuable to die! You played in luck when you drew Sydney Angus Crang, M.D., as your attending physician!”

And then Doctor Sydney Angus Crang made a little grimace as he punctured the flesh of his arm with the needle of the hypodermic syringe and injected into himself another dose of cocaine.

“Yes,” said Doctor Sydney Angus Crang very softly, his eyes lighting, “too valuable, much too valuable—to die!”

CHAPTER FIVE—HAWKINS

IN the outer room, the door closed behind them, Paul Veniza and Hawkins stared into each other's eyes. Hawkins' face had lost its ruddy, weatherbeaten color, and there was a strained, perplexed anxiety in his expression.

“D'ye hear what she said?” he mumbled. “D'ye hear what he said? Going to be married! My little girl, my innocent little girl, and—and that dope-feeding devil! I—I don't understand, Paul. What's it mean?”

Paul Veniza laid his hand on the other's shoulder, as much to seek, it seemed, as to offer sympathy. He shook his head.

“I don't know,” he said blankly.

Hawkins' watery blue eyes under their shaggy brows traveled miserably in the direction of the staircase.

“I—I ain't got the right,” he choked. “You go up and talk to her, Paul.”

Paul Veniza ran his fingers in a troubled way through his white hair; then, nodding his head, he turned abruptly and began to mount the stairs.

Hawkins watched until the other had disappeared from sight, watched until he heard a door open and close softly above; then he swung sharply around, and with his old, drooping shoulders suddenly squared, strode toward the door that shut him off from Doctor Crang and the man he had recognized as his passenger in the traveling pawn-shop earlier that night. But at the door itself he hesitated, and after a moment drew back, and the shoulders drooped again, and he fell to twisting his hands together in nervous indecision as he retreated to the center of the room.

And he stood there again, where Paul Veniza had left him, and stared with the hurt of a dumb animal in his eyes at the top of the staircase.

“It's all my fault,” the old man whispered, and fell to twisting his hands together once more. “But—but I thought she'd be safe with me.”

For a long time he seemed to ponder his own words, and gradually they seemed to bring an added burden upon him, and heavily now he drew his hand across his eyes.

“Why ain't I dead?” he whispered. “I ain't never been no good to her. Twenty years, it is—twenty years. Just old Hawkins—shabby old Hawkins—that she loves 'cause she's sorry for him.”

Hawkins' eyes roved about the room.

“I remember the night I brought her here.” He was still whispering to himself. “In there, it was, I took her.” He jerked his hand toward the inner room. “This here room was the pawn-shop then. God, all those years ago—and—and I ain't never bought her back again, and she ain't known no father but Paul, and——” His voice trailed off and died away.

He sank his chin in his hands.

Occasionally he heard the murmur of voices from above, occasionally the sound of movement through the closed door that separated him from Doctor Crang; but he did not move or speak again until Paul Veniza came down the stairs and stood before him.

Hawkins searched the other's face.

“It—it ain't true, is it, what she said?” he questioned almost fiercely. “She didn't really mean it, did she, Paul?”

Paul Veniza turned his head away.

“Yes, she meant it,” he answered in a low voice. “I don't understand. She wouldn't give me any explanation.”

Hawkins clenched his fists suddenly.

“But didn't you tell her what kind of a man Crang is? Good God, Paul, didn't you tell her what he is?”

“She knows it without my telling her,” Paul Veniza said in a dull tone. “But I told her again; I told her it was impossible, incredible. Her only answer was that it was inevitable.”

“But she doesn't love him! She can't love him!” Hawkins burst out. “There's never been anything between them before.”

“No, she doesn't love him. Of course, she doesn't!” Paul Veniza said, as though speaking to himself. He looked at Hawkins suddenly under knitted brows. “And she says she never saw that other man in her life before until he stepped into the car. She says she only went out to-night because they were so urgent about it up at the house, and that she felt everything would be perfectly safe with you driving the car. I can't make anything out of it!”

Hawkins drew the sleeve of his coat across his brow. It was cool in the room, but little beads of moisture were standing out on his forehead.

“I ain't brought her nothing but harm all my life,” he said brokenly. “I——”

“Don't take it that way, old friend!” Paul Veniza's hands sought the other's shoulders. “I don't see how you are to blame for this. Claire said that other man treated her with all courtesy, and left the car after you had gone around the block; and she doesn't know how he afterwards came here wounded any more than we do—and anyway, it can't have anything to do with her marrying Doctor Crang.”

“What's she doing now?” demanded Hawkins abruptly. “She's up there crying her heart out, ain't she?”

Paul Veniza did not answer.

Hawkins straightened up. A sudden dignity came to the shabby old figure.

“What hold has that devil got on my little girl?” he cried out sharply. “I'll make him pay for it, so help me God! My little girl, my little———”

“S-sh!” Paul Veniza caught hurriedly at Hawkins' arm. “Be careful, old friend!” he warned. “Not so loud! She might hear you.”

Hawkins cast a timorous, startled glance in the direction of the stairs. He seemed to shrink again, into a stature as shabby as his clothing. His lips twitched; he twisted his hands together.

“Yes,” he mumbled; “yes, she—she might hear me.” He stared around the room; and then, as though blindly, his hands groping out in front of him, he started for the street door. “I'm going home,” said Hawkins. “I'm going home to think this out.”

Paul Veniza's voice choked a little.

“Your hat, old friend,” he said, picking up the old man's hat from the table and following the other to the door.

“Yes, my hat,” said Hawkins—and pulling it far down over his eyes, crossed the sidewalk, and climbed into the driver's seat of the old, closed car that stood at the curb.

He started the car mechanically. He did not look back. He stared straight ahead of him except when, at the corner, his eyes lifted and held for a moment on the lighted windows and the swinging doors of a saloon—and the car went perceptibly slower. Then his hands tightened fiercely in their hold upon the wheel until the white of the knuckles showed, and the car passed the saloon and turned the next corner and went on.

Halfway down the next block it almost came to a halt again when opposite a dark and dingy driveway that led in between, and to the rear of, two poverty-stricken frame houses. Hawkins stared at this uninviting prospect, and made as though to turn the car into the driveway; then, shaking his head heavily, he continued on along the street.

“I can't go in there and sit by myself all alone,” said Hawkins hoarsely. “I—I'd go mad. It's—it's like as though they'd told me to-night that she'd died—same as they told me about her mother the night I went to Paul's.”

The car moved slowly onward. It turned the next corner—and the next. It almost completed the circuit of the block. Hawkins now was wetting his lips with the tip of his tongue. His hands on the wheel were trembling. The car had stopped. Hawkins was staring again at the lighted windows and the swinging doors of the saloon.

He sat for a long time motionless; then he climbed down from his seat.

“Just one,” Hawkins whispered to himself. “Just one. I—I'd go mad if I didn't.”

Hawkins pushed the swinging doors open, and sidled up to the bar.

“Hello, Hawkins!” grinned the barkeeper. “Been out of town? I ain't seen you the whole afternoon!”

“You mind your own business!” said Hawkins surlily.

“Sure!” nodded the barkeeper cheerily. “Same as usual?” He slid a square-faced bottle and a glass toward the old man.

Hawkins helped himself and drank moodily. He set his empty glass back on the bar, jerked down his shabby vest and straightened up, his eyes resolutely fixed on the door. Then he felt in his pocket for his pipe and tobacco. His eyes shifted from the door to his pipe. He filled it slowly.

“Give me another,” said Hawkins presently—without looking at the barkeeper.

Again the old man drank, and jerked down his vest, and squared his thin shoulders. He lighted his pipe, tamping the bowl carefully with his forefinger. His eyes sought the swinging doors once more.

“I'm going home,” said Hawkins defiantly to himself. “I've got to think this out.” He dug into his vest pocket for money, and produced a few small bills. He stared at these for a moment, hesitated, started to replace them in his pocket, hesitated again, and the tip of his tongue circled his lips; then he pushed the money across the bar. “Take the drinks out of that, and—and give me a bottle,” he said. “I—I don't like to be without anything in the house, and I got to go home.”

“You said something!” said the barkeeper. “Have one on the house before you go?”

“No; I won't.”

“No,” said Hawkins with stern determination.

Hawkins crowded the bottle into the side pocket of his coat, passed out through the swinging doors, and resumed his seat on the car. And again the car started forward. But it went faster now. Hawkins' face was flushed; he seemed nervously and excitedly in haste. At the driveway he turned in, garaged his car in an old shed at the rear of one of the houses, locked the shed with a padlock, and, by way of the back door, entered the house that was in front of the shed.

It was quite dark inside, but Hawkins had been an inmate of the somewhat seedy rooming-house too many years either to expect that a light should be burning at that hour, or, for that matter, to require any light. He groped his way up a flight of creaking stairs, opened the door of a room, and stepped inside. He shut the door behind him, locked it, and struck a match. A gas-jet wheezed asthmatically, and finally flung a thin and sullen yellow glow about the place. It disclosed a cot bed, a small strip of carpet long since worn bare of nap, a washstand, an old trunk, a battered table, and two chairs.

Hawkins, with some difficulty, extricated the bottle from his pocket, and lifted the lid of his trunk. He thrust the bottle inside, and in the act of closing the lid upon it—hesitated.

“I—I ain't myself to-night, I ain't,” said Hawkins tremulously. “It's shook me, it has—bad. Just one—so help me God!—just one.”

Hawkins sat down at the table with the bottle in front of him.

And while Hawkins sat there it grew very late.

At intervals Hawkins talked to himself. At times he stared owlishly from a half-emptied bottle to the black square of window pane above the trunk—and once he shook his fist in that direction.

“Crang—eh—damn you!” he gritted out. “You think you got her, do you? Some dirty, cunning trick you've played her! But you don't know old Hawkins. Ha, ha! You think he's only a drunken bum!”

Hawkins, as it grew later still, became unsteady in his seat. Gradually his head sank down upon the table.

“I—hie!—gotta think this—out,” said Hawkins earnestly—and fell asleep.

CHAPTER SIX—THE ALIBI

JOHN BRUCE opened his eyes dreamily, unseeingly; and then his eyelids fluttered and closed again. There was an exquisite sense of languor upon him, of cool, comfortable repose; a curious absence of all material things. It seemed as though he were in some suspended state of animation.

It was very strange. It wasn't life—not life as he had ever known it. Perhaps it was death. He did not understand.

He tried to think. He was conscious that his mind for some long indeterminate period had been occupied with the repetition of queer, vague, broken snatches of things, fantastic things born of illusions, brain fancies, cobwebby, intangible, which had no meaning, and were without beginning or end. There was a white beach, very white, and a full round moon, and the moon winked knowingly while he whittled with a huge jack-knife at a quill toothpick. And then there was a great chasm of blackness which separated the beach from some other place that seemed to have nothing to identify it except this black chasm which was the passageway to it; and here a man's face, a face that was sinister in its expression, and both repulsive and unhealthy in its color, was constantly bending over him, and the man's head was always in the same posture—cocked a little to one side, as though listening intently and straining to hear something. And then, in the same place, but less frequently, there was another face—and this seemed to bring with it always a shaft of warm, bright sunlight that dispelled the abominable gloom, and before which the first face vanished—a beautiful, the wondrously beautiful, face of a girl, one that he had seen somewhere before, that was haunting in its familiarity and for which it seemed he had always known a great yearning, but which plagued him miserably because there seemed to be some unseen barrier between them, and because he could not recognize her, and she could not speak and tell him who she was.

John Bruce opened his eyes again. Dimly, faintly, his mind seemed to be grasping coherent realities. He began to remember fragments of the past, but it was very hard to piece those fragments together into a concrete whole. That white beach—yes, he remembered that. And the quill toothpick. Only the huge jack-knife was absurd! It was at Apia with Larmon. But he was in a room somewhere now, and lying on a cot of some sort. And it was night. How had he come here?

He moved a little, and suddenly felt a twinge of pain in his side. His hand groped under the covering, and his fingers came into contact with bandages that were wrapped tightly around his body.

And then in a flash memory returned. He remembered the fight in Ratti's wine shop, the knife stab, and how he had dragged himself along the lane and climbed in through her window. His eyes now in a startled way were searching his surroundings. Perhaps this was the room! He could not be quite sure, but there seemed to be something familiar about it. The light was very low, like a gas-jet turned down, and he could not make out where it came from, nor could he see any window through which he might have climbed in.

He frowned in a troubled way. It was true that, as he had climbed in that night, he had not been in a condition to take much note of the room, but yet it did seem to be the same place. The frown vanished. What did it matter? He knew now beyond any question whose face it was that had come to him so often in that shaft of sunlight. Yes, it did matter! He must have been unconscious, perhaps for only a few hours, perhaps for days, but if this was the same place, then she was here, not as a figment of the brain, not as one created out of his own longing, but here in her actual person, a living, breathing reality. It was the girl of the traveling pawn-shop, and——

John Bruce found himself listening with sudden intentness. Was he drifting back into unconsciousness again, into that realm of unreal things, where the mind, fevered and broken, wove out of its sick imagination queer, meaningless fancies? It was strange that unreal things should seem so real! Wasn't that an animal of some sort scratching at the wall of the house outside?

He lifted his head slightly from the pillow—and held it there. A voice from within the room reached him in an angry, rasping whisper:

“Damn you, Birdie, why don't you pull the house down and have done with it? You clumsy hog! Do you want the police on us? Can't you climb three feet without waking up the whole of New York?”

John Bruce's lips drew together until they formed a tight, straight line. This was strange! Very strange! It wasn't a vagary of his brain this time. His brain was as clear now as it had ever been in his life. The voice came from beyond the head of his cot. He had seen no one in the room, but that was natural enough since from the position in which he was lying his line of vision was decidedly restricted; what seemed incomprehensible though, taken in conjunction with the words he had just heard, was that his own presence there appeared to be completely ignored.

He twisted his head around cautiously, and found that the head of the cot was surrounded by a screen. He nodded to himself a little grimly. That accounted for it! There was a scraping sound now, and heavy, labored breathing.

John Bruce silently and stealthily stretched out his arm. He could just reach the screen. It was made of some soft, silken material, and his fingers found no difficulty in drawing this back a little from the edge of that portion of the upright framework which was directly in front of him.

He scarcely breathed now. Perhaps he was in so weak a state that his mind faltered if crowded, for there was so much to see that he could not seem to grasp it all as a single picture. He gazed fascinated. The details came slowly—one by one. It was the room where he had crawled in through the window and had fallen senseless to the floor—whenever that had been! That was the window there. And, curiously enough, another man was crawling in through it now! And there was whispering. And two other men were already standing in the room, but he could not see their faces because their backs were turned to him. Then one of the two swung around in the direction of the window, bringing his face into view. John Bruce closed his eyes for a moment. Yes, it must be that! His mind was off wandering once more, painting and picturing for itself its fanciful unrealities, bringing back again the character it had created, the man with the sinister face whose pallor was unhealthy and repulsive.

And then he opened his eyes and looked again, and the face was still there—and it was real. And now the man spoke:

“Come on, get busy, Birdie! If you take as long to crack the box as you have taken to climb in through a low window, maybe we'll be invited to breakfast with the family! You act just like a swell cracksman—not! But here's the combination—so try and play up to the part!”

The man addressed was heavy of build, with a pockmarked and forbidding countenance. He was panting from his exertions, as, inside the room now, he leaned against the sill.

“That's all right, Doc!” he grunted. “That's all right! But how about his nibs over there behind the screen? Ain't he ever comin' out of his nap?”

The man addressed as “Doc” rolled up the sleeve of his left arm, and produced a hypodermic syringe from his pocket.

“There's the safe over there, Birdie,” he drawled, as he pricked his arm with the needle and pushed home the plunger. “Get busy!”

The big man shuffled his feet.

“I know you know your business, Doc,” he said uneasily; “but I guess me an' Pete here 'd feel more comfortable if you'd have put that shot of coke into the guy I'm speakin' about instead of into yourself. Ain't I right, Pete?”

The third man was lounging against the wall, his back still turned to John Bruce.

“Sure,” he said; “but I guess you can leave it to Doc. A guy that's been pawin' the air for two days ain't likely to butt in much all of a sudden.”

The man with the hypodermic, in the act of replacing the syringe in his pocket, drew it out again.

“Coming from you, Birdie,” he murmured caustically, “that's a surprisingly bright idea. I've been here for the last three hours listening to his interesting addresses from the rostrum of delirium, and I should say he was quite safe. Still, to oblige you, Birdie, and make you feel more comfortable, we'll act on your suggestion.”

John Bruce's teeth gritted together. How weak he was! His arm ached from even the slight strain of extending it beyond his head to the screen.

And then he smiled grimly. But it wasn't a case of strength now, was it? He was obviously quite helpless in that respect. This man they called Doc believed him to be still unconscious, and—he drew his arm silently back, tucked it again under the sheet and blanket that covered him, and closed his eyes—and even if he could resist, which he couldn't, a hypodermic injection of morphine, or cocaine, or whatever it was that the supreme crook of the trio indulged in, could not instantly take effect. There ought to be time enough to watch at least——

John Bruce lay perfectly still. He heard a footstep come quickly around the screen; he sensed the presence of some one bending over him; then the coverings were pulled down and his arm was bared. He steeled himself against the instinctive impulse to wince at the sharp prick of the needle which he knew was coming—and felt instead a cold and curiously merciless rage sweep over him as the act was performed. Then the footstep retreated—and John Bruce quietly twisted his head around on the pillow, reached out his arm, and his fingers drew the silk panel of the screen slightly away from the edge of the framework again.

He could see the safe they had referred to now. It was over at the far side of the room against the wall, and the three men were standing in front of it. Presently it was opened. The man called Doc knelt down in front of it and began to examine its contents. He swung around to his companions after a moment with a large pile of banknotes in his hands. From this pile he counted out and handed a small portion to each of the other two men—and coolly stuffed the bulk of the money into his own pockets.

The scene went blurry then for a moment before John Bruce's eyes, and he lifted his free hand and brushed it across his forehead. He was so beastly weak, anyhow, and the infernal dope was getting in its work too fast! He fought with all his mental strength against the impulse to relax and close his eyes. What was it they were doing now? It looked like some foolish masquerade. The two companions of the man with the sinister, pasty face were tying handkerchiefs over their faces and drawing revolvers from their pockets; and then the big man began to close the door of the safe.

The Doc's voice came sharply:

“Look out you don't lock it, you fool!”

Once more John Bruce brushed his hand across his eyes. His brain must be playing him tricks again. A din infernal rose suddenly in the room. While the big man lounged nonchalantly against the safe, the other two were scuffling all over the floor and throwing chairs about. And then from somewhere upstairs, on the floor there too, John Bruce thought he caught the sound of hurried movements.

Then for an instant the scuffling in the room ceased, and the pasty-faced man's voice came in a peremptory whisper:

“The minute any one shows at the door you swing that safe open as though you'd been working at it all the time, Birdie, and pretend to shove everything in sight into your pockets. And you, Joe, you've got me cornered and covered here—see? And you hold the doorway with your gun too; and then both of you back away and make your getaway through the window.” The scuffling began again. John Bruce watched the scene, a sense of drowsiness and apathy creeping upon him. He tried to rouse himself. He ought to do something. That vicious-faced little crook who had haunted him with unwelcome visitations, and who at this precise moment had the bulk of the money from the safe in his own pockets, was in the act of planting a somewhat crude, but probably none the less effective, alibi, and——

John Bruce heard a door flung open, and then a sudden, startled cry, first in a woman's and then in a man's voice. But he could not see any door from the position in which he lay. He turned over with a great effort, facing the other way, and reached out with his fingers for the panel of the screen that overlapped the head of the cot. And then John Bruce lay motionless, the blood pounding fiercely at his temples.

He was conscious that a tall, white-haired man in scanty attire was there, because the doorway framed two figures; but he saw only a beautiful face, pitifully white, only the slim form of a girl whose great brown eyes were very wide with fear, and who held her dressing gown tightly clutched around her throat. It was the girl of the traveling pawn-shop, it was the girl of his dreams in the shaft of sunlight, it was the girl he had followed here—only—only the picture seemed to be fading away. It was very strange! It was most curious! She always seemed to leave that way. This was Larmon now instead, wasn't it? Larmon... and a jack-knife... and a quill toothpick... and....

CHAPTER SEVEN—THE GIRL OF THE TRAVELING PAWN-SHOP

JOHN BRUCE abstractedly twirled the tassel of the old and faded dressing gown which he wore, the temporary possession of which he owed to Paul Veniza, his host. From the chair in which he sat his eyes ventured stolen glances at the nape of a dainty neck, and at a great coiled mass of silken brown hair that shone like burnished copper in the afternoon sunlight, as Claire Veniza, her back turned toward him, busied herself about the room. He could walk now across the floor—and a great deal further, he was sure, if they would only let him. He had not pressed that point; it might be taking an unfair advantage of an already over-generous hospitality, but he was not at all anxious to speed his departure from—well, from where he was at that precise moment.

And now as he looked at Claire Veniza, his thoughts went back to the night he had stepped, at old Hawkins' invitation, into the traveling pawn-shop. That was not so very long ago—two weeks of grave illness, and then the past week of convalescence—but it seemed to span a great and almost limitless stretch of time, and to mark a new and entirely different era in his life; an era that perplexed and troubled and intrigued him with conditions and surroundings and disturbing elements that he did not comprehend—but at the same time made the blood in his veins to course with wild abandon, and the future to hold out glad and beckoning hands.

He loved, with a great, overwhelming, masterful love, the girl who stood there just across the room all unconscious of the worship that he knew was in his eyes, and which he neither tried nor wished to curb. Of his own love he was sure. He had loved her from the moment he had first seen her, and in his heart he knew he held fate kind to have given him the wound that in its turn had brought the week of convalescence just past. And yet—and yet—— Here dismay came, and his brain seemed to stumble. Sometimes he dared to hope; sometimes he was plunged into the depths of misery and despair. Little things, a touch of the hand as she had nursed him that had seemed like some God-given tender caress, a glance when she had thought he had not seen and which he had allowed his heart to interpret to its advantage with perhaps no other justification than its own yearning and desire, had buoyed him up; and then, at times, a strange, almost bitter aloofness, it seemed, in her attitude toward him—and this had checked, had always checked, the words that were ever on his lips.

A faint flush dyed his cheeks. But even so, and for all his boasted love, did he not in his own soul wrong her sometimes? The questions would come. What was the meaning of the strange environment in which she lived? Why should she have driven to a gambling hell late at night, and quite as though it were the usual thing, to transact business alone in that car with——

God! His hands clenched fiercely. He remembered that night, and how the same thought had come then, mocking him, jeering him, making sport of him. He was a cad, a pitiful, vile-minded cad! Thank God that he was at least still man enough to be ashamed of his own thoughts, even if they came in spite of him!

Perhaps it was the strange, unusual characters that surrounded her, that came and went in this curious place here, that fostered such thoughts; perhaps he was not strong enough yet to grapple with all these confusing things. He smiled a little grimly. The robbery of the safe, for instance—and that reptile whom he now knew to be his own attending physician, Doctor Crang! He had said nothing about his knowledge of the robbery—yet. As nearly as he could judge it had occurred two or three days prior to the time when his actual convalescence had set in, and as a material witness to the crime he was not at all sure that in law his testimony would be of much value. They must certainly have found him in an unconscious state immediately afterward—and Doctor Crang would as indubitably attack his testimony as being nothing more than the hallucination of a sick brain.

The luck of the devil had been with Crang! Why had he, John Bruce, gone drifting off into unconsciousness just at the psychological moment when, if the plan had been carried out as arranged and the other two had made their fake escape, Crang would have been left in the room with Claire and Paul Veniza—with the money in his pockets! He would have had Doctor Crang cold then! It was quite different now. He was not quite sure what he meant to do, except that he fully proposed to have a reckoning with Doctor Crang. But that reckoning, something, he could not quite define what, had prompted him to postpone until he had become physically a little stronger!

And then there was another curious thing about it all, which too had influenced him in keeping silent. Hawkins, Paul Veniza, Claire and Doctor Crang had each, severally and collectively, been here in this room many times since the robbery, and not once in his presence had the affair ever been mentioned! And—oh, what did it matter! He shrugged his shoulders as though to rid himself of some depressing physical weight. What did anything matter on this wonderful sunlit afternoon—save Claire there in her white, cool dress, that seemed somehow to typify her own glorious youth and freshness.

How dainty and sweet and alluring she looked! His eyes were no longer contented with stolen glances; they held now masterfully, defiant of any self-restraint, upon the slim figure that was all grace from the trim little ankles to the poise of the shapely head. He felt the blood quicken his pulse. Stronger than he had ever known it before, straining to burst all barriers, demanding expression as a right that would not be denied, his love rose dominant within him, and——

The tassel he had been twirling dropped from his hand. She had turned suddenly; and across the room her eyes met his, calm, deep and unperturbed at first, but wide the next instant with a startled shyness, and the color sweeping upward from her throat crimsoned her face, and in confusion she turned away her head.

John Bruce was on his feet. He stumbled a little as he took a step forward. His heart was pounding, flinging a red tide into the pallor of his cheeks that illness had claimed as one of its tolls.

“I—I did not mean to tell you like that,” he said huskily. “But I have wanted to tell you for so long. It seems as though I have always wanted to tell you. Claire—I love you.”

She did not answer.

He was beside her now—only her head was lowered and averted and he could not look into her face. Her fingers were plucking tremulously at a fold of her dress. He caught her hand between both his own.

“Claire—Claire, I love you!” he whispered.

She disengaged her hand gently; and, still refusing to let him see her face, shook her head slowly.

“I—I——-” Her voice was very low. “Oh, don't you know?”

“I know I love you,” he answered passionately. “I know that nothing else but that matters.”

Again she shook her head.

“I thought perhaps he would have told you. I—I am going to marry Doctor Crang.”

John Bruce stepped back involuntarily; and for a moment incredulity and helpless amazement held sway in his expression—then his lips tightened in a hurt, half angry way.

“Is that fair to me, Claire—to give me an answer like that?” he said in a low tone. “I know it isn't true, of course; it couldn't be—but—but it isn't much of a joke either, is it?”

“It is true,” she said monotonously.

He leaned suddenly forward, and taking her face between his hands, made her lift her head and look at him. The brown eyes were swimming with tears. The red swept her face in a great wave, and, receding, left it deathly pale—and in a frenzy of confusion she wrenched herself free from him and retreated a step.

“My God!” said John Bruce hoarsely. “You—and Doctor Crang! I don't understand! It is monstrous! You can't love that——” He checked himself, biting at his lips. “You can't love Doctor Crang. It is impossible! You dare not stand there and tell me that you do. Answer me, Claire—answer me!”

She seemed to have regained her self-control—or perhaps it was the one defense she knew. The little figure was drawn up, her head held back.

“You have no right to ask me that,” she said steadily.

“Right!” John Bruce echoed almost fiercely. His soul itself seemed suddenly to be in passionate turmoil; it seemed to juggle two figures before his consciousness, contrasting one with the other in most hideous fashion—this woman here whom he loved, who struggled to hold herself bravely, who stood for all that was pure, for all that he reverenced in a woman; and that sallow, evil-faced degenerate, a drug fiend so lost to the shame of his vice that he pricked himself with his miserable needle quite as unconcernedly in public as one would smoke a cigarette—and worse—a crook—a thief! Was it a coward's act to tell this girl what the man was whom she proposed to marry? Was it contemptible to pull a rival such as that down from the pedestal which in some fiendish way he must have erected for himself? Surely she did not know the man for what he actually was! She could not know! “Right!” he cried out. “Yes, I have the right—both for your sake and for my own. I have the right my love gives me. Do you know how I came here that first night?”

“Yes,” she said with an effort. “You told me. You were in a fight in Ratti's place, and were wounded.”

He laughed out harshly.

“And I told you the truth—as far as it went,” he said. “But do you know how I came to be in this locality after leaving you in that motor car? I followed you. I loved you from the moment I saw you that night. It seems as though I have always loved you—as I always shall love you. That is what gives me the right to speak. And I mean to speak. If it were an honorable man to whom you were to be married it would be quite another matter; but you cannot know what you are doing, you do not know this man as he really is, or what he——”

“Please! Please stop!” she cried out brokenly. “Nothing you could say would tell me anything I do not already know.”

“I am not so sure!” said John Bruce grimly. “Suppose I told you he was a criminal?”

“He is a criminal.” Her voice was without inflection.

“Suppose then he were sent to jail—to serve a sentence?”

“I would marry him when he came out,” she said. “Oh, please do not say any more! I know far more about him than you do; but—but that has nothing to do with it.”

For an instant, motionless, John Bruce stared at Claire; then his hands swept out and caught her wrists in a tight grip and held her prisoner.

“Claire!” His voice choked. “What does this mean? You do not love him; you say you know he is even a criminal—and yet you are going to marry him! What hold has he got on you? What is it? What damnable trap has he got you in? I am going to know, Claire! I will know! And whatever it is, whatever the cause of it, I'll crush it, strangle it, sweep it out of your dear life at any cost! Tell me, Claire!”

Her face had gone white; she struggled a little to release herself.

“You—you do not know what you are saying. You——” Her voice broke in a half sob.

“Claire, look at me!” He was pleading now with his soul in his eyes and voice. “Claire, I——”

“Oh, please let me go!” she cried out frantically. “You cannot say anything that will make any difference. I—it only makes it harder.” The tears were brimming in her eyes again. “Oh, please let me go—there's—there's some one coming.”

John Bruce's hands dropped to his sides. The door, already half open, was pushed wide, and Hawkins, the old chauffeur, stood on the threshold. And as John Bruce looked in that direction, he was suddenly and strangely conscious that somehow for the moment the old man dominated his attention even to the exclusion of Claire. There was something of curious self-effacement, of humbleness in the bent, stoop-shouldered figure there, who twisted a shapeless hat awkwardly in his hands; but also something of trouble and deep anxiety in the faded blue eyes as they fixed on the girl, and yet without meeting her eyes in return, held upon her as she walked slowly now toward the door.

“Dear old Hawkins,” she said softly, and laid her hand for an instant on the other's arm as she passed by him, “you and Mr. Bruce will be able to entertain each other, won't you? I—I'm going upstairs for a little while.”

And the old man made no answer; but, turning on the threshold, he watched her, his attitude, it seemed to John Bruce, one of almost pathetic wistfulness, as Claire disappeared from view.

CHAPTER EIGHT—ALLIES

CLAIRE'S footsteps, ascending the stairs, died away. John Bruce returned to his chair. His eyes were still on the old chauffeur.

Hawkins was no longer twisting his shapeless hat nervously in his fingers; instead, he held it now in one clenched hand, while with the other he closed the door behind him as he stepped forward across the threshold, and with squared shoulders advanced toward John Bruce. And then, quite as suddenly again, as though alarmed at his own temerity, the old man paused, and the question on his lips, aggressively enough framed, became irresolute in tone.

“What—what's the matter with Claire?” he stammered. “What's this mean?”

It was a moment before John Bruce answered, while he eyed the other from head to foot. Hawkins was not the least interesting by any means of the queer characters that came and went and centered around this one-time pawn-shop of Paul Veniza; but Hawkins, of them all, was the one he was least able, from what he had seen of the man, to fathom. And yet, somehow, he liked Hawkins.

“That's exactly what I want to know,” he said a little brusquely. “And”—he eyed Hawkins once more with cool appraisal—“I think you are the man best able to supply the information.”

Hawkins began to fumble with his hat again.

“I—I—why do you say that?” he faltered, a sudden note of what seemed almost trepidation in his voice.

John Bruce shrugged his shoulders.

“Possibly it is just a hunch,” he said calmly. “But you were the one who was driving that old bus on a certain night—you remember? And you seem to hang around here about as you please. Therefore you must stand in on a fairly intimate basis with the family circle. I'd like to know what hold a rotten crook like Doctor Crang has got on Claire Veniza that she should be willing to marry him, when she doesn't love him. I'd like to know why a girl like Claire Veniza drives alone at night to a gambling hell to——”

“That's enough!” Hawkins' voice rose abruptly, peremptorily. He advanced again threateningly oft John Bruce. “Don't you dare to say one word against my—against—against her. I'll choke the life out of you, if you do! Who are you, anyway? You are asking a lot of questions. How did you get here in the first place? You answer that! I've always meant to ask you. You answer that—and leave Claire out of it!”

John Bruce whistled softly.

“I can't very well do that,” he said quietly, “because it was Claire who brought me here.”

“Claire brought you!” The old blue eyes grew very hard and very steady. “That's a lie! She never saw you after you got out at the corner that night until you came in through the window here. She didn't tell you where she lived. She didn't invite you here. She's not that kind, and, sick though you may be, I'll not keep my hands off you, if——”

“Steady, Hawkins—steady!” said John Bruce, his voice as quiet as before. “We seem to possess a common bond. You seem to be pretty fond of Claire. Well, so am I. That ought to make us allies.” He held out his hand suddenly to the old man. “I had just asked Claire to marry me when you came to the door.”

Hawkins stared from the outstretched hand into John Bruce's eyes, and back again at the outstretched hand. Bewilderment, hesitation, a curious excitement was in his face.

“You asked Claire to marry you?” He swallowed hard. “You—you want to marry Claire? I—why?”

“Why?” John Bruce echoed helplessly. “Good Lord, Hawkins, you are a queer one! Barring beasts like Crang, why does a man ordinarily ask a woman to marry him? Because he loves her. Well, I love Claire. I loved her from the moment I saw her. I followed her, or, rather, that old bus of yours, here that night. And that is how, after that fight at Ratti's when I got out the back door and into the lane, I crawled over here for sanctuary. I said Claire brought me here. You understand now, don't you? That's how she brought me here—because I loved her that night. But it is because of Crang”—his voice grew hard—“that I am telling you this. I love her now—and a great deal too much, whether she could ever care for me or not, to see her in the clutches of a crook, and her life wrecked by a degenerate cur. And somehow”—his hand was still extended—“I thought you seemed to think enough of her to feel the same way about this marriage—for I imagine you must know about it. Well, Hawkins, where do you stand? There's something rotten here. Are you for Claire, or the dope-eater?”

“Oh, my God!” Hawkins whispered huskily. And then almost blindly he snatched at John Bruce's hand and wrung it hard. “I—I believe you're straight,” he choked. “I know you are. I can see it in your eyes. I wouldn't ask anything more in the world for her than a man's honest love. And she ain't going to marry that devil! You understand?” His voice was rising in a curious cracked shrillness. “She ain't! Not while old Hawkins is alive!”

John Bruce drew his brows together in a puzzled way.

“I pass you up, Hawkins,” he said slowly. “I can't make you out. But if you mean what you say, and if you trust me——”

“I'm going to trust you!” There was eagerness, excitement, a tremble in the old man's voice. “I've got to trust you after what you've said. I ain't slept for nights on account of this. It looks like God sent you. You wait! Wait just a second, and I'll show you how much I trust you.”

John Bruce straightened up in his chair. Was the old man simply erratic, or perhaps a little irresponsible—or what? Hawkins had pattered across the floor, had cautiously opened the door, and was now peering with equal caution into the outer room. Apparently satisfied at last, he closed the door noiselessly, and started back across the room. And then John Bruce knew suddenly an indefinable remorse at having somehow misjudged the shabby old chauffeur, whose figure seemed to totter now a little as it advanced toward him. Hawkins' face was full of misery, and the old blue eyes were brimming with tears.

“It—it ain't easy”—Hawkins' voice quavered—“to say—what I got to say. There ain't no one on earth but Paul Veniza knows it; but you've got a right to know after what you've said. And I've got to tell you for Claire's sake too, because it seems to me there ain't nobody going to help me save her the way you are. She—she's my little girl. I—I'm Claire's father.” John Bruce stared numbly at the other. He could find no words; he could only stare.

“Yes, look at me!” burst out the old man finally, and into his voice there came an infinite bitterness. “Look at my clothes! I'm just what I look like! I ain't no good—and that's what has kept my little girl and me apart from the day she was born. Yes, look at me! I don't blame you!”

John Bruce was on his feet. His hand reached out and rested on the old man's shoulder.

“That isn't the way to trust me, Hawkins,” he said gently. “What do your clothes matter? What do your looks matter? What does anything in the world matter alongside of so wonderful a thing as that which you have just told me? Straighten those shoulders, Hawkins; throw back that head of yours. Her father! Why, you're the richest man in New York, and you've reason to be the proudest!”

John Bruce was smiling with both lips and eyes into the other's face. He felt a tremor pass through the old man's frame; he saw a momentary flash of joy and pride light up the wrinkled, weather-beaten face—and then Hawkins turned his head away.

“God bless you,” said Hawkins brokenly; “but you don't know. She's all I've got; she's the only kith and kin I've got in all the world, and oh, my God, how these old arms have ached just to take her and hold her tight, and—and——” He lifted his head suddenly, met John Bruce's eyes, and a flush dyed his cheeks. “She's my little girl; but I lie when I say I love her. It's drink I love. That's my shame, John Bruce—you've got it all now. I pawned my soul, and I pawned my little girl for drink.”

“Hawkins,” said John Bruce huskily, “I think you're a bigger man than you've any idea you are.”

“D'ye mean that?” Hawkins spoke eagerly—only to shake his head miserably the next instant. “You don't understand,” he said. “I as good as killed her mother with drink. She died when Claire was born. I brought Claire here, and Paul Veniza and his wife took her in. And Paul Veniza was right about it. He made me promise she wasn't to know I was her father until—until she would have a man and not a drunken sot to look after her. That's twenty years ago. I've tried.. God knows I've tried, but it's beaten me ever since. Paul's wife died when Claire was sixteen, and Claire's run the house for Paul—and—and I'm Hawkins—just Hawkins—the old cab driver that's dropping in the harness. Just Hawkins that shuffers the traveling pawn-shop now that Paul's quit the regular shop. That's what I am—just old Hawkins, who's always swearing to God he's going to leave the booze alone.”

John Bruce did not speak for a moment. He returned to his chair and sat down. Somehow he wanted to think; somehow he felt that he had not quite grasped the full significance of what he had just heard. He looked at Hawkins. Hawkins had sunk into a chair by the table, and his face was buried in his hands.

And then John Bruce smiled.

“Look here, Hawkins,” he said briskly, “let's talk about something else for a minute. Tell me about Paul Veniza and this traveling pawn-shop. It's a bit out of the ordinary, to say the least.”

Hawkins raised his head, and his thoughts for the moment diverted into other channels, his face brightened, and he scratched at the scanty fringe of hair behind his ear.

“It ain't bad, is it?” he said with interest. “I'm kind of proud of it too, 'cause I guess mabbe, when all's said and done, it was my idea. You see, when Paul's wife died, Paul went all to pieces. He ain't well now, for that matter—nowhere near as well as he looks. I'm kind of scared about Paul. He keeps getting sick turns once every so often. But when the wife died he was just clean broken up. She'd been his right hand from the start in his business here, and—I dunno—it just seemed to affect him that way. He didn't want to go on any more without her. And as far as money was concerned he didn't have to. Paul ain't rich, but he's mighty comfortably off. Anyway, he took the three balls down from over the door, and he took the signs off the windows, and in comes the carpenters to change things around here, and there ain't any more pawn-shop.”

Hawkins for the first time smiled broadly.

“But it didn't work out,” said Hawkins. “Paul's got a bigger business and a more profitable one to-day than he ever had before in his life. You see, he had been at it a good many years, and he had what you might call a private connection—swells up on the Avenue, mostly ladies, but gents too, who needed money sometimes without having it printed in the papers, and they wouldn't let Paul alone. Paul ain't got a hair in his head that ain't honest and fair and square and above-board—and they were the ones that knew it better than anybody else. See?”

“Yes,” said John Bruce. “Go on, Hawkins,” he prompted.

“Well,” said Hawkins, “I used to drive an old hansom cab in those days, and I used to drive Paul out on those private calls to the swell houses. And then when Mrs. Paul died and Paul closed up the shop here he kind of drew himself into his shell all round, and mostly he wouldn't go out any more, though the swells kept telephoning and telephoning him. He'd only go to just a few people that he'd done business with since almost the beginning. He said he didn't want to go around ringing people's doorbells, and being ushered into boudoirs or anywhere else, and he was settling down to shun everybody and everything. It wasn't good for Paul. And then a sort of crazy notion struck me, and I chewed it over and over in my mind, and finally I put it up to Paul. In the mood he was in, it just caught his fancy; and so I bought a second-hand closed car, and fitted it up like you saw, and learned to drive it—and that's how there came to be the traveling pawn-shop.

“After that, there wasn't anything to it. It caught everybody else's fancy as well as Paul's, and it began to get him out of himself. The old bus, as you called it, was running all the time. Lots of the swells who really didn't want to pawn anything took a ride and did a bit of business just for the sake of the experience, and the regular customers just went nutty over it, they were that pleased.

“And then some one who stood in with that swell gambling joint where we picked you up must have tipped the manager off about it, and he saw where he could do a good stroke of business—make it a kind of advertisement, you know, besides doing away with any lending by the house itself, and he put up a proposition to Paul where Paul was to get all the business at regular rates, and a bit of a salary besides on account of the all-night hours he'd have to keep sometimes. Paul said he'd do it, and turned the salary over to me; and they doped out that pass word about a trip to Persia to make it sound mysterious and help out the advertising end, and—well, I guess that's all.”

John Bruce was twirling the tassel of his dressing gown again abstractedly; but now he stopped as Hawkins rose abruptly and came toward him.

“No—it ain't all,” said Hawkins, a curious note almost of challenge in his voice. “You said something about Claire going to that gambling joint. It was the first time she had ever been there. That night Paul was out when they telephoned. You must be one of their big customers, 'cause they wouldn't listen to anything but a trip to Persia right on the spot. They were so set on it that Claire said it would be all right. She sent for me. At first I wasn't for it at all, but she said it seemed to be of such importance, and that there wasn't anything else to do. Claire knows a bit of jewelry or a stone as well as Paul does, and I knew Claire could take care of herself; and besides, although she didn't know it, it—it was her own old father driving the car there with her.”

“Thank you, Hawkins,” said John Bruce simply; and after a moment: “It doesn't make the love I said I had for her show up very creditably to me, does it—that I should have had any questions?”

Hawkins shook his head.

“I didn't mean it that way,” he said earnestly. “It would have been a wonder if you hadn't. Anyway, you had a right to know, and it was only fair to Claire.”

CHAPTER NINE—THE CONSPIRATORS

JOHN BRUCE fumbled in the pocket of his dressing gown and produced a cigarette; but he was a long time in lighting it.

“Hawkins,” he demanded abruptly, “is Paul Veniza in the house now?”

“He's upstairs, I think,” Hawkins answered. “Do you want him?”

“Yes—in a moment,” said John Bruce slowly. “I've been thinking a good deal while you were talking. I can only see things one way; and that is that the time has come when you should take your place as Claire's father.”

The old man drew back, startled.

“Tell Claire?” he whispered. Then he shook his head miserably. “No, no! I—I haven't earned the right. I—I can't break my word to Paul.”

“I do not ask you to break your word to Paul. I want you to earn the right—now.”

Hawkins was still shaking his head.

“Earn it now—after all these years! How can I?”

“By promising that you won't drink any more,” said John Bruce quietly.

Hawkins' eyes went to the floor.

“Promise!” he said in a shamed way. “I've been promising that for twenty years. Paul wouldn't believe me. I wouldn't believe myself. I went and got drunker than I've been in all my life the night that dog said he was going to marry Claire, and Claire said it was true, and wouldn't listen to anything Paul could say to her against it.”

“I would believe you,” said John Bruce gravely.

For an instant Hawkins' face glowed, while tears came into the old blue eyes—and then he turned hurriedly and walked to the window, his back to John Bruce.

“It's no use,” he said, with a catch in his voice. “You don't know me. Nobody that knows me would take my word for that—least of all Paul.”

“I know this,” said John Bruce steadily, “that you have never been really put to the test. The test is here now. You'd stop, and stop forever, wouldn't you, if it meant Claire's happiness, her future, her salvation from the horror and degradation and misery and utter hopelessness that a life with a man who is lost to every sense of decency must bring her? I would believe you if you promised under those conditions. It seems to me to be the only chance there is left to save her. It is true she believes Paul is her father and accepts him as such, and neither his influence nor his arguments will move her from her determination to marry Crang; but I think there is a chance if she is told your story, if she is brought to her own father through this very thing. I think if you are in each other's arms at last after all these years from just that cause it might succeed where everything else failed. But this much is sure. It has a chance of success, and you owe Claire that chance. Will you take it, Hawkins? Will you promise?”

There was no answer from the window, only the shaking of the old man's shoulders.

“Hawkins,” said John Bruce softly, “wouldn't it be very wonderful if you saved her, and saved yourself; and wonderful, too, to know the joy of your own daughter's love?”

The old man turned suddenly from the window, his arms stretched out before him as though in intense yearning; and there was something almost of nobility in the gray head held high on the bent shoulders, something of greatness in the old wrinkled face that seemed to exalt the worn and shabby clothes hanging so formlessly about him.

“My little girl,” he said brokenly.

“Your promise, Hawkins,” said John Bruce in a low voice. “Will you promise?”

“Yes,” breathed the old man fiercely. “Yes—so help me, God! But”—he faltered suddenly—“but Paul——-”

“Ask Paul to come down here,” said John Bruce. “I have something to say to both of you—more than I have already said to you. I will answer for Paul.”

The old cab driver obeyed mechanically. He crossed the room and went out. John Bruce heard him mounting the stairs. Presently he returned, followed by the tall, straight, white-haired figure of Paul Veniza.

Hawkins closed the door behind them.

Paul Veniza turned sharply at the sound, and glanced gravely from one to the other. His eyebrows went up as he looked at John Bruce. John Bruce's face was set.

“What is the matter?” inquired Paul Veniza anxiously.

“I want you to listen first to a little story,” said John Bruce seriously—and in a few words he told Paul Veniza, as he had told Hawkins, of his love for Claire and the events of the night that had brought him there a wounded man. “And this afternoon,” John Bruce ended, “I asked Claire to marry me, and she told me she was going to marry Doctor Crang.”

Paul Veniza had listened with growing anxiety, casting troubled and uncertain glances the while at Hawkins.

“Yes,” he said in a low voice.

John Bruce spoke abruptly:

“Hawkins has promised he will never drink again.”

Paul Veniza, with a sudden start, stared at Hawkins, and then a sort of kindly tolerance dawned in his face.

“My poor friend!” said Paul Veniza as though he were comforting a wayward child, and went over and laid his hand affectionately on Hawkins' arm.

“I have told Hawkins,” went on John Bruce, “that I love Claire, that I asked her to marry me; and Hawkins in turn has told me he is Claire's father, and how he brought her to you and Mrs. Veniza when she was a baby, and of the pledge he made you then. It is because I love Claire too that I feel I can speak now. You once told Hawkins how he could redeem his daughter. He wants to redeem her now. He has promised never to drink again.”

Paul Veniza's face had whitened a little. Half in a startled, half in a troubled way, he looked once more at John Bruce and then at Hawkins.

“My poor friend!” he said again.

John Bruce's hand on the arm of his chair clenched suddenly.

“You may perhaps feel that he should not have told me of his relationship to Claire; but it was this damnable situation with Crang that forced the issue.”

Paul Veniza left Hawkins' side and began to pace the room in an agitated way.

“No!” he said heavily. “I do not blame Hawkins. We—we neither of us know what to do. It is a terrible, an awful thing. Crang is like some loathsome creature to her, and yet in some way that I cannot discover he has got her into his power. I have tried everything, used every argument I can with her, pleaded with her—and it has been useless.” He raised his arms suddenly above his head, partly it seemed in supplication, partly in menace. “Oh, God!” he cried out. “I, too, love her, for she has really been my daughter through all these years. But I do not quite understand.” He turned to Hawkins. “Even if you kept your promise now, my friend, what connection has that with Doctor Crang? Could that in any way prevent this marriage?”

It was John Bruce who answered.

“It is the last ditch,” he said evenly; “the one way you have not tried—to tell her her own and her father's story. I do not say it will succeed. But it is the great crisis in her life. It is the one thing in the world that ought to sway her, win her. Her father! After twenty years—her father!”

Paul Veniza's hands, trembling, ruffled through his white hair. Hawkins' fingers fumbled, now with the buttons on his vest, now with the brim of his hat which He had picked up aimlessly from the table; and his eyes, lifting from the floor, glanced timorously, almost furtively, at Paul Veniza, and sought the floor again.

John Bruce got up from his chair and stepped toward them.

“I want to tell you something,” he said sharply, “that ought to put an end to any hesitation on your parts at any plan, no matter what, that offers even the slightest chance of stopping this marriage. Listen! Devil though you both believe this Crang to be, you do not either of you even know the man for what he is. While I was lying there”—he flung out his hand impulsively toward the couch—“the safe here in this room was opened and robbed one night. You know that. But you do not know that it was done by Doctor Crang and his confederates. You know what happened. But you do not know that while the 'burglars' pretended to hold Crang at bay with a revolver and then made their 'escape,' Crang, with most of the proceeds of that robbery in his own pockets, was laughing up his sleeve at you.”

Hawkins' jaw had dropped as he stared at John Bruce.

“Crang did it! You—you say Crang committed that robbery?” stammered Paul Veniza. “But you were unconscious! Still you—you seem to know that the safe was robbed!”

“Apparently I do!” John Bruce laughed shortly. “Crang too thought I was unconscious, but to make sure he jabbed me with his needle. It took effect just at the right time—for Crang—just as you and Claire appeared in the doorway. And”—his brows knitted together—“it seems a little strange that none of you have ever mentioned it in my presence; that not a word has ever been said to me about it.”

Paul Veniza coughed nervously.

“You were sick,” he said; “too sick, we thought, for any excitement.”

Hawkins suddenly leaned forward; his wrinkled face was earnest.

“That is not true!” he said bluntly. “It might have been at first, but it wasn't after you got better. It was mostly your money that was stolen. Claire put it there the night you came here, and——”

“Hawkins!” Paul Veniza called out sharply in reproof.

“But he knows now it's gone,” said the old cabman a little helplessly. He blundered on: “Paul felt he was responsible for your money, and he was afraid you might not want to take it if you knew he had to make it up out of his own pocket, and——”

John Bruce took a step forward, and laid his hand on Paul Veniza's shoulder. He stood silently, looking at the other.

“It is nothing!” said Paul Veniza, abashed.

“Perhaps not!” said John Bruce. “But”—he turned abruptly away, his lips tight—“it just made me think for a minute. In the life I've led men like you are rare.”

“We were speaking of Doctor Crang,” said Paul Veniza a little awkwardly. “If you know that Doctor Crang is the thief, then that is the way out of our trouble. Instead of marrying Claire, he will be sent to prison.”

John Bruce shook his head.

“You said yourself I was unconscious at the time. You certainly must have found me that way, and Crang would make you testify that for days I had been raving in delirium. I do not think you could convict him on my testimony.”

“But even so,” said Paul Veniza, “there is Claire. If she knew that Crang was a criminal, she——”

“She does know,” said John Bruce tersely.

“Claire knows!” ejaculated Paul Veniza in surprise. “You—you told her, then?”

“No,” John Bruce answered. “I said to her: 'Suppose I were to tell you that the man is a criminal?' She answered: 'He is a criminal.' I said then: 'Suppose he were sent to jail—to serve a sentence?' She answered: 'I would marry him when he came out.'”

“My God!” mumbled the old cabman miserably.

“I tell you this,” said John Bruce through set teeth, and speaking directly to Paul Veniza, “because it seems to me to be the final proof that mere argument with Claire is useless, and that something more is necessary. I do not ask you to release Hawkins from his pledge; I ask you to believe his promise this time because back of it he knows it may save Claire from what would mean worse than death to her. I believe him; I will vouch for him. Do you agree, Paul Veniza?”

For an instant the white-haired pawnbroker seemed lost in thought; then he nodded his head gravely.

“In the last few days,” he said slowly, “I have felt that it was no longer my province to masquerade as her father. I know that my influence is powerless. As you have said, it is the crisis, a very terrible crisis, in her life.” He turned toward Hawkins, and held out his hand. “My old friend”—his voice broke—“I pray Heaven to aid you—to aid us all.”

Hawkins' blue eyes filled suddenly with tears.

“You believe me, too, Paul, this time!” he said in a choking voice. “Listen, Paul! I promise! So help me, God—I promise!”

A lump had somehow risen in John Bruce's throat. He turned away, and for a moment there was silence in the room. And then he heard Paul Veniza speak:

“She is dear to us all. Let us call her—unless, my old friend, you would rather be alone.”

“No, no!” Hawkins cried hurriedly. “I—I want you both; but—but not now, don't call her now.” He swept his hands over his shabby, ill-fitting clothes. “I—not like this. I——”

“Yes,” said Paul Veniza gently, “I understand—and you are right. This evening then—at eight o'clock. You will come back here, my old friend, at eight o'clock. And do you remember, it was in this very room, twenty years ago, that——” He did not complete his sentence; the hot tears were streaming unashamed down his cheeks.

John Bruce was staring out of the window, the panes of which seemed curiously blurred.

“Come,” he heard Paul Veniza say.

And then, as the two men reached the door, John Bruce looked around. Hawkins had turned on the threshold. Something seemed to have transfigured the old cab driver's face. It was illumined. There seemed something of infinite pathos in the head held high, in the drooped shoulders resolutely squared.

“My little girl!” said Hawkins tenderly. “To-night at eight o'clock—my little girl!”

CHAPTER TEN—AT FIVE MINUTES TO EIGHT

BEFORE the rickety washstand and in front of the cracked glass that served as a mirror and was suspended from a nail driven into the wall, Hawkins was shaving himself. Perhaps the light from the wheezing gas-jet was over-bad that evening, or perhaps it was only in playful and facetious mood with the mirror acting the rôle of co-conspirator; Hawkins' chin smarted and was raw; little specks of red showed here and there through the repeated coats of lather which he kept scraping off with his razor. But Hawkins appeared willing to sacrifice even the skin itself to obtain the standard of smoothness which he had evidently set before himself as his goal. And so over and over again he applied the lather, and hoed it off, and tested the result by rubbing thumb and forefinger critically over his face. He made no grimace, nor did he show any irritation at the none-too-keen blade that played havoc with more than the lather, nor did he wince at what must at times have been anything but a painless operation. Hawkins' round, weatherbeaten face and old watery blue eyes smiled into the mirror.

On the washstand beside him lay a large, ungainly silver watch, its case worn smooth with years of service. It had a hunting-case, and it was open. Hawkins glanced at it. It was twenty minutes to eight.

“I got to hurry,” said Hawkins happily. “Just twenty minutes—after twenty years.”

Hawkins laid aside the razor, and washed and scrubbed at his face until it shone; then he went to his trunk and opened it. From underneath the tray he lifted out an old black suit. Perhaps again it was the gas-jet in either baleful or facetious mood, for, as he put on the suit, the cloth in spots seemed to possess, here a rusty, and there a greenish, tinge, and elsewhere to be woefully shiny. Also, but of this the gas-jet could not have been held guilty, the coat and trousers, and indeed the waistcoat, were undeniably most sadly wrinkled.

And now there seemed to be something peculiarly congruous as between the feeble gas-jet, the cracked mirror, the wobbly washstand, the threadbare strip of carpet that lay beside the iron bed, and the old bent-shouldered figure with wrinkled face in wrinkled finery that stood there knotting with anxious, awkward fingers a large, frayed, black cravat about his neck; there seemed to be something strikingly in keeping between the man and his surroundings, a sort of common intimacy, as it were, with the twilight of an existence that, indeed, had never known the full sunlight of high noon.

It was ten minutes to eight.

Hawkins put the silver watch in his pocket, extinguished the spluttering gas-jet, that hissed at him as though in protest at the scant ceremony with which it was treated, and went down the stairs. He stepped briskly out on the street.

“Claire!” said Hawkins radiantly. “My little Claire! I'm her daddy, and she's going to know it. I'm going to get her to call me that—daddy!”

Hawkins walked on halfway along the block, erect, with a quick, firm step, his head high, smiling into every face he met—and turning to smile again, conscious that people as they passed had turned to look back at him. And then very gradually Hawkins' pace slackened, and into his face and eyes there came a dawning anxiety, and the smile was gone.

“I'm kind of forgetting,” said Hawkins presently to himself, “that it ain't just that I'm getting my little girl. I—I'm kind of forgetting her 'rouble. There—there's Crang.”

The old man's face was furrowed now deep with storm and care; he walked still more slowly. He began to mutter to himself. At the corner of the street he raised an old gnarled fist and shook it, clenched, above his head, unconscious and oblivious now that people still turned and looked at him.

And then a little way ahead of him along the street that he must go to reach the one-time pawn-shop of Paul Veniza, his eyes caught the patch of light that filtered out to the sidewalk from under the swinging doors of the familiar saloon, and from the windows in a more brilliant flood.

Hawkins drew in a long breath.

“No, no!” he whispered fiercely. “I will never go in there again—so help me, God! If I did—and—and she knew it was her daddy, it would just break her heart like—like Crang 'll break it.”

He went on, but his footsteps seemed to drag the more now as he approached the saloon. His hand as he raised it trembled; and as he brushed it across his brow it came away wet with sweat.

The saloon was just a yard away from him now.

There was a strange, feverish glitter in the blue eyes. His face was chalky white.

“So help me, God!” Hawkins mumbled hoarsely.

It was five minutes of eight.

Hawkins had halted in front of the swinging doors.

CHAPTER ELEVEN—THE RENDEZVOUS

PAUL VENIZA, pacing restlessly about the room, glanced surreptitiously at his watch, and then glanced anxiously at John Bruce.

John Bruce in turn stole a look at Claire. His lips tightened a little. Since she had been told nothing, she was quite unconscious, of course, that it mattered at all because it was already long after eight o'clock; that Hawkins in particular, or any one else in general, was expected to join the little evening circle here in what he, John Bruce, had by now almost come to call his room. His forehead gathered in a frown. What was it that was keeping Hawkins?

Claire's face was full in the light, and as she sat there at the table, busy with some sewing, it seemed to John Bruce that, due perhaps to the perspective of what he now knew, he detected a weariness in her eyes and in sharp lines around her mouth, that he had not noticed before. It was Crang, of course; but perhaps he too—what he had said to her that afternoon—his love—had not made it any easier for her.

Paul Veniza continued his restless pacing about the room.

“Father, do sit down!” said Claire suddenly. “What makes you so nervous to-night? Is anything the matter?”

“The matter? No! No, no; of course not!” said Paul Veniza hurriedly.

“But I'm sure there is,” said Claire, with a positive' little nod of her head. “With both of you, for that matter. Mr. Bruce has done nothing but fidget with the tassel of that dressing gown for the last half hour.”

John Bruce let the tassel fall as though it had suddenly burned his fingers.

“I? Not at all!” he denied stoutly.

“Oh, dear!” sighed Claire, with mock plaintiveness. “What bores you two men are, then! I wish I could send out—what do you call it?—a thought wave, and inspire some one, and most of all Hawkins, to come over here this evening. He, at least, is never deadly dull.”

Neither of the two men spoke.

“You don't know Hawkins, do you, Mr. Bruce?” Claire went on. She was smiling now as she looked at John Bruce. “I mean really know him, of course. He's a dear, quaint, lovable soul, and I'm so fond of him.”

“I'm sure he is,” said John Bruce heartily. “Even from the little I've seen of him I'd trust him with—well, you know”—John Bruce coughed as his words stumbled—“I mean, I'd take his word for anything.”

“Of course, you would!” asserted Claire. “You couldn't think of doing anything else—nobody could. He's just as honest as—as—well, as father there, and I don't know any one more honest.” She smiled at Paul Veniza, and then her face grew very earnest. “I'm going to tell you something about Hawkins, and something that even you never knew, father. Ever since I was old enough to remember any one, I remember Hawkins. And when I got old enough to understand at all, though I could never get him to talk about it, I knew his life wasn't a very happy one, and perhaps I loved him all the more for that reason. Hawkins used to drink a great deal. Everybody knew it. I—I never felt I had the right to speak to him about it, though it made me feel terribly, until—until mother died.”

Claire had dropped her sewing in her lap, and now she picked it up again and fumbled with it nervously.

“I spoke to him then,” she said in a low voice. “I told him how much you needed him, father; and how glad and happy it would make me. And—and I remember so well his words: 'I promise, Claire. I promise, so help me, God, that I will never drink another drop.'” Claire looked up, her face aglow “And I know, no matter what anybody says, that from that day to this, he never has.”

Paul Veniza, motionless now in the center of the room, was staring at her in a sort of numbed fascination.

John Bruce was staring at the door. He had heard, he thought, a step in the outer room.

The door opened. Hawkins stood there. He plucked at his frayed, black cravat, which was awry. He lurched against the jamb, and in groping unsteadily for support his hat fell from his other hand and rolled across the floor.

Hawkins reeled into the room.

“Good—hic!—good-evenin',” said Hawkins thickly.

Claire alone moved. She rose to her feet, but as though her weight were too heavy for her limbs. Her lips quivered.

“Oh, Hawkins!” she cried out pitifully—and burst into tears, and ran from the room.

It seemed to John Bruce that for a moment the room swirled around before his eyes; and then over him swept an uncontrollable desire to get his hands upon this maudlin, lurching creature. Rage, disgust, a bitter resentment, a mad hunger for reprisal possessed him; Claire's future, her faith which she had but a moment gone so proudly vaunted, were all shattered, swept to the winds, by this seedy, dissolute wreck. Her father! No, her shame! Thank God she did not know!

“You drunken beast!” he gritted in merciless fury, and stepped suddenly forward.

But halfway across the room he halted as though turned to stone. Hawkins wasn't lurching any more. Hawkins had turned and closed the door; and Hawkins now, with his face white and drawn, a look in his old blue eyes that mingled agony and an utter hopelessness, sank into a chair and buried his face in his hands.

It was Paul Veniza who moved now. He went and stood behind the old cabman.

Hawkins looked up.

“You are sober. What does this mean?” Paul Veniza asked heavily.

Hawkins shook his head.

“I couldn't do it,” he said in a broken voice. “And—and I've settled it once for all now. I got to thinking as I came along to-night, and I found out that it wasn't any good for me to swear I wasn't going to touch anything any more. I'm afraid of myself. I—I came near going into the saloon. It—it taught me something, that did; because the only way I could get by was to promise myself I'd go back there after I'd been here.”

Hawkins paused. A flush dyed his cheeks. He turned around and looked at Paul Veniza again, and then at John Bruce.

“You don't understand—neither of you understand. Once I promised Claire that I'd stop, and—and until just now she believed me. And I've hurt her. But I ain't broken her heart. It was only old Hawkins, just Hawkins, who promised her then; it would have been her father who promised her to-night, and—and it ain't any good, I'd have broken that promise, I know it now—and she ain't ever going to share that shame.”

Hawkins brushed his hands across his eyes.

“And then,” he went on, A sudden fierceness in his voice, “suppose she'd had that on top of Crang, 'cause it ain't sure that knowing who I am would have saved her from him! Oh, my God, she'd better be dead! I'd rather see her dead. You're wrong, John Bruce! It wasn't the way. You meant right, and God bless you; but it wasn't the way. I saw it all so clearly after—after I'd got past that saloon; and—and then it was all right for me to promise myself that I'd go back. It wouldn't hurt her none then.”

John Bruce cleared his throat.

“I don't quite understand what you mean by that, Hawkins,” he said a little huskily.

Hawkins rose slowly to his feet.

“I dressed all up for this,” said Hawkins, with a wan smile; “but something's snapped here—inside here.” His hand felt a little aimlessly over his heart. “I know now that I ain't ever going to be worthy; and I know now that she ain't ever to know that I—that I—I'm her old daddy. And so I—I've fixed it just now like you saw so there ain't no going back on it. But I ain't throwing my little girl down. It ain't Claire that's got to be made change her mind—it's Crang.” He raised a clenched fist. “And Crang's going to change it! I can swear to that and know I'll keep it, so—so help me, God! And when she's rid of him, she ain't going to have no shame and sorrow from me. That's what I meant.”

“Yes,” said John Bruce mechanically.

“I'm going now,” said Hawkins in a low voice. “Around by the other way,” said Paul Veniza softly. “And I'll go with you, old friend.”

For a moment Hawkins hesitated, and then he nodded his head.

No one spoke. Paul Veniza's arm was around Hawkins' shoulders as they left the room. The door closed behind them. John Bruce sat down on the edge of his bed.

CHAPTER TWELVE—THE FIGHT

FOR a long time John Bruce stared at the closed door; first a little helplessly because the bottom seemed quite to have dropped out of things, and then with set face as the old cabman's words came back to him: “Crang—not Claire.” And at this, a sort of merciless joy crept into his eyes, and he nodded his head in savage satisfaction. Yes, Hawkins had been right in that respect, and—well, it would be easier to deal with Crang!

And then suddenly John Bruce's face softened. Hawkins! He remembered the fury with which the old man had inspired him as the other had reeled into the room, and Clare, hurt and miserable, had risen from her chair. But he remembered Hawkins in a different way now. It was Hawkins, not Claire, who had been hurt. The shabby old figure standing there had paid a price, and as he believed for Claire's sake, that had put beyond his reach forever what must have meant, what did mean, all that he cherished most in life.

John Bruce smiled a little wistfully. Somehow he envied Hawkins, so pitifully unstable and so weak—his strength!

He shook his head in a puzzled way. His thoughts led him on. What a strange, almost incomprehensible, little world it was into which fate, if one wished to call it fate, had flung him! It was an alien world to him. His own life of the past rose up in contrast with it—> not of his own volition, but because the comparison seemed to insist on thrusting itself upon him.

He had never before met men like Hawkins and Paul Veniza. He had met drunkards and pawnbrokers. Very many of them! He had lived his life, or, rather, impoverished it with a spendthrift hand, among just such classes—but he was conscious that it would never have been the poorer for an intimacy with either Hawkins or Paul Veniza.

John Bruce raised his head abruptly. The front door had opened. A moment later a footstep sounded in the outer room, and then upon the stairs. That would be Paul Veniza returning of course, though he hadn't been gone very long; or was it that he, John Bruce, had been sitting here staring at that closed door for a far longer period than he had imagined?

He shrugged his shoulders, dismissing the interruption from his mind, and again the wistful smile flickered on his lips.

So that was why nothing had been said in his hearing about the robbery! Queer people—with their traveling pawn-shop, which was bizarre; and their standards of honesty, and their unaffected hospitality which verged on the bizarre too, because their genuineness and simplicity were so unostentatious—and so rare. And somehow, suddenly, as he sat there with his chin cupped now in his hands, he was not proud of this contrast—himself on the one hand, a drunkard and a pawnbroker on the other!

And then John Bruce raised his head again, sharply this time, almost in a startled way. Was that a cry—in a woman's voice? It was muffled by the closed door, and it was perhaps therefore his imagination; but it——

He was on his feet. It had come again. No door could have shut it out from his ears. It was from Claire upstairs, and the cry seemed most curiously to mingle terror and a passionate anger. He ran across the room and threw the door open. It was strange! It would be Paul Veniza in a new rôle, if the gentle, white-haired old pawnbroker could inspire terror in any one!

A rasping, jeering oath—in a man's voice this time—reached him. John Bruce, a sudden fury whipping his blood into lire, found himself stumbling up the stairs. It wasn't Veniza! His mind seemed to convert that phrase into a sing-song refrain: “It wasn't Veniza! It wasn't Veniza!”

Claire's voice came to him distinctly now, and there was the same terror in it, the same passionate anger that he had distinguished in her cry:

“Keep away from me! I loathe you! It is men like you that prompt a woman to murder! But—but instead, I have prayed God with all my soul to let me die before——” Her voice ended in a sharp cry, a scuffle of feet.

It was Crang in there! John Bruce, now almost at the top of the stairs, was unconscious that he was panting heavily from his exertions, unconscious of everything save a new refrain that had taken possession of his mind: “It was Crang in there! It was Crang in there!”

It was the door just at the right of the landing.

Crang's voice came from there; and the voice was high, like the squeal of an enraged animal:

“You're mine! I've got a right to those red lips, you vixen, and I'm going to have them! A man's got the right to take the girl he's going to marry in his arms! Do you think I'm going to be held off forever? You're mine, and——”

The words were lost again in a cry from Claire, and in the sound of a struggle—a falling chair, the scuffle once more of feet.

John Bruce flung himself across the hall and against the door, It yielded without resistance, and the impetus of his own rush carried him, staggering, far into the room. Two forms were circling there under the gas light as though in the throes of some mad dance—only the face of the woman was deathly white, and her small clenched fists beat frantically at the face of the man whose arms were around her. John Bruce sprang forward. He laughed aloud, unnaturally. His brain, his mind, was whirling; but something soft was grasped in his two encircling hands, and that was why he laughed—because his soul laughed. His fingers pressed tighter. It was Crang's throat that was soft under his fingers.

Suddenly the room swirled around him. A giddiness seemed to seize upon him—and that soft thing in his grip slipped from his fingers and escaped him. He brushed his hand across his eyes. It would pass, of course. It was strange that he should go giddy like that, and that his limbs should be trembling as though with the ague! Again he brushed his hand across his eyes. It would pass off. He could see better now. Claire had somehow fallen to the floor; but she was rising to her knees now, using the side of the bed for support, and——

Her voice rang wildly through the room.

“Look out! Oh, look out!” she cried.

To John Bruce it seemed as though something leaped at him out of space—and struck. The blow, aimed at his side, which was still bandaged, went home. It brought an agony that racked and tore and twisted at every nerve in his body. It wrung a moan from his lips, it brought the sweat beads bursting out upon his forehead—but it cleared his brain.

Yes, it was Doctor Crang—but disreputable in appearance as he had never before seen the man. Crang's clothes were filthy and unkempt, as though the man had fallen somewhere in the mire and was either unconscious or callous of the fact; his hair draggled in a matted way over his forehead, and though his face worked with passion, and the passion brought a curious hectic rose-color to supplant the customary lifeless gray of his cheeks, the eyes were most strangely glazed and fixed.

And again John Bruce laughed—and with a vicious guard swept aside a second blow aimed at his side, and his left fist, from a full arm swing, crashed to the point of Doctor Crang's jaw. But the next instant they had closed, their arms locked around each other's waists, their chins dug hard into each other's shoulders. And they rocked there, and swayed, and lurched, a curious impotence in their ferocity—and toppled to the floor.

John Bruce's grip tightened as Doctor Crang fought madly now to tear himself free—and they rolled over and over in the direction of the door. Hot and cold waves swept over John Bruce. He was weak, pitifully weak, barely a convalescent. But he was content to call it an equal fight. He asked for no other odds than Crang himself had offered. The man for once had over-steeped himself with dope, and was near the point of collapse. He had read that in the other's eyes, as surely as though he had been told. And so John Bruce, between his gasping breaths, still laughed, and rolled over and over—always toward the door.

From somewhere Claire's voice reached John Bruce, imploringly, in terror. Of course! That was why he was trying to get to the door, to get out of her room—through respect for her—to get somewhere where he could finish this fight between one man who could scarcely stand upon his feet through weakness, and another whose drug-shattered body was approaching that state of coma which he, John Bruce, had been made to suffer on the night the robbery had been committed. And by the same needle! He remembered that! Weak in body, his mind was very clear. And so he rolled over and over, always toward the door, because Crang was heedless of the direction they were taking, and he, John Bruce, was probably not strong enough in any other way to force the other out of the room where they could finish this.

They rolled to the threshold—and out into the hall. John Bruce loosened his hold suddenly, staggered to his feet, and leaned heavily for an instant against the jamb of the door. But it was only for an instant. Crang was the quicker upon his feet. Like a beast there was slaver on the other's lips, his hands clawed the air, his face was contorted hideously like the face of one demented, one from whom reason had flown, and with whom maniacal passion alone remained—and from the banister railing opposite the door Crang launched himself forward upon John Bruce again.

“She's mine!” he screamed. “I've been watching you two! I'll teach you! She's mine—mine! I'll finish you for this!”

John Bruce side-stepped the rush, and Crang pitched with his head against the door jamb, but recovering, whirled again, and rushed again. The man began to curse steadily now in a low, abominable monotone. It seemed to John Bruce that he ought to use his fist as a cork and thrust it into the other's mouth to bottle up the vile flow of epithets that included Claire, and coupled his name with Claire's. Claire might hear! The man was raving, insane with jealousy. John Bruce struck. His fist found its mark on Crang's lips, and found it again; but somehow his arm seemed to possess but little strength, and to sag back at the elbow from each impact. He writhed suddenly as Crang reached him with another blow on his side.

And then they had grappled and locked together again, and were swaying like drunken men, now to this side, and now to that, of the narrow hall.

It could not last. John Bruce felt his knees giving way beneath him. He had under-estimated Crang's resistance to the over-dose of drug. Crang was the stronger—and seemed to be growing stronger every instant. Or was it his own increasing weakness?

Crang's fist with a short-arm jab smashed at John Bruce's wounded side once more. The man struck nowhere else—always, with the cunning born of hell, at the wounded side. John Bruce dug his teeth into his lips. A wave of nausea swept over him. He felt his senses leaving him, and he clung now to the other, close, tight-pressed, as the only means of protecting his side.

He forced himself then desperately to a last effort. There was one chance left, just one. In the livid face, in the hot, panting breath with which the other mouthed his hideous profanity, there was murder. Over his shoulder, barely a foot away, John Bruce glimpsed the staircase. He let his weight sag with seeming helplessness upon Crang. It brought Crang around in a half circle. Crang's back was to the stairs now. John Bruce let his hands slip slowly from their hold upon the other, as though the last of his strength was ebbing away. He accepted a vicious blow on his wounded side as the price that he must pay, a blow that brought his chin crumpling down upon his breast—and then with every ounce of remaining strength he hurled himself at Crang, and Crang's foot stumbled out into space over the topmost stair, and with a scream of infuriated surprise the man pitched backward.

John Bruce grasped with both hands at the banister for support. Something went rolling, rolling, rolling down the stairs with queer, dull thumps like a sack of meal. His hands slipped from the banister, and he sat limply down on the topmost step and laughed. He laughed because that curious looking bundle at the bottom there began a series of fruitless efforts to roll back up the stairs again.

And then the front door opened. He could see it from where he sat, and Paul Veniza—that was Paul Veniza, wasn't it?—stepped into the room below, and cried out, and ran toward the bundle at the foot of the stairs.

John Bruce felt some one suddenly hold him back from pitching down the stairs himself, but nevertheless he kept on falling and falling into some great pit that grew darker and darker the farther he went down, and this in spite of some one who tried to hold him back, and—and who had a face that looked like Claire's, only it was as—as white as driven snow. And as he descended into the blackness some one screamed at him: “I'll finish you for this!” And screamed it again—only the voice kept growing fainter. And—and then he could neither see nor hear any more.

When John Bruce opened his eyes again he was lying on his cot. A little way from him, their backs turned, Claire and Paul Veniza were whispering earnestly together. He watched them for a moment, and gradually as his senses became normally acute again he caught Claire's words:

“He is not safe here for a moment. Father, we must get him away. I am afraid. There is not a threat Doctor Crang made to-night but that he is quite capable of carrying out.”

“But he is safe for to-night,” Paul Veniza answered soothingly. “I got Crang home to bed, and as I told you, he is too badly bruised and knocked about to move around any before morning at least.”

“And yet I am afraid,” Claire insisted anxiously. “Fortunately Mr. Bruce's wound hasn't opened, and he could be moved. Oh, if Hawkins only hadn't——”

She stopped, and twisted her hands together nervously.

Paul Veniza coughed, averted his head suddenly and in turning met John Bruce's eyes—and stared in a startled way.

“Claire!” John Bruce called softly.

“Oh!” she cried, and ran toward him. “You——”

“Yes,” smiled John Bruce. “And I have been listening. Why isn't it safe for me to stay here any longer? On account of Crang's wild threats?”

“Yes,” she said in a low voice.

John Bruce laughed.

“But you don't believe them, do you?” he asked. “At least, I mean, you don't take them literally.” Claire's lips were trembling.

“There is no other way to take them.” She was making an effort to steady her voice. “It is not a question of believing them. I know only too well that he will carry them out if he can. You are not safe here, or even in New York now—but less safe here in this house than anywhere else.”

John Bruce came up on his elbow.

“Then, Claire, isn't this the end?” he demanded passionately. “You know him for what he is. You do not love him, for I distinctly heard you tell him that you loathed him, as I went up the stairs. Claire, I am not asking for myself now—only for you. Tell me, tell Paul Veniza here, to whom it will mean so much, that you have now no further thought of marriage with that”—John Bruce's voice choked—“with Crang.” She shook her head.

“I cannot tell you that,” she said dully, “for I am going to marry Doctor Crang.”

John Bruce's face hardened. He looked at Paul Veniza. The old pawnbroker had his eyes on the floor, and was ruffling his white hair helplessly with his fingers.

Pawned

PAWNED

By Frank L. Packard

The Copp, Clark Co., Limited Toronto

1921

PAWNED

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

HER STORY

TWENTY YEARS LATER

CHAPTER ONE—ALADDIN'S LAMP

CHAPTER TWO—THE MILLIONAIRE PLUNGER

CHAPTER THREE—SANCTUARY

CHAPTER FOUR—A DOCTOR OF MANY DEGREES

CHAPTER FIVE—HAWKINS

CHAPTER SIX—THE ALIBI

CHAPTER SEVEN—THE GIRL OF THE TRAVELING PAWN-SHOP

CHAPTER EIGHT—ALLIES

CHAPTER NINE—THE CONSPIRATORS

CHAPTER TEN—AT FIVE MINUTES TO EIGHT

CHAPTER ELEVEN—THE RENDEZVOUS

CHAPTER TWELVE—THE FIGHT