The NightBorn..................................................................................................................................................1

It was in the old AltaInyo Cluba warm night for San Franciscoand through the open windows, hushed

and far, came the brawl of the streets. The talk had led on from the Graft Prosecution and the latest signs that

the town was to be run wide open, down through all the grotesque sordidness and rottenness of manhate and

manmeanness, until the name of O'Brien was mentionedO'Brien, the promising young pugilist who had

been killed in the prizering the night before. At once the air had seemed to freshen. O'Brien had been a

cleanliving young man with ideals. He neither drank, smoked, nor swore, and his had been the body of a

beautiful young god. He had even carried his prayerbook to the ringside. They found it in his coat pocket in

Here was Youth, clean and wholesome, unsulliedthe thing of glory and wonder for men to conjure with.....

after it has been lost to them and they have turned middleaged. And so well did we conjure, that Romance

came and for an hour led us far from the mancity and its snarling roar. Bardwell, in a way, started it by

quoting from Thoreau; but it was old Trefethan, baldheaded and dewlapped, who took up the quotation and

for the hour to come was romance incarnate. At first we wondered how many Scotches he had consumed

"It was in 1898I was thirtyfive then," he said. "Yes, I know you are adding it up. You're right. I'm

fortyseven now; look ten years more; and the doctors saydamn the doctors anyway!"

He lifted the long glass to his lips and sipped it slowly to soothe away his irritation.

"But I was young. . . once. I was young twelve years ago, and I had hair on top of my head, and my stomach

was lean as a runner's, and the longest day was none too long for me. I was a husky back there in '98. You

remember me, Milner. You knew me then. Wasn't I a pretty good bit of all right?"

Milner nodded and agreed. Like Trefethan, he was another mining engineer who had cleaned up a fortune in

"You certainly were, old man," Milner said. "I'll never forget when you cleaned out those lumberjacks in the

M. M. that night that little newspaper man started the row. Slavin was in the country at the time,"this to

"Well, look at me now," Trefethan commanded angrily. "That's what the Goldstead did to meGod knows

how many millions, but nothing left in my soul..... nor in my veins. The good red blood is gone. I am a

"Women looked at me then; and turned their heads to look a second time. Strange that I never married. But

the girl. That's what I started to tell you about. I met her a thousand miles from anywhere, and then some.

And she quoted to me those very words of Thoreau that Bardwell quoted a moment agothe ones about the

"It was after I had made my locations on Goldsteadand didn't know what a treasurepot that that trip creek

was going to provethat I made that trip east over the Rockies, angling across to the Great Up North there

the Rockies are something more than a backbone. They are a boundary, a dividing line, a wall impregnable

and unscalable. There is no intercourse across them, though, on occasion, from the early days, wandering

trappers have crossed them, though more were lost by the way than ever came through. And that was

precisely why I tackled the job. It was a traverse any man would be proud to make. I am prouder of it right

"It is an unknown land. Great stretches of it have never been explored. There are big valleys there where the

white man has never set foot, and Indian tribes as primitive as ten thousand years ... almost, for they have had

some contact with the whites. Parties of them come out once in a while to trade, and that is all. Even the

"And now the girl. I was coming up a streamyou'd call it a river in Californiaunchartedand unnamed.

It was a noble valley, now shut in by high canyon walls, and again opening out into beautiful stretches, wide

and long, with pasture shoulderhigh in the bottoms, meadows dotted with flowers, and with clumps of

timbersprucevirgin and magnificent. The dogs were packing on their backs, and were sorefooted and

played out; while I was looking for any bunch of Indians to get sleds and drivers from and go on with the first

snow. It was late fall, but the way those flowers persisted surprised me. I was supposed to be in subarctic

America, and high up among the buttresses of the Rockies, and yet there was that everlasting spread of

flowers. Some day the white settlers will be in there and growing wheat down all that valley.

"And then I lifted a smoke, and heard the barking of the dogsIndian dogsand came into camp. There

must have been five hundred of them, proper Indians at that, and I could see by the jerkingframes that the

fall hunting had been good. And then I met herLucy. That was her name. Sign languagethat was all we

could talk with, till they led me to a big flyyou know, half a tent, open on the one side where a campfire

burned. It was all of mooseskins, this flymooseskins, smokecured, handrubbed, and goldenbrown.

Under it everything was neat and orderly as no Indian camp ever was. The bed was laid on fresh spruce

boughs. There were furs galore, and on top of all was a robe of swanskinswhite swanskinsI have never

seen anything like that robe. And on top of it, sitting crosslegged, was Lucy. She was nutbrown. I have

called her a girl. But she was not. She was a woman, a nutbrown woman, an Amazon, a fullblooded,

"That's what took me off my feether eyesblue, not China blue, but deep blue, like the sea and sky all

melted into one, and very wise. More than that, they had laughter in themwarm laughter, sunwarm and

human, very human, and . . . shall I say feminine? They were. They were a woman's eyes, a proper woman's

eyes. You know what that means. Can I say more? Also, in those blue eyes were, at the same time, a wild

unrest, a wistful yearning, and a repose, an absolute repose, a sort of allwise and philosophical calm."

"You fellows think I am screwed. I'm not. This is only my fifth since dinner. I am dead sober. I am solemn. I

sit here now side by side with my sacred youth. It is not I'old' Trefethanthat talks; it is my youth, and it

is my youth that says those were the most wonderful eyes I have ever seenso very calm, so very restless;

so very wise, so very curious; so very old, so very young; so satisfied and yet yearning so wistfully. Boys, I

can't describe them. When I have told you about her, you may know better for yourselves."

"I leave it to youthat sharp, frontier, Western tang of speech. Picture my sensations. It was a woman, a

white woman, but that tang! It was amazing that it should be a white woman, here, beyond the last boundary

of the worldbut the tang. I tell you, it hurt. It was like the stab of a flatted note. And yet, let me tell you,

"She dismissed the Indians. And, by Jove, they went. They took her orders and followed her blind. She was

hiyu skookam chief. She told the bucks to make a camp for me and to take care of my dogs. And they did,

too. And they knew enough not to get away with as much as a moccasinlace of my outfit. She was a regular

SheWhoMustBeObeyed, and I want to tell you it chilled me to the marrow, sent those little thrills

Marathoning up and down my spinal column, meeting a white woman out there at the head of a tribe of

"'Stranger," she said, 'I reckon you're sure the first white that ever set foot in this valley. Set down an' talk a

"There it was, that tang again. But from now to the end of the yarn I want you to forget it. I tell you I forgot

it, sitting there on the edge of that swanskin robe and listening and looking at the most wonderful woman

"I stayed on there a week. It was on her invitation. She promised to fit me out with dogs and sleds and with

Indians that would put me across the best pass of the Rockies in five hundred miles. Her fly was pitched apart

from the others, on the high bank by the river, and a couple of Indian girls did her cooking for her and the

camp work. And so we talked and talked, while the first snow fell and continued to fall and make a surface

"She was frontierborn, of poor settlers, and you know what that meanswork, work, always work, work in

"'I never seen the glory of the world,' she said. 'I had no time. I knew it was right out there, anywhere, all

around the cabin, but there was always the bread to set, the scrubbin' and the washin' and the work that was

never done. I used to be plumb sick at times, jes' to get out into it all, especially in the spring when the songs

of the birds drove me most clean crazy. I wanted to run out through the long pasture grass, wetting my legs

with the dew of it, and to climb the rail fence, and keep on through the timber and up and up over the divide

so as to get a look around. Oh, I had all kinds of hankeringsto follow up the canyon beds and slosh around

from pool to pool, making friends with the waterdogs and the speckly trout; to peep on the sly and watch the

squirrels and rabbits and small furry things and see what they was doing and learn the secrets of their ways.

Seemed to me, if I had time, I could crawl among the flowers, and, if I was good and quiet, catch them

whispering with themselves, telling all kinds of wise things that mere humans never know.'"

"Another time she said: 'I wanted to run nights like a wild thing, just to run through the moonshine and under

the stars, to run white and naked in the darkness that I knew must feel like cool velvet, and to run and run and

keep on running. One evening, plumb tuckered outit had been a dreadful hard hot day, and the bread

wouldn't raise and the churning had gone wrong, and I was all irritated and jerkywell, that evening I made

mention to dad of this wanting to run of mine. He looked at me curioussome and a bit scared. And then he

gave me two pills to take. Said to go to bed and get a good sleep and I'd be all hunkydory in the morning. So

"The mountain home broke upstarved out, I imagineand the family came to Seattle to live. There she

worked in a factorylong hours, you know, and all the rest, deadly work. And after a year of that she

became waitress in a cheap restauranthashslinger, she called it. "She said to me once, 'Romance I guess

was what I wanted. But there wan't no romance floating around in dishpans and washtubs, or in factories and

"When she was eighteen she marrieda man who was going up to Juneau to start a restaurant. He had a few

dollars saved, and appeared prosperous. She didn't love himshe was emphatic about that, but she was all

tired out, and she wanted to get away from the unending drudgery. Besides, Juneau was in Alaska, and her

yearning took the form of a desire to see that wonderland. But little she saw of it. He started the restaurant, a

little cheap one, and she quickly learned what he had married her for..... to save paying wages. She came

pretty close to running the joint and doing all the work from waiting to dishwashing. She cooked most of the

"Can't you picture her, this wild woods creature, quick with every old primitive instinct, yearning for the free

open, and mowed up in a vile little hashjoint and toiling and moiling for four mortal years?

"'There was no meaning in anything,' she said. 'What was it all about! Why was I born! Was that all the

meaning of lifejust to work and work and be always tired!to go to bed tired and to wake up tired, with

every day like every other day unless it was harder?' She had heard talk of immortal life from the gospel

sharps, she said, but she could not reckon that what she was doin' was a likely preparation for her

"But she still had her dreams, though more rarely. She had read a few bookswhat, it is pretty hard to

imagine, Seaside Library novels most likely; yet they had been food for fancy. 'Sometimes,' she said, 'when I

was that dizzy from the heat of the cooking that if I didn't take a breath of fresh air I'd faint, I'd stick my head

out of the kitchen window, and close my eyes and see most wonderful things. All of a sudden I'd be traveling

down a country road, and everything clean and quiet, no dust, no dirt; just streams ripplin' down sweet

meadows, and lambs playing, breezes blowing the breath of flowers, and soft sunshine over everything; and

lovely cows lazying kneedeep in quiet pools, and young girls bathing in a curve of stream all white and slim

and naturaland I'd know I was in Arcady. I'd read about that country once, in a book. And maybe knights,

all flashing in the sun, would come riding around a bend in the road, or a lady on a milkwhite mare, and in

the distance I could see the towers of a castle rising, or I just knew, on the next turn, that I'd come upon some

palace, all white and airy and fairylike, with fountains playing, and flowers all over everything, and

peacocks on the lawn..... and then I'd open my eyes, and the heat of the cooking range would strike on me,

and I'd hear Jake sayin'he was my husbandI'd hear Jake sayin', "Why ain't you served them beans?

Think I can wait here all day!" Romance!I reckon the nearest I ever come to it was when a drunken

Armenian cook got the snakes and tried to cut my throat with a potato knife and I got my arm burned on the

"'I wanted easy ways, and lovely things, and Romance and all that; but it just seemed I had no luck nohow

and was only and expressly born for cooking and dishwashing. There was a wild crowd in Juneau them days,

but I looked at the other women, and their way of life didn't excite me. I reckon I wanted to be clean. I don't

know why; I just wanted to, I guess; and I reckoned I might as well die dishwashing as die their way."

Trefethan halted in his tale for a moment, completing to himself some thread of thought.

"And this is the woman I met up there in the Arctic, running a tribe of wild Indians and a few thousand

square miles of hunting territory. And it happened, simply enough, though, for that matter, she might have

lived and died among the pots and pans. But 'Came the whisper, came the vision.' That was all she needed,

"'I woke up one day,' she said. 'Just happened on it in a scrap of newspaper. I remember every word of it, and

"'The young pines springing up, in the corn field from year to year are to me a refreshing fact. We talk of

civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name for his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness

of his dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods and is admitted from time to time to a

rare and peculiar society with nature. He has glances of starry recognition, to which our saloons are strangers.

The steady illumination of his qenius, dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the

stars compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and shortlived blaze of candles. The Society Islanders had

their dayborn gods, but they were not supposed to be of equal antiquity with the..... nightborn gods.'

"That's what she did, repeated it word for word, and I forgot the tang, for it was solemn, a declaration of

"'And the rest of it was torn away,' she added, a great emptiness in her voice. 'It was only a scrap of

newspaper. But that Thoreau was a wise man. I wish I knew more about him.' She stopped a moment, and I

swear her face was ineffably holy as she said, 'I could have made him a good wife.'

"And then she went on. 'I knew right away, as soon as I read that, what was the matter with me. I was a

nightborn. I, who had lived all my life with the dayborn, was a nightborn. That was why I had never been

satisfied with cooking and dishwashing; that was why I had hankered to run naked in the moonlight. And I

knew that this dirty little Juneau hashjoint was no place for me. And right there and then I said, "I quit." I

packed up my few rags of clothes, and started. Jake saw me and tried to stop me.

"'Divorcin' you and me,' I says. 'I'm headin' for tall timber and where I belong.'"

"'No you don't," he says, reaching for me to stop me. "The cooking has got on your head. You listen to me

"'But I pulled a guna little Colt's fortyfourand says, "This does my talkin' for me.'"

"Boys, do you know what that girl did? She was twentytwo. She had spent her life over the dishpan and

she knew no more about the world than I do of the fourth dimension, or the fifth. All roads led to her desire.

No; she didn't head for the dancehalls. On the Alaskan Panhandle it is preferable to travel by water. She

went down to the beach. An Indian canoe was starting for Dyeayou know the kind, carved out of a single

tree, narrow and deep and sixty feet long. She gave them a couple of dollars and got on board.

"'Romance?' she told me. 'It was Romance from the jump. There were three families altogether in that canoe,

and that crowded there wasn't room to turn around, with dogs and Indian babies sprawling over everything,

and everybody dipping a paddle and making that canoe go.' And all around the great solemn mountains, and

tangled drifts of clouds and sunshine. And oh, the silence! the great wonderful silence! And, once, the smoke

of a hunter's camp, away off in the distance, trailing among the trees. It was like a picnic, a grand picnic, and

I could see my dreams coming true, and I was ready for something to happen 'most any time. And it did.

"'And that first camp, on the island! And the boys spearing fish in the mouth of the creek, and the big deer

one of the bucks shot just around the point. And there were flowers everywhere, and in back from the beach

the grass was thick and lush and neckhigh. And some of the girls went through this with me, and we

climbed the hillside behind and picked berries and roots that tasted sour and were good to eat. And we came

upon a big bear in the berries making his supper, and he said "Oof!" and ran away as scared as we were. And

then the camp, and the camp smoke, and the smell of fresh venison cooking. It was beautiful. I was with the

nightborn at last, and I knew that was where I belonged. And for the first time in my life, it seemed to me, I

went to bed happy that night, looking out under a corner of the canvas at the stars cut off black by a big

shoulder of mountain, and listening to the nightnoises, and knowing that the same thing would go on next

"'Romance! I got it next day. We had to cross a big arm of the oceantwelve or fifteen miles, at least; and it

came on to blow when we were in the middle. That night I was along on shore, with one wolfdog, and I was

"Picture it yourself," Trefethan broke off to say. "The canoe was wrecked and lost, and everybody pounded to

death on the rocks except her. She went ashore hanging on to a dog's tail, escaping the rocks and washing up

"'Lucky for me it was the mainland,' she said. 'So I headed right away back, through the woods and over the

mountains and straight on anywhere. Seemed I was looking for something and knew I'd find it. I wasn't

afraid. I was nightborn, and the big timber couldn't kill me. And on the second day I found it. I came upon a

small clearing and a tumbledown cabin. Nobody had been there for years and years. The roof had fallen in.

Rotted blankets lay in the bunks, and pots and pans were on the stove. But that was not the most curious

thing. Outside, along the edge of the trees, you can't guess what I found. The skeletons of eight horses, each

tied to a tree. They had starved to death, I reckon, and left only little piles of bones scattered some here and

there. And each horse had had a load on its back. There the loads lay, in among the bonespainted canvas

sacks, and inside moosehide sacks, and inside the moosehide sackswhat do you think?'"

She stopped, reached under a comer of the bed among the spruce boughs, and pulled out a leather sack. She

untied the mouth and ran out into my hand as pretty a stream of gold as I have ever seencoarse gold, placer

gold, some large dust, but mostly nuggets, and it was so fresh and rough that it scarcely showed signs of

"'You say you're a mining engineer,' she said, 'and you know this country. Can you name a paycreek that has

"I couldn't! There wasn't a trace of silver. It was almost pure, and I told her so.

"'You bet,' she said. 'I sell that for nineteen dollars an ounce. You can't get over seventeen for Eldorado gold,

and Minook gold don't fetch quite eighteen. Well, that was what I found among the boneseight

"'That's what I reckoned it roughly,' she answered. 'Talk about Romance! And me a slaving the way I had all

the years, when as soon as I ventured out, inside three days, this was what happened. And what became of the

men that mined all that gold? Often and often I wonder about it. They left their horses, loaded and tied, and

just disappeared off the face of the earth, leaving neither hide nor hair behind them. I never heard tell of them.

Nobody knows anything about them. Well, being the nightborn, I reckon I was their rightful heir.'

"Do you know what that girl did? She cached the gold, saving out thirty pounds, which she carried back to

the coast. Then she signaled a passing canoe, made her way to Pat Healy's trading post at Dyea, outfitted, and

went over Chilcoot Pass. That was in '88eight years before the Klondike strike, and the Yukon was a

howling wilderness. She was afraid of the bucks, but she took two young squaws with her, crossed the lakes,

and went down the river and to all the early camps on the Lower Yukon. She wandered several years over

that country and then on in to where I met her. Liked the looks of it, she said, seeing, in her own words, 'a big

bull caribou kneedeep in purple iris on the valleybottom.' She hooked up with the Indians, doctored them,

gained their confidence, and gradually took them in charge. She had only left that country once, and then,

with a bunch of the young bucks, she went over Chilcoot, cleaned up her goldcache, and brought it back

"'And here I be, stranger,' she concluded her yarn, 'and here's the most precious thing I own.'

"She pulled out a little pouch of buckskin, worn on her neck like a locket, and opened it. And inside, wrapped

in oiled silk, yellowed with age and worn and thumbed, was the original scrap of newspaper containing the

"'And are you happy . . . satisfied?' I asked her. 'With a quarter of a million you wouldn't have to work down

"'Not much,' she answered. 'I wouldn't swop places with any woman down in the States. These are my

people; this is where I belong. But there are timesand in her eyes smoldered up that hungry yearning I've

mentioned'there are times when I wish most awful bad for that Thoreau man to happen along.'

"'So as I could marry him. I do get mighty lonesome at spells. I'm just a womana real woman. I've heard

tell of the other kind of women that gallivanted off like me and did queer thingsthe sort that become

soldiers in armies, and sailors on ships. But those women are queer themselves. They're more like men than

women; they look like men and they don't have ordinary women's needs. They don't want love, nor little

children in their arms and around their knees. I'm not that sort. I leave it to you, stranger. Do I look like a

"She didn't. She was a woman, a beautiful, nutbrown woman, with a sturdy, healthrounded woman's body

"'Ain't I woman?' she demanded. 'I am. I'm 'most all woman, and then some. And the funny thing is, though

I'm nightborn in everything else, I'm not when it comes to mating. I reckon that kind likes its own kind best.

"'Never,' she said, and her eyes looked into mine with the straightness of truth. 'I had one husband,

onlyhim I call the Ox; and I reckon he's still down in Juneau running the hashjoint. Look him up, if you

"And look him up I did, two years afterward. He was all she saidsolid and stolid, the Oxshuffling

"'Yep. She went loco. She always said the heat of the cooking would get her, and it did. Pulled a gun on me

one day and ran away with some Siwashes in a canoe. Caught a blow up the coast and all hands drowned.'"

"It did," Trefethan replied. "As she said herself, she was savage in everything except mating, and then she

wanted her own kind. She was very nice about it, but she was straight to the point. She wanted to marry me.

"'Stranger,' she said, 'I want you bad. You like this sort of life or you wouldn't be here trying to cross the

Rockies in fall weather. It's a likely spot. You'll find few likelier. Why not settle down! I'll make you a good

"And then it was up to me. And she waited. I don't mind confessing that I was sorely tempted. I was half in

love with her as it was. You know I have never married. And I don't mind adding, looking back over my life,

that she is the only woman that ever affected me that way. But it was too preposterous, the whole thing, and I

"And that was all. She never pressed her point. . . except once, and then she showed a bit of fire.

"'All I've got to do,' she said, 'is to give the word, and you don't get away from here. If I give the word, you

stay on. . . But I ain't going to give it. I wouldn't want you if you didn't want to be wanted. . . and if you didn't

"'It's a darned shame, stranger," she said, at parting. 'I like your looks, and I like you. If you ever change your

"Now there was one thing I wanted to do, and that was to kiss her goodbye, but I didn't know how to go

about it nor how she would take it.I tell you I was half in love with her. But she settled it herself.

"And we kissed, there in the snow, in that valley by the Rockies, and I left her standing by the trail and went

on after my dogs. I was six weeks in crossing over the pass and coming down to the first post on Great Slave

The brawl of the streets came up to us like a distant surf. A steward, moving noiselessly, brought fresh

We saw his grizzled mustache, the bald spot on his head, the puffsacks under his eyes, the sagging cheeks,

the heavy dewlap, the general tiredness and staleness and fatness, all the collapse and ruin of a man who had

"By God! I wish I weren't a coward!" was Trefethan's answering cry. "I could go back to her. She's there,

now. I could shape up and live many a long year. . . with her. . . up there. To remain here is to commit

suicide. But I am an old manfortysevenlook at me. The trouble is," he lifted his glass and glanced at it,

"the trouble is that suicide of this sort is so easy. I am soft and tender. The thought of the long day's travel

with the dogs appalls me; the thought of the keen frost in the morning and of the frozen sledlashings

Automatically the glass was creeping toward his lips. With a swift surge of anger he made as if to crash it

down upon the floor. Next came hesitancy and second thought. The glass moved upward to his lips and

I TELL this for a fact. It happened in the bullring at Quito. I sat in the box with John Harned, and with

Maria Valenzuela, and with Luis Cervallos. I saw it happen. I saw it all from first to last. I was on the steamer

Ecuadore from Panama to Guayaquil. Maria Valenzuela is my cousin. I have known her always. She is very

beautiful. I am a Spaniardan Ecuadoriano, true, but I am descended from Pedro Patino, who was one of

Pizarro's captains. They were brave men. They were heroes. Did not Pizarro lead three hundred and fifty

Spanish cavaliers and four thousand Indians into the far Cordilleras in search of treasure? And did not all the

four thousand Indians and three hundred of the brave cavaliers die on that vain quest? But Pedro Patino did

not die. He it was that lived to found the family of the Patino. I am Ecuadoriano, true, but I am Spanish. I am

Manuel de Jesus Patino. I own many haciendas, and ten thousand Indians are my slaves, though the law says

they are free men who work by freedom of contract. The law is a funny thing. We Ecuadorianos laugh at it. It

is our law. We make it for ourselves. I am Manuel de Jesus Patino. Remember that name. It will be written

some day in history. There are revolutions in Ecuador. We call them elections. It is a good joke is it

John Harned was an American. I met him first at the Tivoli hotel in Panama. He had much moneythis I

have heard. He was going to Lima, but he met Maria Valenzuela in the Tivoli hotel. Maria Valenzuela is my

cousin, and she is beautiful. It is true, she is the most beautiful woman in Ecuador. But also is she most

beautiful in every countryin Paris, in Madrid, in New York, in Vienna. Always do all men look at her, and

John Harned looked long at her at Panama. He loved her, that I know for a fact. She was Ecuadoriano,

truebut she was of all countries; she was of all the world. She spoke many languages. She sangah! like

an artiste. Her smilewonderful, divine. Her eyesah! have I not seen men look in her eyes? They were

what you English call amazing. They were promises of paradise. Men drowned themselves in her eyes.

Maria Valenzuela was richricher than I, who am accounted very rich in Ecuador. But John Harned did not

care for her money. He had a hearta funny heart. He was a fool. He did not go to Lima. He left the steamer

at Guayaquil and followed her to Quito. She was coming home from Europe and other places. I do not see

what she found in him, but she liked him. This I know for a fact, else he would not have followed her to

But he said: "I go to Lima, not Quito. Such is my passage engaged on the steamer."

"You travel for pleasureno?" said Maria Valenzuela; and she looked at him as only Maria Valenzuela

And he came. No; he did not come for the bullfight. He came because of what he had seen in her eyes.

Women like Maria Valenzuela are born once in a hundred years. They are of no country and no time. They

are what you call goddesses. Men fall down at their feet. They play with men and run them through their

pretty fingers like sand. Cleopatra was such a woman they say; and so was Circe. She turned men into swine.

"You English people arewhat shall I say?savageno? You prizefight. Two men each hit the other

with their fists till their eyes are blinded and their noses are broken. Hideous! And the other men who look on

"But they are men," said John Harned; "and they prizefight out of desire. No one makes them prizefight.

Maria Valenzuelathere was scorn in her smile as she said: "They kill each other oftenis it not so? I have

"The bull is killed many times in the bullfight, and the bull does not come into the the ring out of desire. It is

not fair to the bull. He is compelled to fight. But the man in the prizefightno; he is not compelled."

"He is savage. He is primitive. He is animal. He strikes with his paws like a bear from a cave, and he is

ferocious. But the bullfightah! You have not seen the bullfightno? The toreador is clever. He must

have skill. He is modern. He is romantic. He is only a man, soft and tender, and he faces the wild bull in

conflict. And he kills with a sword, a slender sword, with one thrust, so, to the heart of the great beast. It is

delicious. It makes the heart beat to beholdthe small man, the great beast, the wide level sand, the

thousands that look on without breath; the great beast rushes to the attack, the small man stands like a statue;

he does not move, he is unafraid, and in his hand is the slender sword flashing like silver in the sun; nearer

and nearer rushes the great beast with its sharp horns, the man does not move, and thensothe sword

flashes, the thrust is made, to the heart, to the hilt, the bull falls to the sand and is dead, and the man is unhurt.

It is brave. It is magnificent! Ah!I could love the toreador. But the man of the prizefighthe is the brute,

the human beast, the savage primitive, the maniac that receives many blows in his stupid face and rejoices.

Come to Quito and I will show you the brave sport of men, the toreador and the bull."

But John Harned did not go to Quito for the bullfight. He went because of Maria Valenzuela. He was a large

man, more broad of shoulder than we Ecuadorianos, more tall, more heavy of limb and bone. True, he was

larger of his own race. His eyes were blue, though I have seen them gray, and, sometimes, like cold steel. His

features were large, toonot delicate like ours, and his jaw was very strong to look at. Also, his face was

smoothshaven like a priest's. Why should a man feel shame for the hair on his face? Did not God put it

there? Yes, I believe in GodI am not a pagan like many of you English. God is good. He made me an

Ecuadoriano with ten thousand slaves. And when I die I shall go to God. Yes, the priests are right.

But John Harned. He was a quiet man. He talked always in a low voice, and he never moved his hands when

he talked. One would have thought his heart was a piece of ice; yet did he have a streak of warm in his blood,

for he followed Maria Valenzuela to Quito. Also, and for all that he talked low without moving his hands, he

was an animal, as you shall seethe beast primitive, the stupid, ferocious savage of the long ago that dressed

Luis Cervallos is my friend, the best of Ecuadorianos. He owns three cacao plantations at Naranjito and

Chobo. At Milagro is his big sugar plantation. He has large haciendas at Ambato and Latacunga, and down

the coast is he interested in oilwells. Also has he spent much money in planting rubber along the Guayas.

He is modern, like the Yankee; and, like the Yankee, full of business. He has much money, but it is in many

ventures, and ever he needs more money for new ventures and for the old ones. He has been everywhere and

seen everything. When he was a very young man he was in the Yankee military academy what you call West

Point. There was trouble. He was made to resign. He does not like Americans. But he did like Maria

Valenzuela, who was of his own country. Also, he needed her money for his ventures and for his gold mine in

Eastern Ecuador where the painted Indians live. I was his friend. It was my desire that he should marry Maria

Valenzuela. Further, much of my money had I invested in his ventures, more so in his gold mine which was

very rich but which first required the expense of much money before it would yield forth its riches. If Luis

But John Harned followed Maria Valenzuela to Quito, and it was quickly clear to usto Luis Cervallos and

me that she looked upon John Harned with great kindness. It is said that a woman will have her will, but this

is a case not in point, for Maria Valenzuela did not have her willat least not with John Harned. Perhaps it

would all have happened as it did, even if Luis Cervallos and I had not sat in the box that day at the bullring

in Quito. But this I know: we DID sit in the box that day. And I shall tell you what happened.

The four of us were in the one box, guests of Luis Cervallos. I was next to the Presidente's box. On the other

side was the box of General Jose Eliceo Salazar. With him were Joaquiin Endara and Urcisino Castillo, both

generals, and Colonel Jacinto Fierro and Captain Baltazar de Echeverria. Only Luis Cervallos had the

position and the influence to get that box next to the Presidente. I know for a fact that the Presidente himself

expressed the desire to the management that Luis Cervallos should have that box.

The band finished playing the national hymn of Ecuador. The procession of the toreadors was over. The

Presidente nodded to begin. The bugles blew, and the bull dashed inyou know the way, excited,

bewildered, the darts in its shoulder burning like fire, itself seeking madly whatever enemy to destroy. The

toreadors hid behind their shelters and waited. Suddenly they appeared forth, the capadores, five of them,

from every side, their colored capes flinging wide. The bull paused at sight of such a generosity of enemies,

unable in his own mind to know which to attack. Then advanced one of the capadors alone to meet the bull.

The bull was very angry. With its forelegs it pawed the sand of the arena till the dust rose all about it. Then

It is always of interest, the first charge of the first bull. After a time it is natural that one should grow tired,

trifle, that the keenness should lose its edge. But that first charge of the first bull! John Harned was seeing it

for the first time, and he could not escape the excitementthe sight of the man, armed only with a piece of

cloth, and of the bull rushing upon him across the sand with sharp horns, widespreading.

John Harned nodded, but did not look at her. His eyes were sparkling, and they were only for the bullring.

The capador stepped to the side, with a twirl of the cape eluding the bull and spreading the cape on his own

"What do you think?" asked Maria Venzuela. "Is it not awhatyoucallsporting propositionno?"

She clapped her hands with delight. They were little hands. The audience applauded. The bull turned and

came back. Again the capadore eluded him, throwing the cape on his shoulders, and again the audience

applauded. Three times did this happen. The capadore was very excellent. Then he retired, and the other

capadore played with the bull. After that they placed the banderillos in the bull, in the shoulders, on each side

of the backbone, two at a time. Then stepped forward Ordonez, the chief matador, with the long sword and

the scarlet cape. The bugles blew for the death. He is not so good as Matestini. Still he is good, and with one

thrust he drove the sword to the heart, and the bull doubled his legs under him and lay down and died. It was

a pretty thrust, clean and sure; and there was much applause, and many of the common people threw their

hats into the ring. Maria Valenzuela clapped her hands with the rest, and John Harned, whose cold heart was

"From a little girl," said Luis Cervallos. "I remember her first fight. She was four years old. She sat with her

"You have seen it," said Maria Valenzuela to John Harned, as they fastened the mules to the dead bull and

dragged it out. "You have seen the bullfight and you like itno? What do you think?

"I think the bull had no chance," he said. "The bull was doomed from the first. The issue was not in doubt.

Every one knew, before the bull entered the ring, that it was to die. To be a sporting proposition, the issue

must be in doubt. It was one stupid bull who had never fought a man against five wise men who had fought

many bulls. It would be possibly a little bit fair if it were one man against one bull."

"Or one man against five bulls," said Maria Valenzuela; and we all laughed, and Luis Ceryallos laughed

"Yes," said John Harned, "against five bulls, and the man, like the bulls, never in the bull ring beforea man

"Yet we Spanish like the bullfight," said Luis Cervallos; and I swear the devil was whispering then in his

"Then must it be a cultivated taste," John Harned made answer. "We kill bulls by the thousand every day in

"That is butchery," said I; "but thisah, this is an art. It is delicate. It is fine. It is rare."

"Not always," said Luis Cervallos. "I have seen clumsy matadors, and I tell you it is not nice."

He shuddered, and his face betrayed such whatyoucall disgust, that I knew, then, that the devil was

"Senor Harned may be right," said Luis Cervallos. "It may not be fair to the bull. For is it not known to all of

us that for twentyfour hours the bull is given no water, and that immediately before the fight he is permitted

"And he comes into the ring heavy with water?" said John Harned quickly; and I saw that his eyes were very

"It is necessary for the sport," said Luis Cervallos. "Would you have the bull so strong that he would kill the

"I would that he had a fighting chance," said John Harned, facing the ring to see the second bull come in.

It was not a good bull. It was frightened. It ran around the ring in search of a way to get out. The capadors

"I beg pardon," said John Harned; "but it would seem to me a wise bull. He knows he must not fight man.

True. The bull, pausing where the last one had died, was smelling the wet sand and snorting. Again he ran

around the ring, with raised head, looking at the faces of the thousands that hissed him, that threw

orangepeel at him and called him names. But the smell of blood decided him, and he charged a capador, so

without warning that the man just escaped. He dropped his cape and dodged into the shelter. The bull struck

the wall of the ring with a crash. And John Harned said, in a quiet voice, as though he talked to himself:

"I will give one thousand sucres to the lazarhouse of Quito if a bull kills a man this day."

"I like such men less," said John Harned. "A toreador is not a brave man. He surely cannot be a brave man.

"Yes, it is the water," said John Harned. "Would it not be safer to hamstring the bull before he comes on?"

Maria Valenzuela was made angry by this sneer in John Harned's words. But Luis Cervallos smiled so that

only I could see him, and then it broke upon my mind surely the game he was playing. He and I were to be

banderilleros. The big American bull was there in the box with us. We were to stick the darts in him till he

became angry, and then there might be no marriage with Maria Valenzuela. It was a good sport. And the

The bull was now angry and excited. The capadors had great game with him. He was very quick, and

sometimes he turned with such sharpness that his hind legs lost their footing and he plowed the sand with his

"He thinks the cape is his enemy," explained Maria Valenzuela. "See how cleverly the capador deceives

"It is his nature to be deceived," said John Harned. "Wherefore he is doomed to fight wind. The toreadors

know it, you know it, I know itwe all know from the first that he will fight wind. He only does not know it.

"It is very simple," said Luis Cervallos. "The bull shuts his eyes when he charges. Therefore"

"Yes," said Luis Cervallos; "that is it. The bull shuts his eyes, and the man knows it."

"But cows do not shut their eyes," said John Harned. "I know a cow at home that is a Jersey and gives milk,

"Yes," said Luis Cervallos, "they are afraid to fight cows. There would be no sport in killing toreadors."

"There would be some sport," said John Harned, "if a toreador were killed once in a while. When I become an

old man, and mayhap a cripple, and should I need to make a living and be unable to do hard work, then would

I become a bullfighter. It is a light vocation for elderly gentlemen and pensioners."

"But see!" said Maria Valenzuela, as the bull charged bravely and the capador eluded it with a fling of his

"True," said John Harned. "But believe me, it requires a thousand times more skill to avoid the many and

quick punches of a prizefighter who keeps his eyes open and strikes with intelligence. Furthermore, this bull

It was not a good bull, for again it ran around the ring, seeking to find a way out.

"Yet these bulls are sometimes the most dangerous," said Luis Cervallos. "It can never be known what they

will do next. They are wise. They are half cow. The bullfighters never like them.See! He has turned!"

Once again, baffled and made angry by the walls of the ring that would not let him out, the bull was attacking

"His tongue is hanging out," said John Harned. "First, they fill him with water. Then they tire him out, one

man and then another, persuading him to exhaust himself by fighting wind. While some tire him, others rest.

But the bull they never let rest. Afterward, when he is quite tired and no longer quick, the matador sticks the

The time had now come for the banderillos. Three times one of the fighters endeavored to place the darts, and

three times did he fail. He but stung the bull and maddened it. The banderillos must go in, you know, two at a

time, into the shoulders, on each side the backbone and close to it. If but one be placed, it is a failure. The

crowd hissed and called for Ordonez. And then Ordonez did a great thing. Four times he stood forth, and four

times, at the first attempt, he stuck in the banderillos, so that eight of them, well placed, stood out of the back

of the bull at one time. The crowd went mad, and a rain of hats and money fell on the sand of the ring

And just then the bull charged unexpectedly one of the capadors. The man slipped and lost his head. The bull

caught himfortunately, between his wide horns. And while the audience watched, breathless and silent,

John Harned stood up and yelled with gladness. Alone, in that hush of all of us, John Harned yelled. And he

yelled for the bull. As you see yourself, John Harned wanted the man killed. His was a brutal heart. This bad

conduct made those angry that sat in the box of General Salazar, and they cried out against John Harned. And

Urcisino Castillo told him to his face that he was a dog of a Gringo and other things. Only it was in Spanish,

and John Harned did not understand. He stood and yelled, perhaps for the time of ten seconds, when the bull

"The bull has no chance," John Harned said with sadness as he sat down. "The man was uninjured. They

fooled the bull away from him." Then he turned to Maria Valenzuela and said: "I beg your pardon. I was

"It is your first bullfight," she said. "After you have seen more you will not cry for the death of the man.

You Americans, you see, are more brutal than we. It is because of your prizefighting. We come only to see

"But I would the bull had some chance," he answered. "Doubtless, in time, I shall cease to be annoyed by the

The bugles blew for the death of the bull. Ordonez stood forth with the sword and the scarlet cloth. But the

bull had changed again, and did not want to fight. Ordonez stamped his foot in the sand, and cried out, and

waved the scarlet cloth. Then the bull charged, but without heart. There was no weight to the charge. It was a

poor thrust. The sword struck a bone and bent. Ordonez took a fresh sword. The bull, again stung to fight,

charged once more. Five times Ordonez essayed the thrust, and each time the sword went but part way in or

struck bone. The sixth time, the sword went in to the hilt. But it was a bad thrust. The sword missed the heart

and stuck out half a yard through the ribs on the opposite side. The audience hissed the matador. I glanced at

John Harned. He sat silent, without movement; but I could see his teeth were set, and his hands were

All fight was now out of the bull, and, though it was no vital thrust, he trotted lamely what of the sword that

stuck through him, in one side and out the other. He ran away from the matador and the capadors, and circled

"He is saying: 'For God's sake let me out of this; I don't want to fight,'" said John Harned.

That was all. He said no more, but sat and watched, though sometimes he looked sideways at Maria

Valenzuela to see how she took it. She was angry with the matador. He was awkward, and she had desired a

The bull was now very tired, and weak from loss of blood, though far from dying. He walked slowly around

the wall of the ring, seeking a way out. He would not charge. He had had enough. But he must be killed.

There is a place, in the neck of a bull behind the horns, where the cord of the spine is unprotected and where a

short stab will immediately kill. Ordonez stepped in front of the bull and lowered his scarlet cloth to the

ground. The bull would not charge. He stood still and smelled the cloth, lowering his head to do so. Ordonez

stabbed between the horns at the spot in the neck. The bull jerked his head up. The stab had missed. Then the

bull watched the sword. When Ordonez moved the cloth on the ground, the bull forgot the sword and lowered

his head to smell the cloth. Again Ordonez stabbed, and again he failed. He tried many times. It was stupid.

And John Harned said nothing. At last a stab went home, and the bull fell to the sand, dead immediately, and

"The Gringos say it is a cruel sportno?" said Luis Cervallos. "That it is not humane. That it is bad for the

"No," said John Harned. "The bull does not count for much. It is bad for those that look on. It is degrading to

those that look on. It teaches them to delight in animal suffering. It is cowardly for five men to fight one

stupid bull. Therefore those that look on learn to be cowards. The bull dies, but those that look on live and the

Maria Valenzuela said nothing. Neither did she look at him. But she heard every word and her cheeks were

white with anger. She looked out across the ring and fanned herself, but I saw that her hand trembled. Nor did

John Harned look at her. He went on as though she were not there. He, too, was angry, coldly angry.

"I understand now the Spanish Inquisition," said John Harned. "It must have been more delightful than

Luis Cervallos smiled but said nothing. He glanced at Maria Valenzuela, and knew that the bullfight in the

box was won. Never would she have further to do with the Gringo who spoke such words. But neither Luis

Cervallos nor I was prepared for the outcome of the day. I fear we do not understand the Gringos. How were

we to know that John Harned, who was so coldly angry, should go suddenly mad! But mad he did go, as you

shall see. The bull did not count for muchhe said so himself. Then why should the horse count for so

much? That I cannot understand. The mind of John Harned lacked logic. That is the only explanation.

"It is not usual to have horses in the bullring at Quito," said Luis Cervallos, looking up from the program.

"In Spain they always have them. But today, by special permission we shall have them. When the next bull

comes on there will be horses and picadorsyou know, the men who carry lances and ride the horses."

"The bull is doomed from the first," said John Harned. "Are the horses then likewise doomed!"

"They are blindfolded so that they may not see the bull," said Luis Cervallos. "I have seen many horses

"I have seen the bull slaughtered," said John Harned "I will now see the horse slaughtered, so that I may

"They are old horses," said Luis Cervallos, "that are not good for anything else."

The third bull came on, and soon against it were both capadors and picadors. One picador took his stand

directly below us. I agree, it was a thin and aged horse he rode, a bag of bones covered with mangy hide.

"It is a marvel that the poor brute can hold up the weight of the rider," said John Harned. "And now that the

"Oh," said John Harned, "then is the horse there to be gored? That must be why it is blindfolded, so that it

"Not quite so," said I. "The lance of the picador is to keep the bull from goring the horse."

"No," said Luis Cervallos. "I have seen, at Seville, eighteen horses killed in one day, and the people clamored

After that we talked no more, but watched the fight. And John Harned was going mad all the time, and we did

not know. The bull refused to charge the horse. And the horse stood still, and because it could not see it did

not know that the capadors were trying to make the bull charge upon it. The capadors teased the bull their

capes, and when it charged them they ran toward the horse and into their shelters. At last the bull was angry,

"The horse does not know, the horse does not know," John Harned whispered to himself, unaware that he

The bull charged, and of course the horse knew nothing till the picador failed and the horse found himself

impaled on the bull's horns from beneath. The bull was magnificently strong. The sight of its strength was

splendid to see. It lifted the horse clear into the air; and as the horse fell to its side on on the ground the

picador landed on his feet and escaped, while the capadors lured the bull away. The horse was emptied of its

essential organs. Yet did it rise to its feet screaming. It was the scream of the horse that did it, that made John

Harned completely mad; for he, too, started to rise to his feet, I heard him curse low and deep. He never took

his eyes from the horse, which, screaming, strove to run, but fell down instead and rolled on its back so that

all its four legs were kicking in the air. Then the bull charged it and gored it again and again until it was dead.

John Harned was now on his feet. His eyes were no longer cold like steel. They were blue flames. He looked

at Maria Valenzuela, and she looked at him, and in his face was a great loathing. The moment of his madness

was upon him. Everybody was looking, now that the horse was dead; and John Harned was a large man and

John Harned replied nothing. He struck out his fist. He smote Luis Cervallos in the face so that he fell like a

dead man across the chairs and did not rise again. He saw nothing of what followed. But I saw much.

Urcisino Castillo, leaning forward from the next box, with his cane struck John Harned full across the face.

And John Harned smote him with his fist so that in falling he overthrew General Salazar. John Harned was

now in whatyoucall Berserker rageno? The beast primitive in him was loose and roaringthe beast

"You came for a bullfight," I heard him say, "And by God I'll show you a manfight!"

It was a fight. The soldiers guarding the Presidente's box leaped across, but from one of them he took a rifle

and beat them on their heads with it. From the other box Colonel Jacinto Fierro was shooting at him with a

revolver. The first shot killed a soldier. This I know for a fact. I saw it. But the second shot struck John

Harned in the side. Whereupon he swore, and with a lunge drove the bayonet of his rifle into Colonel Jacinto

Fierro's body. It was horrible to behold. The Americans and the English are a brutal race. They sneer at our

bullfighting, yet do they delight in the shedding of blood. More men were killed that day because of John

Harned than were ever killed in all the history of the bullring of Quito, yes, and of Guayaquil and all

It was the scream of the horse that did it, yet why did not John Harned go mad when the bull was killed? A

beast is a beast, be it bull or horse. John Harned was mad. There is no other explanation. He was bloodmad,

a beast himself. I leave it to your judgment. Which is worsethe goring of the horse by the bull, or the

goring of Colonel Jacinto Fierro by the bayonet in the hands of John Harned! And John Harned gored others

with that bayonet. He was full of devils. He fought with many bullets in him, and he was hard to kill. And

Maria Valenzuela was a brave woman. Unlike the other women, she did not cry out nor faint. She sat still in

her box, gazing out across the bullring. Her face was white and she fanned herself, but she never looked

From all sides came the soldiers and officers and the common people bravely to subdue the mad Gringo. It is

truethe cry went up from the crowd to kill all the Gringos. It is an old cry in LatinAmerican countries,

what of the dislike for the Gringos and their uncouth ways. It is true, the cry went up. But the brave

Ecuadorianos killed only John Harned, and first he killed seven of them. Besides, there were many hurt. I

have seen many bullfights, but never have I seen anything so abominable as the scene in the boxes when the

fight was over. It was like a field of battle. The dead lay around everywhere, while the wounded sobbed and

groaned and some of them died. One man, whom John Harned had thrust through the belly with the bayonet,

clutched at himself with both his hands and screamed. I tell you for a fact it was more terrible than the

No, Maria Valenzuela did not marry Luis Cervallos. I am sorry for that. He was my friend, and much of my

money was invested in his ventures. It was five weeks before the surgeons took the bandages from his face.

And there is a scar there to this day, on the cheek, under the eye. Yet John Harned struck him but once and

struck him only with his naked fist. Maria Valenzuela is in Austria now. It is said she is to marry an

ArchDuke or some high nobleman. I do not know. I think she liked John Harned before he followed her to

Quito to see the bullfight. But why the horse? That is what I desire to know. Why should he watch the bull

and say that it did not count, and then go immediately and most horribly mad because a horse screamed ?

HE was a very quiet, selfpossessed sort of man, sitting a moment on top of the wall to sound the damp

darkness for warnings of the dangers it might conceal. But the plummet of his hearing brought nothing to him

save the moaning of wind through invisible trees and the rustling of leaves on swaying branches. A heavy fog

drifted and drove before the wind, and though he could not see this fog, the wet of it blew upon his face, and

Without noise he had climbed to the top of the wall from the outside, and without noise he dropped to the

ground on the inside. From his pocket he drew an electric nightstick, but he did not use it. Dark as the way

was, he was not anxious for light. Carrying the nightstick in his hand, his finger on the button, he advanced

through the darkness. The ground was velvety and springy to his feet, being carpeted with dead pineneedles

and leaves and mold which evidently bad been undisturbed for years. Leaves and branches brushed against

his body, but so dark was it that he could not avoid them. Soon he walked with his hand stretched out

gropingly before him, and more than once the hand fetched up against the solid trunks of massive trees. All

about him he knew were these trees; he sensed the loom of them everywhere; and he experienced a strange

feeling of microscopic smallness in the midst of great bulks leaning toward him to crush him. Beyond, he

knew, was the house, and he expected to find some trail or winding path that would lead easily to it.

Once, he found himself trapped. On every side he groped against trees and branches, or blundered into

thickets of underbrush, until there seemed no way out. Then he turned on his light, circumspectly, directing

its rays to the ground at his feet. Slowly and carefully he moved it about him, the white brightness showing in

sharp detail all the obstacles to his progress. He saw, an opening between hugetrunked trees, and advanced

through it, putting out the light and treading on dry footing as yet protected from the drip of the fog by the

dense foliage overhead. His sense of direction was good, and he knew he was going toward the house.

And then the thing happenedthe thing unthinkable and unexpected. His descending foot came down upon

something that was soft and alive, and that arose with a snort under the weight of his body. He sprang clear,

and crouched for another spring, anywhere, tense and expectant, keyed for the onslaught of the unknown. He

waited a moment, wondering what manner of animal it was that had arisen from under his foot and that now

made no sound nor movement and that must be crouching and waiting just as tensely and expectantly as he.

The strain became unbearable. Holding the nightstick before him, he pressed the button, saw, and screamed

aloud in terror. He was prepared for anything, from a frightened calf or fawn to a belligerent lion, but he was

not prepared for what he saw. In that instant his tiny searchlight, sharp and white, had shown him what a

thousand years would not en. able him to forgeta man, huge and blond, yellowhaired and

yellowbearded, naked except for softtanned moccasins and what seemed a goatskin about his middle.

Arms and legs were bare, as were his shoulders and most of his chest. The skin was smooth and hairless, but

browned by sun and wind, while under it heavy muscles were knotted like fat snakes. Still, this alone,

unexpected as it well was, was not what had made the man scream out. What had caused his terror was the

unspeakable ferocity of the face, the wildanimal glare of the blue eyes scarcely dazzled by the light, the

pineneedles matted and clinging in the beard and hair, and the whole formidable body crouched and in the

act of springing at him. Practically in the instant he saw all this, and while his scream still rang, the thing

leaped, he flung his nightstick full at it, and threw himself to the ground. He felt its feet and shins strike

against his ribs, and he bounded up and away while the thing itself hurled onward in a heavy crashing fall

As the noise of the fall ceased, the man stopped and on hands and knees waited. He could hear the thing

moving about, searching for him, and he was afraid to advertise his location by attempting further flight. He

knew that inevitably he would crackle the underbrush and be pursued. Once he drew out his revolver, then

changed his mind. He had recovered his composure and hoped to get away without noise. Several times he

heard the thing beating up the thickets for him, and there were moments when it, too, remained still and

listened. This gave an idea to the man. One of his hands was resting on a chunk of dead wood. Carefully, first

feeling about him in the darkness to know that the full swing of his arm was clear, he raised the chunk of

wood and threw it. It was not a large piece, and it went far, landing noisily in a bush. He heard the thing

bound into the bush, and at the same time himself crawled steadily away. And on hands and knees, slowly

and cautiously, he crawled on, till his knees were wet on the soggy mold, When he listened he heard naught

but the moaning wind and the dripdrip of the fog from the branches. Never abating his caution, he stood

erect and went on to the stone wall, over which he climbed and dropped down to the road outside.

Feeling his way in a clump of bushes, he drew out a bicycle and prepared to mount. He was in the act of

driving the gear around with his foot for the purpose of getting the opposite pedal in position, when he heard

the thud of a heavy body that landed lightly and evidently on its feet. He did not wait for more, but ran, with

hands on the handles of his bicycle, until he was able to vault astride the saddle, catch the pedals, and start a

spurt. Behind he could hear the quick thudthud of feet on the dust of the road, but he drew away from it and

lost it. Unfortunately, he had started away from the direction of town and was heading higher up into the

hills. He knew that on this particular road there were no cross roads. The only way back was past that terror,

and he could not steel himself to face it. At the end of half an hour, finding himself on an ever increasing

grade, he dismounted. For still greater safety, leaving the wheel by the roadside, he climbed through a fence

into what he decided was a hillside pasture, spread a newspaper on the ground, and sat down.

And "Gosh!" he said once again, while rolling a cigarette and as he pondered the problem of getting back.

But he made no attempt to go back. He was resolved not to face that road in the dark, and with head bowed

How long afterward he did not know, he was awakened by the yapping bark of a young coyote. As he looked

about and located it on the brow of the hill behind him, he noted the change that had come over the face of

the night. The fog was gone; the stars and moon were out; even the wind had died down. It had transformed

into a balmy California summer night. He tried to doze again, but the yap of the coyote disturbed him. Half

asleep, he heard a wild and eery chant. Looking about him, he noticed that the coyote had ceased its noise and

was running away along the crest of the hill, and behind it, in full pursuit, no longer chanting, ran the naked

creature he had encountered in the garden. It was a young coyote, and it was being overtaken when the chase

passed from view. The man trembled as with a chill as he started to his feet, clambered over the fence, and

mounted his wheel. But it was his chance and he knew it. The terror was no longer between him and Mill

He sped at a breakneck rate down the hill, but in the turn at the bottom, in the deep shadows, he encountered

"It's sure not my night," he muttered, as he examined the broken fork of the machine

Shouldering the useless wheel, he trudged on. In time he came to the stone wall, and, half disbelieving his

experience, he sought in the road for tracks, and found themmoccasin tracks, large ones, deepbitten into

the dust at the toes. It was while bending over them, examining, that again he heard the eery chant. He had

seen the thing pursue the coyote, and he knew he had no chance on a straight run. He did not attempt it,

And again he saw the thing that was like a naked man, running swiftly and lightly and singing as it ran.

Opposite him it paused, and his heart stood still. But instead of coming toward his hidingplace, it leaped

into the air, caught the branch of a roadside tree, and swung swiftly upward, from limb to limb, like an ape. It

swung across the wall, and a dozen feet above the top, into the branches of another tree, and dropped out of

Dave Slotter leaned belligerently against the desk that barred the way to the private office of James Ward,

senior partner of the firm of Ward, Knowles Co. Dave was angry. Every one in the outer office had looked

"I tell you he is dictating and cannot be disturbed," was the answer. "Come tomorrow."

"Tomorrow will be too late. You just trot along and tell Mr. Ward it's a matter of life and death."

"You just tell him I was across the bay in Mill Valley last night, and that I want to put him wise to

When Dave was shown into the private office, he was still in the belligerent frame of mind, but when he saw

a large fair man whirl in a revolving chair from dictating to a stenographer to face him, Dave's demeanor

abruptly changed. He did not know why it changed, and he was secretly angry with himself.

"You are Mr. Ward?" Dave asked with a fatuousness that still further irritated him. He had never intended it

"You live there, don't you?" Dave countered, looking suspiciously at the stenographer.

The girl arose, gathered her notes together, and passed out. Dave looked at Mr. James Ward wonderingly,

And Dave proceeded in the face of a growing conviction that was unbelievable. "I was at your house, or in

"I heard you lived all alone with a Chinaman for cook, and it looked good to me. Only I didn't break in.

Something happened that prevented. That's why I'm here. I come to warn you. I found a wild man loose in

your groundsa regular devil. He could pull a guy like me to pieces. He gave me the run of my life. He don't

wear any clothes to speak of, he climbs trees like a monkey, and he runs like a deer. I saw him chasing a

Dave paused and looked for the effect that would follow his words. But no effect came. James Ward was

"Very remarkable, very remarkable," he murmured. "A wild man, you say. Why have you come to tell me?"

"To warn you of your danger. I'm something of a hard proposition myself, but I don't believe in killing people

. . . that is, unnecessarily. I realized that you was in danger. I thought I'd warn you. Honest, that's the game.

Of course, if you wanted to give me anything for my trouble, I'd take it. That was in my mind, too. But I don't

care whether you give me anything or not. I've warned you any way, and done my duty."

Mr. Ward meditated and drummed on the surface of his desk. Dave noticed they were large, powerful hands,

withal wellcared for despite their dark sunburn. Also, he noted what had already caught his eye beforea

tiny strip of fleshcolored courtplaster on the forehead over one eve. And still the thought that forced itself

Mr. Ward took a wallet from his inside coat pocket, drew out a greenback, and passed it to Dave, who noted

But so quiet a man was Mr. Ward, that Dave's courage returned. Besides, a new theory had suggested itself.

The wild man was evidently Mr. Ward's brother, a lunatic privately confined. Dave had heard of such things.

Perhaps Mr. Ward wanted it kept quiet. That was why he had given him the twenty dollars.

"Say," Dave began, "now I come to think of it that wild man looked a lot like you"

That was as far as Dave got, for at that moment he witnessed a transformation and found himself gazing into

the same unspeakably ferocious blue eyes of the night before, at the same clutching talonlike hands, and at

the same formidable bulk in the act of springing upon him. But this time Dave had no nightstick to throw,

and he was caught by the biceps of both arms in a grip so terrific that it made him groan with pain. He saw

the large white teeth exposed, for all the world as a dog's about to bite. Mr. Ward's beard brushed his face as

the teeth went in for the grip on his throat. But the bite was not given. Instead, Dave felt the other's body

stiffen as with an iron restraint, and then he was flung aside, without effort but with such force that only the

"What do you mean by coming here and trying to blackmail me?" Mr. Ward was snarling at him. "Here, give

"I thought you came here with good intentions. I know you now. Let me see and hear no more of you, or I'll

And Dave went, without further word, both his biceps aching intolerably from the bruise of that tremendous

"You were lucky," Mr. Ward was saying, and Dave noted that his face and eyes were cruel and gloating and

"You were lucky. Had I wanted, I could have torn your muscles out of your arms and thrown them in the

"Gosh!" was all Dave vouchsafed, and with this utterance passed out of the offices and the story.

James G. Ward was forty years of age, a successful business man, and very unhappy. For forty years he had

vainly tried to solve a problem that was really himself and that with increasing years became more and more

a woeful affliction. In himself he was two men, and, chronologically speaking, these men were several

thousand years or so apart. He had studied the question of dual personality probably more profoundly than

any half dozen of the leading specialists in that intricate and mysterious psychological field. In himself he

was a different case from any that had been recorded. Even the most fanciful flights of the fictionwriters had

not quite hit upon him. He was not a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, nor was he like the unfortunate young man in

Kipling's "Greatest Story in the World." His two personalities were so mixed that they were practically aware

His other self he had located as a savage and a barbarian living under the primitive conditions of several

thousand years before. But which self was he, and which was the other, he could never tell. For he was both

selves, and both selves all the time. Very rarely indeed did it happen that one self did not know what the other

was doing. Another thing was that he had no visions nor memories of the past in which that early self had

lived. That early self lived in the present; but while it lived in the present, it was under the compulsion to live

In his childhood he had been a problem to his father and mother, and to the family doctors, though never had

they come within a thousand miles of hitting upon the clue to his erratic, conduct. Thus, they could not

understand his excessive somnolence in the forenoon, nor his excessive activity at night. When they found

him wandering along the hallways at night, or climbing over giddy roofs, or running in the hills, they decided

he was a somnambulist. In reality he was wideeyed awake and merely under the nightroaming compulsion

of his early self. Questioned by an obtuse medico, he once told the truth and suffered the ignominy of having

The point was, that as twilight and evening came on he became wakeful. The four walls of a room were an irk

and a restraint. He heard a thousand voices whispering to him through the darkness. The night called to him,

for he was, for that period of the twentyfour hours, essentially a nightprowler. But nobody understood, and

never again did he attempt to explain. They classified him as a sleepwalker and took precautions

accordinglyprecautions that very often were futile. As his childhood advanced, he grew more cunning, so

that the major portion of all his nights were spent in the open at realizing his other self. As a result, he slept in

the forenoons. Morning studies and schools were impossible, and it was discovered that only in the

afternoons, under private teachers, could he be taught anything. Thus was his modern self educated and

But a problem, as a child, he ever remained. He was known as a little demon, of insensate cruelty and

viciousness. The family medicos privately adjudged him a mental monstrosity and degenerate. Such few boy

companions as he had, hailed him as a wonder, though they were all afraid of him. He could outclimb,

outswim, outrun, outdevil any of them; while none dared fight with him. He was too terribly strong, madly

When nine years of age he ran away to the hills, where he flourished, nightprowling, for seven weeks before

he was discovered and brought home. The marvel was how he had managed to subsist and keep in condition

during that time. They did not know, and he never told them, of the rabbits he had killed, of the quail, young

and old, he had captured and devoured, of the farmers' chickenroosts he had raided, nor of the cavelair he

had made and carpeted with dry leaves and grasses and in which he had slept in warmth and comfort through

At college he was notorious for his sleepiness and stupidity during the morning lectures and for his brilliance

in the afternoon. By collateral reading and by borrowing the notebook of his fellow students he managed to

scrape through the detestable morning courses, while his afternoon courses were triumphs. In football he

proved a giant and a terror, and, in almost every form of track athletics, save for strange Berserker rages that

were sometimes displayed, he could be depended upon to win. But his fellows were afraid to box with him,

and he signalized his last wrestling bout by sinking his teeth into the shoulder of his opponent.

After college, his father, in despair, sent him among the cowpunchers of a Wyoming ranch. Three months

later the doughty cowmen confessed he was too much for them and telegraphed his father to come and take

the wild man away. Also, when the father arrived to take him away, the cowmen allowed that they would

vastly prefer chumming with howling cannibals, gibbering lunatics, cavorting gorillas, grizzly bears, and

maneating tigers than with this particular Young college product with hair parted in the middle.

There was one exception to the lack of memory of the life of his early self, and that was language. By some

quirk of atavism, a certain portion of that early self's language had come down to him as a racial memory. In

moments of happiness, exaltation, or battle, he was prone to burst out in wild barbaric songs or chants. It was

by this means that he located in time and space that strayed half of him who should have been dead and dust

for thousands of years. He sang, once, and deliberately, several of the ancient chants in the presence of

Professor Wertz, who gave courses in old Saxon and who was a philogist of repute and passion. At the first

one, the professor pricked up his ears and demanded to know what mongrel tongue or hogGerman it was.

When the second chant was rendered, the professor was highly excited. James Ward then concluded the

performance by giving a song that always irresistibly rushed to his lips when he was engaged in fierce

struggling or fighting. Then it was that Professor Wertz proclaimed it no hogGerman, but early German, or

early Teuton, of a date that must far precede anything that had ever been discovered and handed down by the

scholars. So early was it that it was beyond him; yet it was filled with haunting reminiscences of wordforms

he knew and which his trained intuition told him were true and real. He demanded the source of the songs,

and asked to borrow the precious book that contained them. Also, he demanded to know why young Ward

had always posed as being profoundly ignorant of the German language. And Ward could neither explain his

ignorance nor lend the book. Whereupon, after pleadings and entreaties that extended through weeks,

Professor Wert took a dislike to the young man, believed him a liar, and classified him as a man of monstrous

selfishness for not giving him a glimpse of this wonderful screed that was older than the oldest any

But little good did it do this muchmixed young man to know that half of him was late American and the

other half early Teuton. Nevertheless, the late American in him was no weakling, and he (if he were a he and

had a shred of existence outside of these two) compelled an adjustment or compromise between his one self

that was a nightprowling savage that kept his other self sleepy of mornings, and that other self that was

cultured and refined and that wanted to be normal and live and love and prosecute business like other people.

The afternoons and early evenings he gave to the one, the nights to the other; the forenoons and parts of the

nights were devoted to sleep for the twain. But in the mornings he slept in bed like a civilized man. In the

night time he slept like a wild animal, as he had slept Dave Slotter stepped on him in the woods.

Persuading his father to advance the capital, he went into business and keen and successful business he made

of it, devoting his afternoons wholesouled to it, while his partner devoted the mornings. The early evenings

he spent socially, but, as the hour grew to nine or ten, an irresistible restlessness overcame him and he

disappeared from the haunts of men until the next afternoon. Friends and acquaintances thought that he spent

much of his time in sport. And they were right, though they never would have dreamed of the nature of the

sport, even if they had seen him running coyotes in nightchases over the hills of Mill Valley. Neither were

the schooner captains believed when they reported seeing, on cold winter mornings, a man swimming in the

tiderips of Raccoon Straits or in the swift currents between Goat island and Angel Island miles from shore.

In the bungalow at Mill Valley he lived alone, save for Lee Sing, the Chinese cook and factotum, who knew

much about the strangeness of his master, who was paid well for saying nothing, and who never did say

anything. After the satisfaction of his nights, a morning's sleep, and a breakfast of Lee Sing's, James Ward

crossed the bay to San Francisco on a midday ferryboat and went to the club and on to his office, as normal

and conventional a man of business as could be found in the city. But as the evening lengthened, the night

called to him. There came a quickening of all his perceptions and a restlessness. His hearing was suddenly

acute; the myriad nightnoises told him a luring and familiar story; and, if alone, he would begin to pace up

Once, he ventured to fall in love. He never permitted himself that diversion again. He was afraid. And for

many a day the young lady, scared at least out of a portion of her young ladyhood, bore on her arms and

shoulders and wrists divers blackandblue bruisestokens of caresses which he had bestowed in all fond

gentleness but too late at night. There was the mistake. Had he ventured lovemaking in the afternoon, all

would have been well, for it would have been as the quiet gentleman that he would have made lovebut at

night it was the uncouth, wifestealing savage of the dark German forests. Out of his wisdom, he decided that

afternoon lovemaking could be prosecuted successfully; but out of the same wisdom he was convinced that

marriage as would prove a ghastly failure. He found it appalling to imagine being married and encountering

So he had eschewed all lovemaking, regulated his dual life, cleaned up a million in business, fought shy of

matchmaking mamas and brighteyed and eager young ladies of various ages, met Lilian Gersdale and

made it a rigid observance never to see her later than eight o'clock in the evening, run of nights after his

coyotes, and slept in forest lairsand through it all had kept his secret safe save Lee Sing . . . and now, Dave

Slotter. It was the latter's discovery of both his selves that frightened him. In spite of the counter fright he had

given the burglar, the latter might talk. And even if he did not, sooner or later he would be found out by some

Thus it was that James Ward made a fresh and heroic effort to control the Teutonic barbarian that was half of

him. So well did he make it a point to see Lilian in the afternoons, that the time came when she accepted him

for better or worse, and when he prayed privily and fervently that it was not for worse. During this period no

prizefighter ever trained more harshly and faithfully for a contest than he trained to subdue the wild savage

in him. Among other things, he strove to exhaust himself during the day, so that sleep would render him deaf

to the call of the night. He took a vacation from the office and went on long hunting trips, following the deer

through the most inaccessible and rugged country he could findand always in the daytime. Night found

him indoors and tired. At home he installed a score of exercise machines, and where other men might go

through a particular movement ten times, he went hundreds. Also, as a compromise, he built a sleeping porch

on the second story. Here he at least breathed the blessed night air. Double screens prevented him from

escaping into the woods, and each night Lee Sing locked him in and each morning let him out.

The time came, in the month of August, when he engaged additional servants to assist Lee Sing and dared a

house party in his Mill Valley bungalow. Lilian, her mother and brother, and half a dozen mutual friends,

were the guests. For two days and nights all went well. And on the third night, playing bridge till eleven

o'clock, he had reason to be proud of himself. His restlessness fully hid, but as luck would have it, Lilian

Gersdale was his opponent on his right. She was a frail delicate flower of a woman, and in his nightmood

her very frailty incensed him. Not that he loved her less, but that he felt almost irresistibly impelled to reach

out and paw and maul her. Especially was this true when she was engaged in playing a winning hand against

He had one of the deerhounds brought in and, when it seemed he must fly to pieces with the tension, a

caressing hand laid on the animal brought him relief. These contacts with the hairy coat gave him instant

easement and enabled him to play out the evening. Nor did anyone guess the while terrible struggle their host

was making, the while he laughed so carelessly and played so keenly and deliberately.

When they separated for the night, he saw to it that he parted from Lilian in the presence or the others. Once

on his sleeping porch and safely locked in, he doubled and tripled and even quadrupled his exercises until,

exhausted, he lay down on the couch to woo sleep and to ponder two problems that especially troubled him.

One was this matter of exercise. It was a paradox. The more he exercised in this excessive fashion, the

stronger he became. While it was true that he thus quite tired out his nightrunning Teutonic self, it seemed

that he was merely setting back the fatal day when his strength would be too much for him and overpower

him, and then it would be a strength more terrible than he had yet known. The other problem was that of his

marriage and of the stratagems he must employ in order to avoid his wife after dark. And thus, fruitlessly

Now, where the huge grizzly bear came from that night was long a mystery, while the people of the Springs

Brothers' Circus, showing at Sausalito, searched long and vainly for "Big Ben, the Biggest Grizzly in

Captivity." But Big Ben escaped, and, out of the mazes of half a thousand bungalows and country estates,

selected the grounds of James J. Ward for visitation. The self first Mr. Ward knew was when he found him on

his feet, quivering and tense, a surge of battle in his breast and on his lips the old warchant. From without

came a wild baying and bellowing of the hounds. And sharp as a knifethrust through the pandemonium

Not stopping for slippers, pajamaclad, he burst through the door Lee Sing had so carefully locked, and sped

down the stairs and out into the night. As his naked feet struck the graveled driveway, he stopped abruptly,

reached under the steps to a hidingplace he knew well, and pulled forth a huge knotty clubhis old

companion on many a mad night adventure on the hills. The frantic hullabaloo of the dogs was coming

nearer, and, swinging the club, he sprang straight into the thickets to meet it.

The aroused household assembled on the wide veranda. Somebody turned on the electric lights, but they

could see nothing but one another's frightened faces. Beyond the brightly illuminated driveway the trees

formed a wall of impenetrable blackness. Yet somewhere in that blackness a terrible struggle was going on.

There was an infernal outcry of animals, a great snarling and growling, the sound of blows being struck and a

The tide of battle swept out from among the trees and upon the driveway just beneath the onlookers. Then

they saw. Mrs. Gersdale cried out and clung fainting to her son. Lilian, clutching the railing so spasmodically

that a bruising hurt was left in her fingerends for days, gazed horrorstricken at a yellowhaired, wildeyed

giant whom she recognized as the man who was to be her husband. He was swinging a great club, and

fighting furiously and calmly with a shaggy monster that was bigger than any bear she had ever seen. One rip

of the beast's claws had dragged away Ward's pajamacoat and streaked his flesh with blood.

While most of Lilian Gersdale's fright was for the man beloved, there was a large portion of it due to the man

himself. Never had she dreamed so formidable and magnificent a savage lurked under the starched shirt and

conventional garb of her betrothed. And never had she had any conception of how a man battled. Such a

battle was certainly not modern; nor was she there beholding a modern man, though she did not know it. For

this was not Mr. James J. Ward, the San Francisco business man, but one, unnamed and unknown, a crude,

rude savage creature who, by some freak of chance, lived again after thrice a thousand years.

The hounds, ever maintaining their mad uproar, circled about the fight, or dashed in and out, distracting the

bear. When the animal turned to meet such flanking assaults, the man leaped in and the club came down.

Angered afresh by every such blow, the bear would rush, and the man, leaping and skipping, avoiding the

dogs, went backwards or circled to one side or the other. Whereupon the dogs, taking advantage of the

The end came suddenly. Whirling, the grizzly caught a hound with a wide sweeping cuff that sent the brute,

its ribs caved in and its back broken, hurtling twenty feet. Then the human brute went mad. A foaming rage

flecked the lips that parted with a wild inarticulate cry, as it sprang in, swung the club mightily in both hands,

and brought it down full on the head of the uprearing grizzly. Not even the skull of a grizzly could withstand

the crushing force of such a blow, and the animal went down to meet the worrying of the hounds. And

through their scurrying leaped the man, squarely upon the body, where, in the white electric light, resting on

his club, he chanted a triumph in an unknown tonguea song so ancient that Professor Wertz would have

His guests rushed to possess him and acclaim him, but James Ward, suddenly looking out of the eyes of the

early Teuton, saw the fair frail Twentieth Century girl he loved, and felt something snap in his brain. He

staggered weakly toward her, dropped the club, and nearly fell. Something had gone wrong with him. Inside

his brain was an intolerable agony. It seemed as if the soul of him were flying asunder. Following the excited

gaze of the others, he glanced back and saw the carcass of the bear. The sight filled him with fear. He uttered

a cry and would have fled, had they not restrained him and led him into the bungalow.

James J. Ward is still at the head of the firm of Ward, Knowles Co. But he no longer lives in the country; nor

does he run of nights after the coyotes under the moon. The early Teuton in him died the night of the Mill

Valley fight with the bear. James J. Ward is now wholly James J. Ward, and he shares no part of his being

with any vagabond anachronism from the younger world. And so wholly is James J. Ward modern, that he

knows in all its bitter fullness the curse of civilized fear. He is now afraid of the dark, and night in the forest

is to him a thing of abysmal terror. His city house is of the spick and span order, and he evinces a great

interest in burglarproof devices. His home is a tangle of electric wires, and after bedtime a guest can

scarcely breathe without setting off an alarm. Also, he had invented a combination keyless doorlock that

travelers may carry in their vest pockets and apply immediately and successfully under all circumstances. But

his wife does not deem him a coward. She knows better. And, like any hero, he is content to rest on his

laurels. His bravery is never questioned by those friends who are aware of the Mill Valley episode.

CARTER WATSON, a current magazine under his arm, strolled slowly along, gazing about him curiously.

Twenty years had elapsed since he had been on this particular street, and the changes were great and

stupefying. This Western city of three hundred thousand souls had contained but thirty thousand, when, as a

boy, he had been wont to ramble along its streets. In those days the street he was now on had been a quiet

residence street in the respectable workingclass quarter. On this late afternoon he found that it had been

submerged by a vast and vicious tenderloin. Chinese and Japanese shops and dens abounded, all confusedly

intermingled with low white resorts and boozing dens. This quiet street of his youth had become the toughest

He looked at his watch. It was halfpast five. It was the slack time of the day in such a region, as he well

knew, yet he was curious to see. In all his score of years of wandering and studying social conditions over the

world, he had carried with him the memory of his old town as a sweet and wholesome place. The

metamorphosis he now beheld was startling. He certainly must continue his stroll and glimpse the infamy to

Another thing: Carter Watson had a keen social and civic consciousness. Independently wealthy, he had been

loath to dissipate his energies in the pink teas and freak dinners of society, while actresses, racehorses, and

kindred diversions had left him cold. He had the ethical bee in his bonnet and was a reformer of no mean

pretension, though his work had been mainly in the line of contributions to the heavier reviews and

quarterlies and to the publication over his name of brightly, cleverly written books on the working classes and

the slumdwellers. Among the twentyseven to his credit occurred titles such as, "If Christ Came to New

Orleans," " The Workedout Worker," "Tenement Reform in Berlin," "The Rural Slums of England," "The

people of the East Side," "Reform Versus Revolution," "The University Settlement as a Hot Bed of

But Carter Watson was neither morbid nor fanatic. He did not lose his head over the horrors he encountered,

studied, and exposed. No hair brained enthusiasm branded him. His humor saved him, as did his wide

experience and his con. conservative philosophic temperament. Nor did he have any patience with lightning

change reform theories. As he saw it, society would grow better only through the painfully slow and

arduously painful processes of evolution. There were no short cuts, no sudden regenerations. The betterment

of mankind must be worked out in agony and misery just as all past social betterments had been worked out.

But on this late summer afternoon, Carter Watson was curious. As he moved along he paused before a gaudy

drinking place. The sign above read, "The Vendome." There were two entrances. One evidently led to the

bar. This he did not explore. The other was a narrow hallway. Passing through this he found himself in a huge

room, filled with chairencircled tables and quite deserted. In the dim light he made out a piano in the

distance. Making a mental note that he would come back some time and study the class of persons that must

sit and drink at those multitudinous tables, he proceeded to circumnavigate the room.

Now, at the rear, a short hallway led off to a small kitchen, and here, at a table, alone, sat Patsy Horan,

proprietor of the Vendome, consuming a hasty supper ere the evening rush of business. Also, Patsy Horan

was angry with the world. He had got out of the wrong side of bed that morning, and nothing had gone right

all day. Had his barkeepers been asked, they would have described his mental condition as a grouch. But

Carter Watson did not know this. As he passed the little hallway, Patsy Horan's sullen eyes lighted on the

magazine he carried under his arm. Patsy did not know Carter Watson, nor did he know that what he carried

under his arm was a magazine. Patsy, out of the depths of his grouch, decided that this stranger was one of

those pests who marred and scarred the walls of his back rooms by tacking up or pasting up advertisements.

The color on the front cover of the magazine convinced him that it was such an advertisement. Thus the

Carter Watson was startled. The man had come upon him like the eruption of a jackinthebox.

"A defacin' me walls," cried Patsy, at the same time emitting a string of vivid and vile, rather than virile,

"Get out wid yeh; yeh talk too much wid yer mouth," quoted Patsy, emphasizing his remarks with flourishes

Carter Watson caught a quick vision of that eatingfork inserted uncomfortably between his ribs, knew that it

would be rash to talk further with his mouth, and promptly turned to go. The sight of his meekly retreating

back must have further enraged Patsy Horan, for that worthy, dropping the table implements, sprang upon

Patsy weighed one hundred and eighty pounds. So did Watson. In this they were equal. But Patsy was a

rushing, roughandtumble saloonfighter, while Watson was a boxer. In this the latter had the advantage,

for Patsy came in wide open, swinging his right in a perilous sweep. All Watson had to do was to

straightleft him and escape. But Watson had another advantage. His boxing, and his experience in the slums

He pivoted on his feet, and, instead of striking, ducked the other's swinging blow and went into a clinch. But

Patsy, charging like a bull, had the momentum of his rush, while Watson, whirling to meet him, had no

momentum. As a result, the pair of them went down, with all their three hundred and sixty pounds of weight,

in a long crashing fall, Watson underneath. He lay with his head touching the rear wall of the large room. The

street was a hundred and fifty feet away, and he did some quick thinking. His first thought was to avoid

trouble. He had no wish to get into the papers of this, his childhood town, where many of his relatives and

So it was that he locked his arms around the man on top of him, held him close, and waited for the help to

come that must come in response to the crash of the fall. The help camethat is, six men ran in from the bar

'Take him off, fellows," Watson said. "I haven't struck him, and I don't want any fight."

But the semicircle remained silent. Watson held on and waited. Patsy, after various vain efforts to inflict

Watson let go, but when Patsy scrambled to his feet he stood over his recumbent foe, ready to strike.

His voice was stern and implacable, like the voice of God calling to judgment, and Watson knew there was

"If yer a gentleman, get up," quoth Patsy, his pale blue eyes aflame with wrath, his fist ready for a crushing

At the same moment he drew his foot back to kick the other in the face. Watson blocked the kick with his

crossed arms and sprang to his feet so quickly that he was in a clinch with his antagonist before the latter

"Take him away from me, fellows. You see I am not striking him. I don't want to fight. I want to get out of

The circle did not move nor speak. Its silence was ominous and sent a chill to Watson's heart.

Patsy made an effort to throw him, which culminated in his putting Patsy on his back. Tearing loose from

him, Watson sprang to his feet and made for the door. But the circle of men was interposed a wall. He noticed

the white, pasty faces, the kind that never see the sun, and knew that the men who barred his way were the

nightprowlers and preying beasts of the city jungle. By them he was thrust back upon the pursuing,

Again it was a clinch, in which, in momentary safety, Watson appealed to the gang. And again his words fell

on deaf ears. Then it was that he knew of many similar knew fear. For he had known of many similar

situations, in low dens like this, when solitary men were manhandled, their ribs and features caved in,

themselves beaten and kicked to death. And he knew, further, that if he were to escape he must neither strike

Yet in him was righteous indignation. Under no circumstances could seven to one be fair. Also, he was angry,

and there stirred in him the fighting beast that is in all men. But he remembered his wife and children, his

unfinished book, the ten thousand rolling acres of the upcountry ranch he loved so well. He even saw in

flashing visions the blue of the sky, the golden sun pouring down on his flowerspangled meadows, the lazy

cattle kneedeep in the brooks, and the flash of trout in the riffles. Life was goodtoo good for him to risk it

His opponent, locked by his masterly clinch, was striving to throw him. Again Watson put him on the floor,

broke away, and was thrust back by the pastyfaced circle to duck Patsy's swinging right and effect another

clinch. This happened many times. And Watson grew even cooler, while the baffled Patsy, unable to inflict

punishment, raged wildly and more wildly. He took to batting with his head in the clinches. The first time, he

landed his forehead flush on Watson's nose. After that, the latter, in the clinches, buried his face in Patsy's

breast. But the enraged Patsy batted on, striking his own eye and nose and cheek on the top of the other's

This onesided contest continued for twelve or fifteen minutes. Watson never struck a blow, and strove only

to escape. Sometimes, in the free moments, circling about among the tables as he tried to win the door, the

pastyfaced men gripped his coattails and flung him back at the swinging right of the onrushing Patsy.

Time upon time, and times without end, he clinched and put Patsy on his back, each time first whirling him

around and putting him down in the direction of the door and gaining toward that goal by the length of the

In the end, hatless, disheveled, with streaming nose and one eye closed, Watson won to the sidewalk and into

"Not unless you arrest that man. He has committed a violent and unprovoked assault on me."

"Nah. Lemme tell you, Charley, an' I got the witnesses to prove it, so help me God. I was settin' in me kitchen

eatin' a bowl of soup, when this guy comes in an' gets gay wid me. I never seen him in me born days before.

The officer looked at him with sullen, menacing eyes and nodded to Patsy to continue.

"This guy gets gay wid me. 'I'm Tim McGrath,' says he, 'an' I can do the like to you,' says he. 'Put up yer

hands.' I smiles, an' wid that, biff biff, he lands me twice an' spills me soup. Look at me eye. I'm fair

But at that moment the policeman grabbed his arm with a savage jerk that nearly overthrew him.

Carter Watson was genuinely angry. Not only had he been wantonly assaulted, badly battered, and arrested,

but the morning papers without exception came out with lurid accounts of his drunken brawl with the

proprietor of the notorious Vendome. Not one accurate or truthful line was published. Patsy Horan and his

satellites described the battle in detail. The one incontestable thing was that Carter Watson had been drunk.

Thrice he had been thrown out of the place and into the gutter, and thrice he had come back, breathing blood

and fire and announcing that he was going to clean out the place. "EMINENT SOCIOLOGIST JAGGED

AND JUGGED," was the first headline he read, on the front page, accompanied by a large portrait of

At the police court, next morning, under bail, appeared Carter Watson to answer the complaint of the People

Versus Carter Watson, for the latter's assault and battery on one Patsy Horan. But first, the Prosecuting

Attorney, who was paid to prosecute all offenders against the People, drew him aside and talked with him

"Why not let it drop!" said the Prosecuting Attorney. "I tell you what you do, Mr. Watson: Shake hands with

Mr. Horan and make it up, and we'll drop the case right here. A word to the Judge, and the case against you

"But I don't want it dismissed," was the answer. "Your office being what it is, you should be prosecuting me

"Also you will have to prosecute this Patsy Horan," Watson advised; "for I shall now have him arrested for

"You'd better shake and make up," the Prosecuting Attorney repeated, and this time there was almost a threat

The trials of both men were set for a week later, on the same morning, in Police Judge Witberg's court.

"You have no chance," Watson was told by an old friend of his boyhood, the retired manager of the biggest

paper in the city. "Everybody knows you were beaten up by this man. His reputation is most unsavory. But it

won't help you in the least. Both cases will be dismissed. This will be because you are you. Any ordinary man

"But I do not understand," objected the perplexed sociologist. "Without warning I was attacked by this man;

"I'll tell you. You are now up against the local police and political machine. Who are you? You are not even a

legal resident in this town. You live up in the country. You haven't a vote of your own here. Much less do

you swing any votes. This dive proprietor swings a string of votes in his precinctsa mighty long string."

"Do you mean to tell me that this Judge Witberg will violate the sacredness of his office and oath by letting

"Watch him," was the grim reply. "Oh, he'll do it nicely enough. He will give an extralegal, extrajudicial

decision, abounding in every word in the dictionary that stands for fairness and right."

"They are not fighting the administration at present. They'll give it to you hard. You see what they have

"They will write something so near like the truth that the public will believe it. They write their stories under

instruction, you know. They have their orders to twist and color, and there won't be much left of you when

"Give the word and they'll drop them now. A man can't fight a machine unless he has a machine behind him."

But Carter Watson was stubborn. He was convinced that the machine would beat him, but all his days he had

The morning of the trial the Prosecuting Attorney made another attempt to patch up the affair.

"If you feel that way, I should like to get a lawyer to prosecute the case," said Watson.

"No, you don't," said the Prosecuting Attorney. "I am paid by the People to prosecute, and prosecute I will.

But let me tell you. You have no chance. We shall lump both cases into one, and you watch out."

Judge Witberg looked good to Watson. A fairly young man, short, comfortably stout, smoothshaven and

with an intelligent face, he seemed a very nice man indeed. This good impression was added to by the smiling

lips and the wrinkles of laughter in the corners of his black eyes. Looking at him and studying him, Watson

But Watson was soon to learn. Patsy Horan and two of his satellites testified to a most colossal aggregation of

perjuries. Watson could not have believed it possible without having experienced it. They denied the

existence of the other four men. And of the two that testified, one claimed to have been in the kitchen, a

witness to Watson's unprovoked assault on Patsy, while the other, remaining in the bar, had witnessed

Watson's second and third rushes into the place as he attempted to annihilate the unoffending Patsy. The vile

language ascribed to Watson was so voluminously and unspeakably vile, that he felt they were injuring their

own case. It was so impossible that he should utter such things. But when they described the brutal blows he

had rained on poor Patsy's face, and the chair he demolished when he vainly attempted to kick Patsy, Watson

waxed secretly hilarious and at the same time sad. The trial was a farce, but such lowness of life was

depressing to contemplate when he considered the long upward climb humanity must make.

Watson could not recognize himself, nor could his worst enemy have recognized him, in the swashbuckling,

roughhousing picture that was painted of him. But, as in all cases of complicated perjury, rifts and

contradictions in the various stories appeared. The Judge somehow failed to notice them, while the

Prosecuting Attorney and Patsy's attorney shied off from them gracefully. Watson had not bothered to get a

Still, he retained a semblance of faith in Judge Witberg when he went himself on the stand and started to tell

"I was strolling casually along the street, your Honor," Watson began, but was interrupted by the Judge.

"We are not here to consider your previous actions," bellowed Judge Witberg. "Who struck the first blow?"

"Your Honor," Watson pleaded, "I have no witnesses of the actual fray, and the truth of my story can only be

"We do not care to publish any magazines here," Judge Witberg roared, looking at him so fiercely and

malevolently that Watson could scarcely bring himself to believe that this was same man he had studied a

The Prosecuting Attorney interposed, demanding to know which of the two cases lumped together was, and

by what right Patsy's lawyer, at that stage of the proceedings, should take the witness. Patsy's attorney fought

back. Judge Witberg interfered, professing no knowledge of any two cases being lumped together. All this

had to be explained. Battle royal raged, terminating in both attorneys apologizing to the Court and to each

other. And so it went, and to Watson it had the seeming of a group of pickpockets ruffling and bustling an

"It has been my custom for many years, as a student of economics and sociology, to acquaint myself"

"We want none of your ologies here," snarled Judge Witberg. "It is a plain question. Answer it plainly. Is it

When Watson attempted to tell how Patsy had injured his face in his attempts to bat with his head, Watson

"Are you aware of the solemnity of the oath you took to testify to nothing but the truth on this witness stand?"

the Judge demanded. "This is a fairy story you are telling. It is not reasonable that a man would so injure

himself, and continue to injure himself, by striking the soft and sensitive parts of his face against your head.

"What right have you to say that?" he cried. "It is gratuitous. It has no bearing on the case. You are here as a

witness, sir, of events that have transpired. The Court does not wish to hear any expressions of opinion from

"You did nothing of the sort," was the next blast. "And let me warn you, sir, let me warn you, that you are

laying yourself liable to contempt by such insolence. And I will have you know that we know how to observe

the law and the rules of courtesy down here in this little courtroom. I am ashamed of you."

And, while the next punctilious legal wrangle between the attorneys interrupted his tale of what happened in

the Vendome, Carter Watson, without bitterness, amused and at the same time sad, saw rise before him the

machine, large and small, that dominated his country, the unpunished and shameless grafts of a thousand

cities perpetrated by the spidery and verminlike creatures of the machines. Here it was before him, a

courtroom and a judge, bowed down in subservience by the machine to a divekeeper who swung a string of

votes. Petty and sordid as it was, it was one face of the manyfaced machine that loomed colossally, in every

A familiar phrase rang in his ears: "It is to laugh." At the height of the wrangle, he giggled, once, aloud, and

earned a sullen frown from Judge Witberg. Worse, a myriad times, he decided, were these bullying lawyers

and this bullying judge then the bucko mates in first quality hellships, who not only did their own bullying

but protected themselves as well. These petty rapscallions, on the other hand, sought protection behind the

majesty of the law. They struck, but no one was permitted to strike back, for behind them were the prison

cells and the clubs of the stupid policemenpaid and professional fighters and beatersup of men. Yet he

was not bitter. The grossness and the sliminess of it was forgotten in the simple grotesqueness of it, and he

Nevertheless, hectored and heckled though he was, he managed in the end to give a simple, straightforward

version of the affair, and, despite a belligerent crossexamination, his story was not shaken in any particular.

Quite different it was from the perjuries that had shouted aloud from the perjuries of Patsy and his two

Both Patsy's attorney and the Prosecuting Attorney rested their cases, letting everything go before the Court

without argument. Watson protested against this, but was silenced when the Prosecuting Attorney told him

"Patrick Horan has testified that he was in danger of his life and that he was compelled to defend himself,"

Judge Witberg's verdict began. "Mr. Watson has testified to the same thing. Each has sworn that the other

struck the first blow; each has sworn that the other made an unprovoked assault on him. It is an axiom of the

law that the defendant should be given the benefit of the doubt. A very reasonable doubt exists. Therefore, in

the case of the People Versus Carter Watson the benefit of the doubt is given to said Carter Watson and he is

herewith ordered discharged from custody. The same reasoning applies to the case of the People Versus

Patrick Horan. He is given the benefit of the doubt and discharged from custody. My recommendation is that

In the afternoon papers the first headline that caught Watson's eye was: "CARTER WATSON

ACQUITTED." In the second paper it was: "CARTER WATSON ESCAPES A FINE." But what capped

everything was the one beginning: "CARTER WATSON A GOOD FELLOW." In the text he read how Judge

Witberg had advised both fighters to shake hands, which they promptly did. Further, he read:

Now, from the whole adventure, Watson carried away no bitterness. It was a social experience of a new

order, and it led to the writing of another book, which he entitled, "POLICE COURT PROCEDURE: A

One summer morning a year later, on his ranch, he left his horse and himself clambered on through a

miniature canyon to inspect some rock ferns he had planted the previous winter. Emerging from the upper

end of the canyon, he came out on one of his flowerspangled meadows, a delightful isolated spot, screened

from the world by low hills and clumps of trees. And here he found a man, evidently on a stroll from the

summer hotel down at the little town a mile away. They met face to face and the recognition was mutual. It

was Judge Witberg. Also, it was a clear case of trespass, for Watson had trespass signs upon his boundaries,

"Politics is a dirty trade, isn't it, Judge?" he remarked. "Oh, yes, I see your hand, but I don't care to take it.

The papers said I shook hands with Patsy Horan after the trial. You know I did not, but let me tell you that I'd

a thousand times rather shake hands with him and his vile following of curs, than with you."

Judge Witberg was painfully flustered, and as he hemmed and hawed and essayed to speak, Watson, looking

at him, was struck by a sudden whim, and he determined on a grim and facetious antic.

"I should scarcely expect any animus from a man of your acquirements and knowledge of the world," the

"Animus?" Watson replied. "Certainly not. I haven't such a thing in my nature. And to prove it, let me show

you something curious, something you have never seen before." Casting about him, Watson picked up a

So saying, Carter Watson tapped himself a sharp blow on the cheek. The stone laid the flesh open to the bone

"The stone was too sharp," he announced to the astounded police judge, who thought he had gone mad.

"I must bruise it a trifle. There is nothing like being realistic in such matters."

Whereupon Carter Watson found a smooth stone and with it pounded his cheek nicely several times.

"Ah," he cooed. "That will turn beautifully green and black in a few hours. It will be most convincing."

"Don't use such vile language to me," said Watson. "You see my bruised and bleeding face? You did that,

with that right hand of yours. You hit me twicebiff, biff. It is a brutal and unprovoked assault. I am in

"That is what I told Patsy," was the answer. "And do you know what he did when I told him that?"

And at the same moment Watson's right fist landed flush on Judge Witberg's nose, putting that legal

"Get up!" commanded Watson. "If you are a gentleman, get upthat's what Patsy told me, you know."

Judge Witberg declined to rise, and was dragged to his feet by the coatcollar, only to have one eye blacked

and be put on his back again. After that it was a red Indian massacre. Judge Witberg was humanely and

scientifically beaten up. His checks were boxed, his cars cuffed, and his face was rubbed in the turf. And all

the time Watson exposited the way Patsy Horan had done it. Occasionally, and very carefully, the facetious

sociologist administered a real bruising blow. Once, dragging the poor Judge to his feet, he deliberately

"See that!" cried Watson, stepping back and deftly shedding his blood all down his own shirt front. "You did

it. With your fist you did it. It is awful. I am fair murdered. I must again defend myself."

And once more Judge Witberg impacted his features on a fist and was sent to grass.

And with that, Carter Watson departed down the canyon, mounted his horse, and rode to town.

An hour later, as Judge Witberg limped up the grounds to his hotel, he was arrested by a village constable on

"Your Honor," Watson said next day to the village Justice, a well to do farmer and graduate, thirty years

before, from a cow college, "since this Sol Witberg has seen fit to charge me with battery, following upon my

charge of battery against him, I would suggest that both cases be lumped together. The testimony and the

To this the Justice agreed, and the double case proceeded. Watson, as prosecuting witness, first took the stand

"I was picking flowers," he testified. "Picking flowers on my own land, never dreaming of danger. Suddenly

this man rushed upon me from behind the trees. 'I am the Dodo,' he says, 'and I can do you to a frazzle. Put up

your hands.' I smiled, but with that, biff, biff, he struck me, knocking me down and spilling my flowers. The

language he used was frightful. It was an unprovoked and brutal assault. Look at my cheek. Look at my

noseI could not understand it. He must have been drunk. Before I recovered from my surprise he had

administered this beating. I was in danger of my life and was compelled to defend himself. That is all, Your

Honor, though I must say, in conclusion, that I cannot get over my perplexity. Why did he say he was the

And thus was Sol Witberg given a liberal education in the art of perjury. Often, from his high seat, he had

listened indulgently to police court perjuries in cookedup cases; but for the first time perjury was directed

against him, and he no longer sat above the court, with the bailiffs, the Policemen's clubs, and the prison cells

"Your Honor," he cried, "never have I heard such a pack of lies told by so barefaced a liar!'

"Your Honor, I protest. It is for your Honor to decide truth or falsehood. The witness is on the stand to testify

to actual events that have transpired. His personal opinion upon things in general, and upon me, has no

"The point is well taken," he decided. "I am surprised at you, Mr. Witberg, claiming to be a judge and skilled

in the practice of the law, and yet being guilty of such unlawyerlike conduct. Your manner, sir, and your

methods, remind me of a shyster. This is a simple case of assault and battery. We are here to determine who

struck the first blow, and we are not interested in your estimates of Mr. Watson's personal character. Proceed

Sol Witberg would have bitten his bruised and swollen lip in chagrin, had it not hurt so much. But he

"Your Honor," Watson said, "I would suggest that you ask him what he was doing on my premises."

"It was a trespass, your Honor," Watson cried. "The warnings are posted conspicuously."

"I have seen them myself," snapped the Justice. "They are very conspicuous. And I would warn you, sir, that

if you palter with the truth in such little matters you may darken your more important statements with

The Justice looked at Carter Watson's bruised and swollen visage, and turned to glare at Sol Witberg.

"Look at that man's cheek!" he thundered. "If you did not strike a blow how comes it that he is so disfigured

"I will be careful, sir. I will say nothing but the truth. He struck himself with a rock. He struck himself with

"Does it stand to reason that a man, any man not a lunatic, would so injure himself, and continue to injure

himself, by striking the soft and sensitive parts of his face with a stone?" Carter Watson demanded

Watson took advantage of the opportunity to wink at Sol Witberg, but that muchabused gentleman saw

"A very peculiar case, a very peculiar case," the Justice announced, as he began his verdict. "The evidence of

the two parties is flatly contradictory. There are no witnesses outside the two principals. Each claims the

other committed the assault, and I have no legal way of determining the truth. But I have my private opinion,

Mr. Witberg, and I would recommend that henceforth you keep off of Mr. Watson's premises and keep away

"Sit down, sir!" was the Justice's thundered command. "If you interrupt the Court in this manner again, I shall

fine you for contempt. And I warn you I shall fine you heavilyyou, a judge yourself, who should be

conversant with the courtesy and dignity of courts. I shall now give my verdict:

"It is a rule of law that the defendant shall be given the benefit of the doubt. As I have said, and I repeat, there

is no legal way for me to determine who struck the first blow. Therefore, and much to my regret,"here he

paused and glared at Sol Witberg"in each of these cases I am compelled to give the defendant the benefit

"Let us have a nip on it," Watson said to Witberg, as they left the courtroom; but that outraged person refused

PETER WINN lay back comfortably in a library chair, with closed eyes, deep in the cogitation of a scheme of

campaign destined in the near future to make a certain coterie of hostile financiers sit up. The central idea had

come to him the night before, and he was now reveling in the planning of the remoter, minor details. By

obtaining control of a certain upcountry bank, two general stores, and several logging camps, he could come

into control of a certain dinky jerkwater line which shall here be nameless, but which, in his hands, would

prove the key to a vastly larger situation involving more mainline mileage almost than there were spikes in

the aforesaid dinky jerkwater. It was so simple that he had almost laughed aloud when it came to him. No

The library door opened, and a slender, middleaged man, weakeyed and eye glassed, entered. In his hands

was an envelope and an open letter. As Peter Winn's secretary it was his task to weed out, sort, and classify

"This came in the morning post," he ventured apologetically and with the hint of a titter. "Of course it doesn't

"It is dated July seventeenth, but is without address. Postmark San Francisco. It is also quite illiterate. The

Mr. Peter Winn, SIR: I send you respectfully by express a pigeon worth good money. She's a looloo"

"I'm sure I don't know, except that it must be a superlative of some sort. The letter continues:

Please freight it with a couple of thousanddollar bills and let it go. If you do I wont never annoy you no

The secretary was inclined to take the affair as a practical joke, but Peter Winn, after an examination of the

"Look at it," he said, stroking and handling it. "See the length of the body and that elongated neck. A proper

carrier. I doubt if I've ever seen a finer specimen. Powerfully winged and muscled. As our unknown

On a slip of paper he wrote the succinct message, "Go to hell," signed it, and placed it in the carrying

"He's down in the workshop. He slept there last night, and had his breakfast sent down this morning."

"He'll break his neck yet," Peter Winn remarked, halffiercely, halfproudly, as he led the way to the

Standing at the head of the broad steps, he tossed the pretty creature outward and upward. She caught herself

with a quick beat of wings, fluttered about undecidedly for a space, then rose in the air.

Again, high up, there seemed indecision; then, apparently getting her bearings, she headed east, over the

But Peter Winn was a very busy man, with such large plans in his head and with so many reins in his hands

that he quickly forgot the incident. Three nights later the left wing of his country house was blown up. It was

not a heavy explosion, and nobody was hurt, though the wing itself was ruined. Most of the windows of the

rest of the house were broken, and there was a deal of general damage. By the first ferry boat of the morning

half a dozen San Francisco detectives arrived, and several hours later the secretary, in high excitement,

"It's come!" the secretary gasped, the sweat beading his forehead and his eyes bulging behind their glasses.

"Then continue, and see if you can find another letter from our mysterious friend, the pigeon fancier."

Mr. Peter Winn, HONORABLE SIR: Now dont be a fool. If youd came through, your shack would not have

blew upI beg to inform you respectfully, am sending same pigeon. Take good care of same, thank you. Put

five one thousand dollar bills on her and let her go. Dont feed her. Dont try to follow bird. She is wise to the

Peter Winn was genuinely angry. This time he indited no message for the pigeon to carry. Instead, he called

in the detectives, and, under their advice, weighted the pigeon heavily with shot. Her previous flight having

been eastward toward the bay, the fastest motorboat in Tiburon was commissioned to take up the chase if it

But too much shot had been put on the carrier, and she was exhausted before the shore was reached. Then the

mistake was made of putting too little shot on her, and she rose high in the air, got her bearings and started

eastward across San Francisco Bay. She flew straight over Angel Island, and here the motorboat lost her, for

That night, armed guards patrolled the grounds. But there was no explosion. Yet, in the early morning Peter

Winn learned by telephone that his sister's home in Alameda had been burned to the ground.

Two days later the pigeon was back again, coming this time by freight in what had seemed a barrel of

Mr. Peter Winn, RESPECTABLE SIR: It was me that fixed yr sisters house. You have raised hell, aint you.

Send ten thousand now. Going up all the time. Dont put any more handicap weights on that bird. You sure

Peter Winn was ready to acknowledge himself beaten. The detectives were powerless, and Peter did not know

where next the man would strikeperhaps at the lives of those near and dear to him. He even telephoned to

San Francisco for ten thousand dollars in bills of large denomination. But Peter had a son, Peter Winn, Junior,

with the same firmset jaw as his fathers,, and the same knitted, brooding determination in his eyes. He was

only twentysix, but he was all man, a secret terror and delight to the financier, who alternated between pride

"Hold on, father, don't send that money," said Peter Winn, Junior. "Number Eight is ready, and I know I've at

last got that reefing down fine. It will work, and it will revolutionize flying. Speedthat's what's needed, and

so are the large sustaining surfaces for getting started and for altitude. I've got them both. Once I'm up I reef

down. There it is. The smaller the sustaining surface, the higher the speed. That was the law discovered by

Langley. And I've applied it. I can rise when the air is calm and full of holes, and I can rise when its boiling,

and by my control of my plane areas I can come pretty close to making any speed I want. Especially with that

"You'll come pretty close to breaking your neck one of these days," was his father's encouraging remark.

"Dad, I'll tell you what I'll come pretty close toninety miles an hourYes, and a hundred. Now listen! I was

going to make a trial tomorrow. But it won't take two hours to start today. I'll tackle it this afternoon. Keep

that money. Give me the pigeon and I'll follow her to her loft where ever it is. Hold on, let me talk to the

He called up the workshop, and in crisp, terse sentences gave his orders in a way that went to the older man's

heart. Truly, his one son was a chip off the old block, and Peter Winn had no meek notions concerning the

Timed to the minute, the young man, two hours later, was ready for the start. In a holster at his hip, for instant

use, cocked and with the safety on, was a largecaliber automatic pistol. With a final inspection and

overhauling he took his seat in the aeroplane. He started the engine, and with a wild burr of gas explosions

the beautiful fabric darted down the launching ways and lifted into the air. Circling, as he rose, to the west, he

This start depended on the pigeon. Peter Winn held it. Nor was it weighted with shot this time. Instead, half a

yard of bright ribbon was firmly attached to its legthis the more easily to enable its flight being followed.

Peter Winn released it, and it arose easily enough despite the slight drag of the ribbon. There was no

uncertainty about its movements. This was the third time it had made particular homing passage, and it knew

At an altitude of several hundred feet it straightened out and went due cast. The aeroplane swerved into a

straight course from its last curve and followed. The race was on. Peter Winn, looking up, saw that the pigeon

was outdistancing the machine. Then he saw something else. The aeroplane suddenly and instantly became

smaller. It had reefed. Its highspeed planedesign was now revealed. Instead of the generous spread of

surface with which it had taken the air, it was now a lean and hawklike monoplane balanced on long and

When young Winn reefed down so suddenly, he received a surprise. It was his first trial of the new device,

and while he was prepared for increased speed he was not prepared for such an astonishing increase. It was

better than he dreamed, and, before he knew it, he was hard upon the pigeon. That little creature, frightened

by this, the most monstrous hawk it had ever seen, immediately darted upward, after the manner of pigeons

In great curves the monoplane followed upward, higher and higher into the blue. It was difficult, from

underneath to see the pigeon. and young Winn dared not lose it from his sight. He even shook out his reefs in

order to rise more quickly. Up, up they went, until the pigeon, true to its instinct, dropped and struck at what

it to be the back of its pursuing enemy. Once was enough, for, evidently finding no life in the smooth cloth

surface of the machine, it ceased soaring and straightened out on its eastward course.

A carrier pigeon on a passage can achieve a high rate of speed, and Winn reefed again. And again, to his

satisfaction, be found that he was beating the pigeon. But this time he quickly shook out a portion of his

reefed sustaining surface and slowed down in time. From then on he knew he had the chase safely in hand,

and from then on a chant rose to his lips which he continued to sing at intervals, and unconsciously, for the

rest of the passage. It was: "Going some; going some; what did I tell you!going some."

Even so, it was not all plain sailing. The air is an unstable medium at best, and quite without warning, at an

acute angle, he entered an aerial tide which he recognized as the gulf stream of wind that poured through the

draftymouthed Golden Gate. His right wing caught it firsta sudden, sharp puff that lifted and tilted the

monoplane and threatened to capsize it. But he rode with a sensitive "loose curb," and quickly, but not too

quickly, he shifted the angles of his wingtips, depressed the front horizontal rudder, and swung over the rear

vertical rudder to meet the tilting thrust of the wind. As the machine came back to an even keel, and he knew

that he was now wholly in the invisible stream, he readjusted the wingtips, rapidly away from him during

The pigeon drove straight on for the Alameda County shore, and it was near this shore that Winn had another

experience. He fell into an airhole. He had fallen into airholes before, in previous flights, but this was a far

larger one than he had ever encountered. With his eyes strained on the ribbon attached to the pigeon, by that

fluttering bit of color he marked his fall. Down he went, at the pit of his stomach that old sink sensation

which he had known as a boy he first negotiated quickstarting elevators. But Winn, among other secrets of

aviation, had learned that to go up it was sometimes necessary first to go down. The air had refused to hold

him. Instead of struggling futilely and perilously against this lack of sustension, he yielded to it. With steady

head and hand, he depressed the forward horizontal rudderjust recklessly enough and not a fraction

moreand the monoplane dived head foremost and sharply down the void. It was falling with the keenness

of a knifeblade. Every instant the speed accelerated frightfully. Thus he accumulated the momentum that

would save him. But few instants were required, when, abruptly shifting the double horizontal rudders

forward and astern, he shot upward on the tense and straining plane and out of the pit.

At an altitude of five hundred feet, the pigeon drove on over the town of Berkeley and lifted its flight to the

Contra Costa hills. Young Winn noted the campus and buildings of the University of Californiahis

Once more, on these Contra Costa hills, he early came to grief. The pigeon was now flying low, and where a

grove of eucalyptus presented a solid front to the wind, the bird was suddenly sent fluttering wildly upward

for a distance of a hundred feet. Winn knew what it meant. It had been caught in an airsurf that beat upward

hundreds of feet where the fresh west wind smote the upstanding wall of the grove. He reefed hastily to the

uttermost, and at the same time depressed the angle of his flight to meet that upward surge. Nevertheless, the

monoplane was tossed fully three hundred feet before the danger was left astern.

Two or more ranges of hills the pigeon crossed, and then Winn saw it dropping down to a landing where a

small cabin stood in a hillside clearing. He blessed that clearing. Not only was it good for alighting, but, on

account of the steepness of the slope, it was just the thing for rising again into the air.

A man, reading a newspaper, had just started up at the sight of the returning pigeon, when be heard the burr

of Winn's engine and saw the huge monoplane, with all surfaces set, drop down upon him, stop suddenly on

an aircushion manufactured on the spur of the moment by a shift of the horizontal rudders, glide a few

yards, strike ground, and come to rest not a score of feet away from him. But when he saw a young man,

calmly sitting in the machine and leveling a pistol at him, the man turned to run. Before he could make the

comer of the cabin, a bullet through the leg brought him down in a sprawling fall.

"I want to take you for a ride in my new machine," Winn answered. "Believe me, she is a looloo."

The man did not argue long, for this strange visitor had most convincing ways. Under Winn's instructions,

covered all the time by the pistol, the man improvised a tourniquet and applied it to his wounded leg. Winn

helped him to a seat in the machine, then went to the pigeonloft and took possession of the bird with the

A very tractable prisoner, the man proved. Once up in the air, he sat close, in an ecstasy of fear. An adept at

winged blackmail, he had no aptitude for wings himself, and when he gazed down at the flying land and

water far beneath him, he did not feel moved to attack his captor, now defenseless, both hands occupied with

Peter Winn, Senior, scanning the heavens with powerful glasses, saw the monoplane leap into view and grow

large over the rugged backbone of Angel Island. Several minutes later he cried out to the waiting detectives

that the machine carried a passenger. Dropping swiftly and piling up an abrupt aircushion, the monoplane

"That reefing device is a winner!" young Winn cried, as he climbed out. "Did you see me at the start? I

almost ran over the pigeon. Going some, dad! Going some! What did I tell you? Going some!"

"Why, that's the pigeonfancier," he said. "I guess the officers can take care of him."

Peter Winn gripped his son's hand in grim silence, and fondled the pigeon which his son had passed to him.

ARRANGEMENTS quite extensive had been made for the celebration of Christmas on the yacht Samoset.

Not having been in any civilized port for months, the stock of provisions boasted few delicacies; yet Minnie

"Listen, Boyd, she told her husband. "Here are the menus. For the cabin, raw bonita native style, turtle soup,

"Well, if you must know, I found a tin of mushrooms and a package of eggpowder which had fallen down

behind the locker, and there are other things as well that will go into it. But don't interrupt. Boiled yam, fried

taro, alligator pear saladthere, you've got me all mixed, Then I found a last delectable halfpound of dried

squid. There will be baked beans Mexican, if I can hammer it into Toyama's head; also, baked papaia with

Marquesan honey, and, lastly, a wonderful pie the secret of which Toyama refuses to divulge."

"I wonder if it is possible to concoct a punch or a cocktail out of trade rum?" Duncan muttered gloomily.

His wife caught his hand and led him through the small connecting door to her tiny stateroom. Still holding

his hand, she fished in the depths of a hatlocker and brought forth a pint bottle of champagne.

She fished again, and was rewarded with a silvermounted whisky flask. She held it to the light of a

"I've been saving it for weeks," she explained. "And there's enough for you and Captain Dettmar."

"The nasty stuff! For a sick man? Don't be greedy, Boyd. And I'm glad there isn't any more, for Captain

Dettmar's sake. Drinking always makes him irritable. And now for the men's dinner. Soda crackers, sweet

"Do hush. Rice, and curry, yam, taro, bonita, of course, a big cake Toyama is making, young pig"

"It is all right, Boyd. We'll be in AttuAttu in three days. Besides, it's my pig. That old chief

whateverhisname distinctly presented it to me. You saw him yourself. And then two tins of bullamacow.

That's their dinner. And now about the presents. Shall we wait until tomorrow, or give them this evening?"

"Christmas Eve, by all means," was the man's judgment. "We'll call all hands at eight bells; I'll give them a

tot of rum all around, and then you give the presents. Come on up on deck. It's stifling down here. I hope

Lorenzo has better luck with the dynamo; without the fans there won't be much sleeping tonight if we're

They passed through the small maincabin, climbed a steep companion ladder, and emerged on deck. The

sun was setting, and the promise was for a clear tropic night. The Samoset, with fore and mainsail winged

out on either side, was slipping a lazy fourknots through the smooth sea. Through the engineroom skylight

came a sound of hammering. They strolled aft to where Captain Dettmar, one foot on the rail, was oiling the

gear of the patent log. At the wheel stood a tall South Sea Islander, clad in white undershirt and scarlet

Boyd Duncan was an original. At least that was the belief of his friends. Of comfortable fortune, with no need

to do anything but take his comfort, he elected to travel about the world in outlandish and most

uncomfortable ways. Incidentally, he had ideas about coralreefs, disagreed profoundly with Darwin on that

subject, had voiced his opinion in several monographs and one book, and was now back at his hobby,

His wife, Minnie Duncan, was also declared an original, inasmuch as she joyfully shared his vagabond

wanderings. Among other things, in the six exciting years of their marriage she had climbed Chimborazo

with him, made a threethousandmile winter journey with dogs and sleds in Alaska, ridden a horse from

Canada to Mexico, cruised the Mediterranean in a tenton yawl, and canoed from Germany to the Black Sea

across the heart of Europe. They were a royal pair of wanderlusters, he, big and broadshouldered, she a

small, brunette, and happy woman, whose one hundred and fifteen pounds were all grit and endurance, and

The Samoset had been a trading schooner, when Duncan bought her in San Francisco and made alterations.

Her interior was wholly rebuilt, so that the hold became maincabin and staterooms, while abaft amidships

were installed engines, a dynamo, an ice machine, storage batteries, and, far in the stern, gasoline tanks.

Necessarily, she carried a small crew. Boyd, Minnie, and Captain Dettmar were the only whites on board,

though Lorenzo, the small and greasy engineer, laid a part claim to white, being a Portuguese halfcaste. A

Japanese served as cook, and a Chinese as cabin boy. Four white sailors had constituted the original crew

for'ard, but one by one they had yielded to the charms of palmwaving South Sea isles and been replaced by

islanders. Thus, one of the dusky sailors hailed from Easter Island, a second from the Carolines, a third from

the Paumotus, while the fourth was a gigantic Samoan. At sea, Boyd Duncan, himself a navigator, stood a

mate's watch with Captain Dettmar, and both of them took a wheel or lookout occasionally. On a pinch,

Minnie herself could take a wheel, and it was on pinches that she proved herself more dependable at steering

At eight bells, all hands assembled at the wheel, and Boyd Duncan appeared with a black bottle and a mug.

The rum he served out himself, half a mug of it to each man. They gulped the stuff down with many facial

expressions of delight, followed by loud lipsmackings of approval, though the liquor was raw enough and

corrosive enough to burn their mucous membranes. All drank except Lee Goom, the abstemious cabin boy.

This rite accomplished, they waited for the next, the presentgiving. Generously molded on Polynesian lines,

hugebodied and heavymuscled, they were nevertheless like so many children, laughing merrily at little

things, their eager black eyes flashing in the lantern light as their big bodies swayed to the heave and roll of

Calling each by name, Minnie gave the presents out, accompanying each presentation with some happy

remark that added to the glee. There were trade watches, clasp knives, amazing assortments of fishhooks in

packages, plug tobacco, matches, and gorgeous strips of cotton for loincloths all around. That Boyd Duncan

was liked by them was evidenced by the roars of laughter with which they greeted his slightest joking

Captain Dettmar, whitefaced, smiling only when his employer chanced to glance at him, leaned against the

wheelbox, looking on. Twice, he left the group and went below, remaining there but a minute each time.

Later, in the main cabin, when Lorenzo, Lee Goom and Toyama received their presents, he disappeared into

his stateroom twice again. For of all times, the devil that slumbered in Captain Dettmar's soul chose this

particular time of good cheer to awaken. Perhaps it was not entirely the devil's fault, for Captain Dettmar,

privily cherishing a quart of whisky for many weeks, had selected Christmas Eve for broaching it.

It was still early in the eveningtwo bells had just gonewhen Duncan and his wife stood by the cabin

companionway, gazing to windward and canvassing the possibility of spreading their beds on deck. A small,

dark blot of cloud, slowly forming on the horizon, carried the threat of a rainsquall, and it was this they

were discussing when Captain Dettmar, coming from aft and about to go below, glanced at them with sudden

His voice was hoarse, and there was an excited vibration in it. Minnie Duncan started, then glanced at her

"I say you were talking about me," Captain Dettmar repeated, this time with almost a snarl.

He did not lurch nor betray the liquor on him in any way save by the convulsive working of his face.

"Minnie, you'd better go down," Duncan said gently. "Tell Lee Goom we'll sleep below. It won't be long

She took the hint and left, delaying just long enough to give one anxious glance at the dim faces of the two

Duncan puffed at his cigar and waited till his wife's voice, in talk with the cabinboy, came up through the

"I said you were talking about me. I say it again. Oh, I haven't been blind. Day after day I've seen the two of

you talking about me. Why don't you come out and say it to my face! I know you know. And I know your

"I am sorry you are making such a mess of everything," was Duncan's quiet reply.

"You know you are going to discharge me. You think you are too good to associate with the likes of

Captain Dettmar for the moment was taken aback. His face and lips worked, but he could say nothing.

Duncan coolly pulled at his cigar and glanced aft at the rising cloud of squall.

"We were hove short then and leaving. You didn't look at your letters until we were outside, and then it was

too late. That's why you didn't discharge me at Tahiti. Oh, I know. I saw the long envelope when Lee Goom

came over the side. It was from the Governor of California, printed on the corner for any one to see. You'd

been working behind my back. Some beachcomber in Honolulu had whispered to you, and you'd written to

the Governor to find out. And that was his answer Lee Goom carried out to you. Why didn't you come to me

like a man! No, you must play underhand with me, knowing that this billet was the one chance for me to get

on my feet again. And as soon as you read the Governor's letter your mind was made up to get rid of me. I've

seen it on your face ever since for all these months.. I've seen the two of you, polite as hell to me all the time,

"Then I'll tell you a few things. It was precisely because of that affair in 'Frisco that I did not discharge you in

Tahiti. God knows you gave me sufficient provocation. I thought that if ever a man needed a chance to

rehabilitate himself, you were that man. Had there been no black mark against you, I would have discharged

"There was that matter of the deckcalking, the bronze rudderirons, the overhauling of the engine, the new

spinnaker boom, the new davits, and the repairs to the whaleboat. You 0Kd the shipyard bill. It was four

thousand one hundred and twentytwo francs. By the regular shipyard charges it ought not to have been a

"If you take the word of those alongshore sharks against mine' the other began thickly.

"Save yourself the trouble of further lying," Duncan went on coldly. "I looked it up. I got Flaubin before the

Governor himself, and the old rascal confessed to sixteen hundred overcharge. Said you'd stuck him up for it.

Twelve hundred went to you, and his share was four hundred and the job. Don't interrupt. I've got his

affidavit below. Then was when I would have put you ashore, except for the cloud you were under. You had

to have this one chance or go clean to hell. I gave you the chance. And what have you got to say about it?"

"I'll tell you what he said. He said that you had been convicted on circumstantial evidence; that was why you

had got life imprisonment instead of hanging; that you had always stoutly maintained your innocence; that

you were the black sheep of the Maryland Dettmars; that they moved heaven and earth for your pardon; that

your prison conduct was most exemplary; that he was prosecuting attorney at the time you were convicted;

that after you had served seven years he yielded to your family's plea and pardoned you; and that in his own

There was a pause, during which Duncan went on studying the rising squall, while Captain Dettmar's face

"Well, the Governor was wrong," he announced, with a short laugh. "I did kill McSweeny. I did get the

watchman drunk that night. I beat McSweeny to death in his bunk. I used the iron belaying pin that appeared

in the evidence. He never had a chance. I beat him to a jelly. Do you want the details?"

Duncan looked at him in the curious way one looks at any monstrosity, but made no reply.

"Oh, I'm not afraid to tell you," Captain Dettmar blustered on. "There are no witnesses. Besides, I am a free

man now. I am pardoned, and by God they can never put me back in that hole again. I broke McSweeny's jaw

with the first blow. He was lying on his back asleep. He said, 'My God, Jim! My God!' It was funny to see his

broken jaw wabble as he said it. Then I smashed him . . . I say, do you want the rest of the details?"

"In the meantime . . ." Duncan paused. An increase of weight in the wind rippled his hair. The stars overhead

vanished, and the Samoset swung four points off her course in the careless steersman's hands. "In the

meantime throw your halyards down on deck and look to your wheel. I'll call the men."

The next moment the squall burst upon them. Captain Dettmar, springing aft, lifted the coiled mainsail

halyards from their pins and threw them, ready to run, on the deck. The three islanders swarmed from the tiny

forecastle, two of them leaping to the halyards and holding by a single turn, while the third fastened down the

engineroom, companion and swung the ventilators around. Below, Lee Goom and Toyama were lowering

skylight covers and screwing up deadeyes. Duncan pulled shut the cover of the companion scuttle, and held

on, waiting, the first drops of rain pelting his face, while the Samoset leaped violently ahead, at the same time

heeling first to starboard then to port as the gusty pressures caught her wingedout sails.

All waited. But there was no need to lower away on the run. The power went out of the wind, and the tropic

rain poured a deluge over everything. Then it was, the danger past, and as the Kanakas began to coil the

But before Duncan climbed into his bunk, he strapped around himself, against the skin and under his pajama

He fell asleep almost immediately, for his was the gift of perfect relaxation. He did things tensely, in the way

savages do, but the instant the need passed he relaxed, mind and body. So it was that he slept, while the rain

still poured on deck and the yacht plunged and rolled in the brief, sharp sea caused by the squall.

He awoke with a feeling of suffocation and heaviness. The electric fans had stopped, and the air was thick

and stifling. Mentally cursing all Lorenzos and storage batteries, he heard his wife moving in the adjoining

stateroom and pass out into the main cabin. Evidently heading for the fresher air on deck, he thought, and

decided it was a good example to imitate. Putting on his slippers and tucking a pillow and a blanket under his

arm, he followed her. As he was about to emerge from the companionway, the ship's clock in the cabin began

to strike and he stopped to listen. Four bells sounded. It was two in the morning. From without came the

creaking of the gaffjaw against the mast. The Samoset rolled and righted on a sea, and in the light breeze her

He was just putting his foot out on the damp deck when he heard his wife scream. It was a startled frightened

scream that ended in a splash overside. He leaped out and ran aft. In the dim starlight he could make out her

"Mrs. Duncan," was Duncan's reply, as he tore the lifebuoy from its hook and flung it aft. "Jibe over to

When he came up, he glimpsed the bluelight on the buoy, which had ignited automatically when it struck

The blue light, through deterioration or damage, flickered out. As they lifted on the smooth crest of a wave,

Duncan turned to look where the Samoset made a vague blur in the darkness. No lights showed, but there was

noise of confusion. He could hear Captain Dettmar's shouting above the cries of the others.

"I must say he's taking his time," Duncan grumbled. "Why doesn't he jibe? There she goes now."

They could hear the rattle of the boom tackle blocks as the sail was eased across.

"That was the mainsail," he muttered. "Jibed to port when I told him starboard."

Again they lifted on a wave, and again and again, ere they could make out the distant green of the Samoset's

starboard light. But instead of remaining stationary, in token that the yacht was coming toward them, it began

"What's the lubber holding over there for!" he demanded. "He's got his compass. He knows our bearing."

But the green light, which was all they could see, and which they could see only when they were on top of a

wave, moved steadily away from them, withal it was working up to windward, and grew dim and dimmer.

Duncan called out loudly and repeatedly, and each time, in the intervals, they could hear, very faintly, the

There was something in the quiet way she said it that caught her husband's attention.

"I mean that he is not trying to pick us up," she went on in the same composed voice. "He threw me

"How could I? I was at the main rigging, looking to see if any more rain threatened. He must have left the

wheel and crept behind me. I was holding on to a stay with one hand. He gripped my hand free from behind

and threw me over. It's too bad you didn't know, or else you would have staid aboard."

Duncan groaned, but said nothing for several minutes. The green light changed the direction of its course.

"She's gone about," he announced. "You are right. He's deliberately working around us and to windward. Up

He called at minute intervals for a long time. The green light disappeared, being replaced by the red, showing

"Minnie," he said finally, "it pains me to tell you, but you married a fool. Only a fool would have gone

"What chance have we of being picked up . . . by some other vessel, I mean?" she asked.

"About one in ten thousand, or ten thousand million. Not a steamer route nor trade route crosses this stretch

of ocean. And there aren't any whalers knocking about the South Seas. There might be a stray trading

schooner running across from Tutuwanga. But I happen to know that island is visited only once a year. A

"You ARE a joy!" His hand lifted hers to his lips. "And Aunt Elizabeth always wondered what I saw in you.

Of course we'll play that chance. And we'll win it, too. To happen otherwise would be unthinkable. Here

He slipped the heavy pistol from his belt and let it sink into the sea. The belt, however, he retained.

She ducked obediently, and came up inside the floating circle. He fastened the straps for her, then, with the

"We're good for all day tomorrow," he said. "Thank God the water's warm. It won't be a hardship for the

first twentyhour hours, anyway. And if we're not picked up by nightfall, we've just got to hang on for

For half an hour they maintained silence, Duncan, his head resting on the arm that was on the buoy, seemed

"Stow that!" he broke in ungallantly. "Of course we're coming through. There is isn't a doubt of it.

Somewhere on this ocean is a ship that's heading right for us. You wait and see. Just the same I wish my brain

But for once, sleep baffled him. An hour later he heard Minnie stir and knew she was awake.

"By George, I never thought of it. Of course it's Christmas Day. We'll have many more of them, too. And do

you know what I've been thinking? What a confounded shame we're done out of our Christmas dinner. Wait

till I lay hands on Dettmar. I'll take it out of him. And it won't be with an iron belaying pin either, Just two

Despite his facetiousness, Boyd Duncan had little hope. He knew well enough the meaning of one chance in a

million, and was calmly certain that his wife and he had entered upon their last few living hourshours that

The tropic sun rose in a cloudless sky. Nothing was to be seen. The Samoset was beyond the searim. As the

sun rose higher, Duncan ripped his pajama trousers in halves and fashioned them into two rude turbans.

"When I think of that dinner, I'm really angry," he complained, as he noted an anxious expression threatening

to set on his wife's face. "And I want you to be with me when I settle with Dettmar. I've always been opposed

to women witnessing scenes of blood, but this is different. It will be a beating."

Midday came and went, and they floated on, the center of a narrow seacircle. A gentle breath of the dying

tradewind fanned them, and they rose and fell monotonously on the smooth swells of a perfect summer sea.

Once, a gunie spied them, and for half an hour circled about them with majestic sweeps. And, once, a huge

By sunset, Minnie began to rave, softly, babblingly, like a child. Duncan's face grew haggard as he watched

and listened, while in his mind he revolved plans of how best to end the hours of agony that were. coining.

And, so planning, as they rose on a larger swell than usual, he swept the circle of the sea with his eyes, and

"Minnie!" She did not answer, and he shouted her name again in her ear, with all the voice he could

command. Her eyes opened, in them fluttered commingled consciousness and delirium. He slapped her hands

"A steamer at that, heading straight for us! By George, it's a cruiser! I have it! the Annapolis, returning with

United States Consul Lingford was a fussy, elderly gentleman, and in the two years of his service at

AttuAttu had never encountered so unprecedented a case as that laid before him by Boyd Duncan. The

latter, with his wife, had been landed there by the Annapolis, which had promptly gone on with its cargo of

"It was coldblooded, deliberate attempt to murder," said Consul Lingford. "The law shall take its course. I

don't know how precisely to deal with this Captain Dettmar, but if he comes to AttuAttu, depend upon it he

shall be dealt with, heahshall be dealt with. In the meantime, I shall read up the law. And now, won't

As Duncan accepted the invitation, Minnie, who had been glancing out of the window at the harbor, suddenly

leaned forward and touched her husband's arm. He followed her gaze, and saw the Samoset, flag at half mast,

"There's my boat now," Duncan said to the Consul. "And there's the launch over the side, and Captain

Dettmar dropping into it. If I don't miss my guess, he's coming to report our deaths to you."

The launch landed on the white beach, and leaving Lorenzo tinkering with the engine, Captain Dettmar strode

"Let him make his report," Duncan said. "We'll just step into this next room and listen."

And through the partly open door, he and his wife heard Captain Dettmar, with tears in his voice, describe the

"I jibed over and went back across the very spot," he concluded. "There was not a sign of them. I called and

called, but there was never an answer. I tacked back and forth and wore for two solid hours, then hove to till

daybreak, and cruised back and forth all day, two men at the mastheads. It is terrible. I am heartbroken. Mr.

But he never completed the sentence, for at that moment his splendid employer strode out upon him, leaving

Minnie standing in the doorway. Captain Dettmar's white face blanched even whiter.

Boyd Duncan's answer was couched in terms of bunched knuckles, two bunches of them, that landed right

Captain Dettmar staggered backward, recovered, and rushed with swinging arms at his employer, only to be

met with a blow squarely between the eyes. This time the Captain went down, bearing the typewriter under

"This is not permissible," Consul Lingford spluttered. "I beg of you, I beg of you, to desist."

"I'll pay the damages to office furniture," Duncan answered, and at the same time landing more bunched

Consul Lingford bobbed around in the turmoil like a wet hen, while his office furniture went to ruin. Once, he

caught Duncan by the arm, but was flung back, gasping, halfacross the room. Another time he appealed to

But she, whitefaced and trembling, resolutely shook her head and watched the fray with all her eyes.

"It is outrageous," Consul Lingford cried, dodging the hurtling bodies of the two men. "It is an affront to the

Government, to the United States Government. Nor will it be overlooked, I warn you. Oh, do pray desist, Mr.

But the crash of a tall vase filled with crimson hibiscus blossoms left him speechless.

The time came when Captain Dettmar could no longer get up. He got as far as hands and knees, struggled

vainly to rise further, then collapsed. Duncan stirred the groaning wreck with his foot.

"He's all right," he announced. "I've only given him what he has given many a sailor and worse."

"Great heavens, sir!" Consul Lingford exploded, staring horrorstricken at the man whom he had invited to

"I apologize, Mr. Lingford, I most heartily apologize. I fear I was slightly carried away by my feelings."

"And now, Mr. Lingford, I am done with him," Duncan said. "I turn over what is left to you and the law."

HE was a young man, not more than twentyfour or five, and he might have sat his horse with the careless

grace of his youth had he not been so catlike and tense. His black eyes roved everywhere, catching the

movements of twigs and branches where small birds hopped, questing ever onward through the changing

vistas of trees and brush, and returning always to the clumps of undergrowth on either side. And as he

watched, so did he listen, though he rode on in silence, save for the boom of heavy guns from far to the west.

This had been sounding monotonously in his ears for hours, and only its cessation could have aroused his

notice. For he had business closer to hand. Across his saddlebow was balanced a carbine.

So tensely was he strung, that a bunch of quail, exploding into flight from under his horse's nose, startled him

to such an extent that automatically, instantly, he had reined in and fetched the carbine halfway to his

shoulder. He grinned sheepishly, recovered himself, and rode on. So tense was he, so bent upon the work he

had to do, that the sweat stung his eyes unwiped, and unheeded rolled down his nose and spattered his saddle

pommel. The band of his cavalryman's hat was freshstained with sweat. The roan horse under him was

likewise wet. It was high noon of a breathless day of heat. Even the birds and squirrels did not dare the sun,

Man and horse were littered with leaves and dusted with yellow pollen, for the open was ventured no more

than was compulsory. They kept to the brush and trees, and invariably the man halted and peered out before

crossing a dry glade or naked stretch of upland pasturage. He worked always to the north, though his way was

devious, and it was from the north that he seemed most to apprehend that for which he was looking. He was

no coward, but his courage was only that of the average civilized man, and he was looking to live, not die.

Up a small hillside he followed a cowpath through such dense scrub that he was forced to dismount and lead

his horse. But when the path swung around to the west, he abandoned it and headed to the north again along

The ridge ended in a steep descentso steep that he zigzagged back and forth across the face of the slope,

sliding and stumbling among the dead leaves and matted vines and keeping a watchful eye on the horse above

that threatened to fall down upon him. The sweat ran from him, and the pollendust, settling pungently in

mouth and nostrils, increased his thirst. Try as he would, nevertheless the descent was noisy, and frequently

he stopped, panting in the dry heat an d listening for any warning from beneath.

At the bottom he came out on a flat, so densely forested that he could not make out its extent. Here the

character of the woods changed, and he was able to remount. Instead of the twisted hillside oaks, tall straight

trees, bigtrunked and prosperous, rose from the damp fat soil. Only here and there were thickets, easily

avoided, while he encountered winding, parklike glades where the cattle had pastured in the days before war

His progress was more rapid now, as he came down into the valley, and at the end of half an hour he halted at

an ancient rail fence on the edge of a clearing. He did not like the openness of it, yet his path lay across to the

fringe of trees that marked the banks of the stream. It was a mere quarter of a mile across that open, but the

thought of venturing out in it was repugnant. A rifle, a score of them, a thousand, might lurk in that fringe by

Twice he essayed to start, and twice he paused. He was appalled by his own loneliness. The pulse of war that

beat from the West suggested the companionship of battling thousands; here was naught but silence, and

himself, and possible deathdealing bullets from a myriad ambushes. And yet his task was to find what he

feared to find. He must on, and on, till somewhere, some time, he encountered another man, or other men,

from the other side, scouting, as he was scouting, to make report, as he must make report, of having come in

Changing his mind, he skirted inside the woods for a distance, and again peeped forth. This time, in the

middle of the clearing, he saw a small farmhouse. There were no signs of life. No smoke curled from the

chimney, not a barnyard fowl clucked and strutted. The kitchen door stood open, and he gazed so long and

hard into the black aperture that it seemed almost that a farmer's wife must emerge at any moment.

He licked the pollen and dust from his dry lips, stiffened himself, mind and body, and rode out into the

blazing sunshine. Nothing stirred. He went on past the house, and approached the wall of trees and bushes by

the river's bank. One thought persisted maddeningly. It was of the crash into his body of a highvelocity

bullet. It made him feel very fragile and defenseless, and he crouched lower in the saddle.

Tethering his horse in the edge of the wood, he continued a hundred yards on foot till he came to the stream.

Twenty feet wide it was, without perceptible current, cool and inviting, and he was very thirsty. But he

waited inside his screen of leafage, his eyes fixed on the screen on the opposite side. To make the wait

endurable, he sat down, his carbine resting on his knees. The minutes passed, and slowly his tenseness

relaxed. At last he decided there was no danger; but just as he prepared to part the bushes and bend down to

It might be a bird. But he waited. Again there was an agitation of the bushes, and then, so suddenly that it

almost startled a cry from him, the bushes parted and a face peered out. It was a face covered with several

weeks' growth of gingercolored beard. The eyes were blue and wide apart, with laughterwrinkles in the

All this he could see with microscopic clearness, for the distance was no more than twenty feet. And all this

he saw in such brief time, that he saw it as he lifted his carbine to his shoulder. He glanced along the sights,

and knew that he was gazing upon a man who was as good as dead. It was impossible to miss at such point

But he did not shoot. Slowly he lowered the carbine and watched. A hand, clutching a waterbottle, became

visible and the ginger beard bent downward to fill the bottle. He could hear the gurgle of the water. Then arm

and bottle and ginger beard disappeared behind the closing bushes. A long time he waited, when, with thirst

unslaked, he crept back to his horse, rode slowly across the sunwashed clearing, and passed into the shelter

Another day, hot and breathless. A deserted farmhouse, large, with many outbuildings and an orchard,

standing in a clearing. From the Woods, on a roan horse, carbine across pommel, rode the young man with

the quick black eyes. He breathed with relief as he gained the house. That a fight had taken place here earlier

in the season was evident. Clips and empty cartridges, tarnished with verdigris, lay on the ground, which,

while wet, had been torn up by the hoofs of horses. Hard by the kitchen garden were graves, tagged and

numbered. From the oak tree by the kitchen door, in tattered, weatherbeaten garments, hung the bodies of two

men. The faces, shriveled and defaced, bore no likeness to the faces of men. The roan horse snorted beneath

Entering the house, he found the interior a wreck. He trod on empty cartridges as he walked from room to

room to reconnoiter from the windows. Men had camped and slept everywhere, and on the floor of one room

Again outside, he led the horse around behind the barn and invaded the orchard. A dozen trees were burdened

with ripe apples. He filled his pockets, eating while he picked. Then a thought came to him, and he glanced at

the sun, calculating the time of his return to camp. He pulled off his shirt, tying the sleeves and making a bag.

As he was about to mount his horse, the animal suddenly pricked up its ears. The man, too, listened, and

heard, faintly, the thud of hoofs on soft earth. He crept to the corner of the barn and peered out. A dozen

mounted men, strung out loosely, approaching from the opposite side of the clearing, were only a matter of a

hundred yards or so away. They rode on to the house. Some dismounted, while others remained in the saddle

as an earnest that their stay would be short. They seemed to be holding a council, for he could hear them

talking excitedly in the detested tongue of the alien invader. The time passed, but they seemed unable to

reach a decision. He put the carbine away in its boot, mounted, and waited impatiently, balancing the shirt of

He heard footsteps approaching, and drove his spurs so fiercely into the roan as to force a surprised groan

from the animal as it leaped forward. At the comer of the barn he saw the intruder, a mere boy of nineteen or

twenty for all of his uniform jump back to escape being run down. At the same moment the roan swerved and

its rider caught a glimpse of the aroused men by the house. Some were springing from their horses, and he

could see the rifles going to their shoulders. He passed the kitchen door and the dried corpses swinging in the

shade, compelling his foes to run around the front of the house. A rifle cracked, and a second, but he was

going fast, leaning forward, low in the saddle, one hand clutching the shirt of apples, the other guiding the

The top bar of the fence was four feet high, but he knew his roan and leaped it at full career to the

accompaniment of several scattered shots. Eight hundred yards straight away were the woods, and the roan

was covering the distance with mighty strides. Every man was now firing. pumping their guns so rapidly that

he no longer heard individual shots. A bullet went through his hat, but he was unaware, though he did know

when another tore through the apples on the pommel. And he winced and ducked even lower when a third

bullet, fired low, struck a stone between his horse's legs and ricochetted off through the air, buzzing and

The shots died down as the magazines were emptied, until, quickly, there was no more shooting. The young

man was elated. Through that astonishing fusillade he had come unscathed. He glanced back. Yes, they had

emptied their magazines. He could see several reloading. Others were running back behind the house for their

horses. As he looked, two already mounted, came back into view around the comer, riding hard. And at the

same moment, he saw the man with the unmistakable ginger beard kneel down on the ground, level his gun,

The young man threw his spurs into the horse, crouched very low, and swerved in his flight in order to

distract the other's aim. And still the shot did not come. With each jump of the horse, the woods sprang

And then he heard it, the last thing he was to hear, for he was dead ere he hit the ground in the long crashing

fall from the saddle. And they, watching at the house, saw him fall, saw his body bounce when it struck the

earth, and saw the burst of redcheeked apples that rolled about him. They laughed at the unexpected

eruption of apples, and clapped their hands in applause of the long shot by the man with the ginger beard.

The little man flung this challenge forth to the whole group, then leaned back in his deck chair, sipping

lemonade with an air commingled of certitude and watchful belligerence. Nobody made answer. They were

"I repeat, it was in my presence that he said a certain lady, whom none of you knows, was a pig. He did not

say swine. He grossly said that she was a pig. And I hold that no man who is a man could possibly make such

Dr. Dawson puffed stolidly at his black pipe. Matthews, with knees hunched up and clasped by his arms, was

absorbed in the flight of a gunie. Sweet, finishing his Scotch and soda, was questing about with his eyes for a

Treloar, who happened to be sitting next to him, was startled by the abruptness of the attack, and wondered

what grounds he had ever given the little man to believe that he could call a woman a pig.

"I should say," he began his hesitant answer, "that iterdepends on theerthe lady."

There was a long pained silence. The little man seemed withered by the coarse brutality of the reply. In his

"You have told of a man who made a not nice remark and you have classified him," Treloar said in cold, even

tones. "I shall now tell you about a womanI beg your pardona lady, and when I have finished I shall ask

you to classify her. Miss Caruthers I shall call her, principally for the reason that it is not her name. It was on

"Miss Caruthers was charming. No; that is not the word. She was amazing. She was a young woman, and a

lady. Her father was a certain high official whose name, if I mentioned it, would be immediately recognized

by all of you. She was with her mother and two maids at the time, going out to join the old gentleman

"She, and pardon me for repeating, was amazing. It is the one adequate word. Even the most minor adjectives

applicable to her are bound to be sheer superlatives. There was nothing she could not do better than any

woman and than most men. Sing, playbah!as some rhetorician once said of old Nap, competition fled

from her. Swim! She could have made a fortune and a name as a public performer. She was one of those rare

women who can strip off all the frills of dress, and in simple swimming suit be more satisfying beautiful.

"But her swimming. Physically, she was the perfect womanyou know what I mean, not in the gross,

muscular way of acrobats, but in all the delicacy of line and fragility of frame and texture. And combined

with this, strength. How she could do it was the marvel. You know the wonder of a woman's armthe fore

arm, I mean; the sweet fading away from rounded biceps and hint of muscle, down through small elbow and

firm soft swell to the wrist, small, unthinkably small and round and strong. This was hers. And yet, to see her

swimming the sharp quick English overhand stroke, and getting somewhere with it, too, waswell, I

understand anatomy and athletics and such things, and yet it was a mystery to me how she could do it.

"She could stay under water for two minutes. I have timed her. No man on board, except Dennitson, could

capture as many coins as she with a single dive. On the forward maindeck was a big canvas tank with six

feet of seawater. We used to toss small coins into it. I have seen her dive from the bridge deckno mean

feat in itselfinto that sixfeet of water, and fetch up no less than fortyseven coins, scattered willynilly

over the whole bottom of the tank. Dennitson, a quiet young Englishman, never exceeded her in this, though

"She was a seawoman, true. But she was a landwoman, a horsewomanashe was the universal woman.

To see her, all softness of soft dress, surrounded by half a dozen eager men, languidly careless of them all or

flashing brightness and wit on them and at them and through them, one would fancy she was good for

nothing else in the world. At such moments I have compelled myself to remember her score of fortyseven

coins from the bottom of the swimming tank. But that was she, the everlasting, wonder of a woman who did

"She fascinated every betrousered human around her. She had meand I don't mind confessing itshe bad

me to heel along with the rest. Young puppies and old gray dogs who ought to have known betteroh, they

all came up and crawled around her skirts and whined and fawned when she whistled. They were all guilty,

from young Ardmore, a pink cherub of nineteen outward bound for some clerkship in the Consular Service,

to old Captain Bentley, grizzled and seaworn, and as emotional, to look at, as a Chinese joss. There was a

nice middleaged chap, Perkins, I believe, who forgot his wife was on board until Miss Caruthers sent him to

"Men were wax in her hands. She melted them, or softly molded them, or incinerated them, as she pleased.

There wasn't a steward, even, grand and remote as she was, who, at her bidding, would have hesitated to

souse the Old Man himself with a plate of soup. You have all seen such womena sort of world's desire to

all men. As a manconqueror she was supreme. She was a whiplash, a sting and a flame, an electric spark.

Oh, believe me, at times there were flashes of will that scorched through her beauty and seduction and smote

"And don't fail to mark, in the light of what is to come, that she was a prideful woman. Pride of race, pride of

caste, pride of sex, pride of powershe had it all, a pride strange and wilful and terrible.

"She ran the ship, she ran the voyage, she ran everything, and she ran Dennitson. That he had outdistanced

the pack even the least wise of us admitted. That she liked him, and that this feeling was growing, there was

not a doubt. I am certain that she looked on him with kinder eyes than she had ever looked with on man

before. We still worshiped, and were always hanging about waiting to be whistled up, though we knew that

Dennitson was laps and laps ahead of us. What might have happened we shall never know, for we came to

"You know Colombo, and how the native boys dive for coins in the sharkinfested bay. Of course, it is only

among the ground sharks and fish sharks that they venture. It is almost uncanny the way they know sharks

and can sense the presence of a real killera tiger shark, for instance, or a gray nurse strayed up from

Australian waters. Let such a shark appear, and, long before the passengers can guess, every mother's son of

"It was after tiffin, and Miss Caruthers was holding her usual court under the deckawnings. Old Captain

Bentley had just been whistled up, and had granted her what he never granted before. . . nor

sincepermission for the boys to come up on the promenade deck. You see, Miss Caruthers was a swimmer,

and she was interested. She took up a collection of all our small change, and herself tossed it overside, singly

and in handfuls, arranging the terms of the contests, chiding a miss, giving extra rewards to clever wins, in

"She was especially keen on their jumping. You know, jumping feetfirst from a height, it is very difficult to

hold the body perpendicularly while in the air. The center of gravity of the male body is high, and the

tendency is to overtopple. But the little beggars employed a method which she declared was new to her and

which she desired to learn. Leaping from the davits of the boatdeck above, they plunged downward, their

faces and shoulders bowed forward, looking at the water. And only at the last moment did they abruptly

"It was a pretty sight. Their diving was not so good, though there was one of them who was excellent at it, as

he was in all the other stunts. Some white man must have taught him, for he made the proper swan dive and

did it as beautifully as I have ever seen it. You know, headfirst into the water, from a great height, the

problem is to enter the water at the perfect angle. Miss the angle and it means at the least a twisted back and

injury for life. Also, it has meant death for many a bungler. But this boy could do itseventy feet I know he

cleared in one dive from the riggingclenched hands on chest, head thrown back, sailing more like a bird,

upward and out, and out and down, body flat on the air so that if it struck the surface in that position it would

be split in half like a herring. But the moment before the water is reached, the head drops forward, the hands

go out and lock the arms in an arch in advance of the head, and the body curves gracefully downward and

"This the boy did, again and again, to the delight of all of us, but particularly of Miss Caruthers. He could not

have been a moment over twelve or thirteen, yet he was by far the cleverest of the gang. He was the favorite

of his crowd, and its leader. Though there were a number older than he, they acknowledged his chieftaincy.

He was a beautiful boy, a lithe young god in breathing bronze, eyes wide apart, intelligent and daring, a

bubble, a mote, a beautiful flash and sparkle of life. You have seen. wonderful glorious creaturesanimals,

anything, a leopard, a horserestless, eager, too much alive ever to be still, silken of muscle, each slightest

movement a benediction of grace, every action wild, untrammeled, and over all spilling out that intense

vitality, that sheen and luster of living light. The boy had it. Life poured out of him almost in an effulgence.

His skin glowed with it. It burned in his eyes. I swear I could almost hear it crackle from him. Looking at

him, it was as if a whiff of ozone came to one's nostrilsso fresh and young was he, so resplendent with

"This was the boy. And it was he who gave the alarm in the midst of the sport. The boys made a dash of it for

the gangway platform, swimming the fastest strokes they knew, pellmell, floundering and splashing, fright in

their faces, clambering out with jumps and surges, any way to get out, lending one another a hand to safety,

"'A shark, I fancy,' Captain Bentley answered. 'Lucky little beggars that he didn't get one of them.'

"'Not for the world would I venture where a shark might be,' she said, and shuddered again. 'They are

"The boys came up on the promenade deck, clustering close to the rail and worshiping Miss Caruthers who

had flung them such a wealth of backsheesh. The performance being over, Captain Bentley motioned to them

"'One moment, please, Captain. I have always understood that the natives are not afraid of sharks.'

"She beckoned the boy of the swan dive nearer to her, and signed to him to dive over again. He shook his

"But he nodded his head positively, and the boys behind him nodded with equal positiveness.

"'No, no, no,' she cried. And then to us, 'Who'll lend me a halfcrown and a sovereign!'

"Immediately the half dozen of us were presenting her with crowns and sovereigns, and she accepted the two

"She held up the halfcrown for the boys to see. But there was no eager rush to the rail preparatory to

leaping. They stood there grinning sheepishly. She offered the coin to each one individually, and each, as his

turn came, rubbed his foot against his calf, shook his head, and grinned. Then she tossed the halfcrown

overboard. With wistful, regretful faces they watched its silver flight through the air, but not one moved to

"She took no notice, but held up the gold coin before the eyes of the boy of the swan dive.

"'Don't,' said Captain Bentley. 'I wouldn't throw a sick cat overside with a shark around.'

"'Don't tempt him,' Dennitson urged. 'It is a fortune to him, and he might go over after it.'

"She turned back to the boy. Again she held the coin before his eyes, dazzling him with the vastness of its

value. Then she made as to toss it out, and, involuntarily, he made a halfmovement toward the rail, but was

checked by sharp cries of reproof from his companions. There was anger in their voices as well.

"'I know it is only fooling,' Dennitson said. 'Carry it as far as you like, but for heaven's sake don't throw it.'

"Whether it was that strange wilfulness of hers, or whether she doubted the boy could be persuaded, there is

no telling. It was unexpected to all of us. Out from the shade of the awning the coin flashed golden in the

blaze of sunshine and fell toward the sea in a glittering arch. Before a hand could stay him, the boy was over

the rail and curving beautifully downward after the coin. Both were in the air at the same time. It was a pretty

sight. The sovereign cut the water sharply, and at the very spot, almost at the same instant, with scarcely a

"From the quickereyed black boys watching, came an exclamation. We were all at the railing. Don't tell me

it is necessary for a shark to turn on its back. That one did not. In the clear water, from the height we were

above it, we saw everything. The shark was a big brute, and with one drive he cut the boy squarely in half.

"There was a murmur or something from among uswho made it I did not know; it might have been I. And

then there was silence. Miss Caruthers was the first to speak. Her face was deathly white.

All her pride was at work to give her control. She turned weakly toward Dennitson, and then, on from one to

another of us. In her eyes was a terrible sickness, and her lips were trembling. We were brutesoh, I know

"He never changed the direction of his gaze, which was the bleakest I have ever seen in a man's face, nor did

he move an eyelid. He took a cigarette from his case and lighted it. Captain Bentley made a nasty sound in his

"She turned away and started to walk firmly down the deck. Twenty feet away, she swayed and thrust a hand

against the wall to save herself. And so she went on, supporting herself against the cabins and walking very

slowly." Treloar ceased. He turned his head and favored the little man with a look of cold inquiry.

THOUGH dim nightlights burned, she moved familiarly through the big rooms and wide halls, seeking

vainly the halffinished book of verse she had mislaid and only now remembered. When she turned on the

lights in the drawingroom, she disclosed herself clad in a sweeping negligee gown of soft rosecolored

stuff, throat and shoulders smothered in lace. Her rings were still on her fingers, her massed yellow hair had

not yet been taken down. She was delicately, gracefully beautiful, with slender, oval face, red lips, a faint

color in the cheeks, and blue eyes of the chameleon sort that at will stare wide with the innocence of

childhood, go hard and gray and brilliantly cold, or flame up in hot wilfulness and mastery.

She turned the lights off and passed out and down the hall toward the morning room. At the entrance she

paused and listened. From farther on had come, not a noise, but an impression of movement. She could have

sworn she had not heard anything, yet something had been different. The atmosphere of night quietude had

been disturbed. She wondered what servant could be prowling about. Not the butler, who was nosion. torious

for retiring early save on special occasion. Nor could it be her maid, whom she had permitted to go that

Passing on to the diningroom, she found the door closed. Why she opened it and went on in, she did not

know, except for the feeling that the disturbing factor, whatever it might be, was there. The room was in

darkness, and she felt her way to the button and pressed. As the blaze of light flashed on, she stepped back

Facing her, alongside the button, flat against the wall, was a man. In his hand, pointed toward her, was a

revolver. She noticed, even in the shock of seeing him, that the weapon was black and exceedingly

longbarreled. She knew black and exceedingly long it for what it was, a Colt's. He was a mediumsized

man, roughly clad, browneyed, and swarthy with sunburn. He seemed very cool. There was no wabble to

the revolver and it was directed toward her stomach, not from an outstretched arm, but from the hip, against

"I reckon I want to get out," he answered, with a humorous twitch to the lips. "I've kind of lost my way in this

here shebang, and if you'll kindly show me the door I'll cause no trouble and sure vamoose."

"But what are you doing here?" she demanded, her voice touched with the sharpness of one used to authority.

"Plain robbing, Miss, that's all. I came snooping around to see what I could gather up. I thought you wan't to

home, seein' as I saw you pull out with your old man in an auto. I reckon that must a ben your pa, and you're

Mrs. Setliffe saw his mistake, appreciated the naive compliment, and decided not to undeceive him.

"I didn't know he had a daughter, but I reckon you must be her. And now, if it ain't botherin' you too much,

"If I wan't an ornery shorthorn at the business, I'd be accumulatin' them rings on your fingers instead of being

"I come to make a raise outa old Setliffe, and not to be robbing womenfolks. If you get outa the way, I

Mrs. Setliffe was a keen woman, and she felt that from such a man there was little to fear. That he was not a

typical criminal, she was certain. From his speech she knew he was not of the cities, and she seemed to sense

"Suppose I screamed?" she queried curiously. "Suppose I made an outcry for help? You couldn't shoot me? . .

She noted the fleeting bafflement in his brown eyes. He answered slowly and thoughtfully, as if working out

a difficult problem. "I reckon, then, I'd have to choke you and maul you some bad."

"You're only a soft woman, but you see, Miss, I can't afford to go to jail. No, Miss, I sure can't. There's a

friend of mine waitin' for me out West. He's in a hole, and I've got to help him out." The mouth shaped even

"I never met a burglar before," she assured him, "and I can't begin to tell you how interested I am."

"I'm not a burglar, Miss. Not a real one," he hastened to add as she looked her amused unbelief. "It looks like

it, me being here in your house. But it's the first time I ever tackled such a job. I needed the money bad.

"I don't understand," she smiled encouragingly. "You came here to rob, and to rob is to take what is not

"Yes, and no, in this here particular case. But I reckon I'd better be going now."

He started for the door of the diningroom, but she interposed, and a very beautiful obstacle she made of

herself. His left hand went out as if to grip her, then hesitated. He was patently awed by her soft womanhood.

"I ain't never manhandled a woman yet," he explained, "and it don't come easy. But I sure will, if you set to

"Won't you stay a few minutes and talk?" she urged. "I'm so interested. I should like to hear you explain how

"I always thought womenfolks were scairt of robbers," he confessed. "But you don't seem none."

"There are robbers and robbers, you know. I am not afraid of you, because I am confident you are not the sort

of creature that would harm a woman. Come, talk with me a while. Nobody will disturb us. I am all alone.

My father caught the night train to New York. The servants are all asleep. I should like to give you

something to eatwomen always prepare midnight suppers for the burglars they catch, at least they do in the

magazine stories. But I don't know where to find the food. Perhaps you will have something to drink?"

He hesitated, and did not reply; but she could see the admiration for her growing in his eyes.

"You're not afraid?" she queried. "I won't poison you, I promise. I'll drink with you to show you it is all

"You sure are a surprise package of all right," he declared, for the first time lowering the weapon and letting

it hang at his side. "No one don't need to tell me ever again that womenfolks in cities is afraid. You ain't

muchjust a little soft pretty thing. But you've sure got the spunk. And you're trustful on top of it. There

ain't many women, or men either. who'd treat a man with a gun the way you're treating me."

She smiled her pleasure in the compliment, and her face, was very earnest as she said:

"That is because I like your appearance. You are too decentlooking a man to be a robber. You oughtn't to do

such things. If you are in bad luck you should go to work. Come, put away that nasty revolver and let us talk

"Not in this burg," he commented bitterly. "I've walked two inches off the bottom of my legs trying to find a

job. Honest, I was a fine large man once. . . before I started looking for a job."

The merry laughter with which she greeted his sally obviously pleased him, and she was quick to note and

take advantage of it. She moved directly away from the door and toward the sideboard.

"Come, you must tell me all about it while I get that drink for you. What will it be? Whisky?"

"Yes, ma'am," he said, as he followed her, though he still carried the big revolver at his side, and though he

"I promised to drink with you," she said hesitatingly. "But I don't like whisky. I . . . I prefer sherry."

"Sure," he answered, with a nod. "Whisky's a man's drink. I never like to see women at it. Wine's more their

But she broke off at sight of the expression of surprised disgust on his face. The glass, barely touched, was

"What is the matter!" she asked anxiously. "Don't you like it? Have I made a mistake?"

"Oh! How silly of me! I gave you Scotch. Of course you are accustomed to rye. Let me change it."

She was almost solicitiously maternal, as she replaced the glass with another and sought and found the proper

"Yes, ma'am. No smoke in it. It's sure the real good stuff. I ain't had a drink in a week. Kind of slick, that;

"No, ma'am, not to speak of. I HAVE rared up and ripsnorted at spells, but most unfrequent. But there is

times when a good stiff jolt lands on the right spot kerchunk, and this is sure one of them. And now, thanking

But Mrs. Setliffe did not want to lose her burglar. She was too poised a woman to possess much romance, but

there was a thrill about the present situation that delighted her. Besides, she knew there was no danger. The

man, despite his jaw and the steady brown eyes, was eminently tractable. Also, farther back in her

consciousness glimmered the thought of an audience of admiring friends. It was too bad not to have that

"You haven't explained how burglary, in your case, is merely collecting what is your own," she said. "Come,

She maneuvered for her own seat, and placed him across the corner from her. His alertness had not deserted

him, as she noted, and his eyes roved sharply about, returning always with smoldering admiration to hers, but

never resting long. And she noted likewise that while she spoke he was intent on listening for other sounds

than those of her voice. Nor had he relinquished the revolver, which lay at the corner of the table between

But he was in a new habitat which he did not know. This man from the West, cunning in woodcraft and

plainscraft, with eyes and ears open, tense and suspicious, did not know that under the table, close to her foot,

was the push button of an electric bell. He had never heard of such a contrivance, and his keenness and

"It's like this, Miss," he began, in response to her urging. "Old Setliffe done me up in a little deal once. It was

raw, but it worked. Anything will work full and legal when it's got few hundred million behind it. I'm not

squealin', and I ain't taking a slam at your pa. He don't know me from Adam, and I reckon he don't know he

done me outa anything. He's too big, thinking and dealing in millions, to ever hear of a small potato like me.

He's an operator. He's got all kinds of experts thinking and planning and working for him, some of them, I

hear, getting more cash salary than the President of the United States. I'm only one of thousands that have

"You see, ma'am, I had a little hole in the grounda dinky, hydraulic, onehorse outfit of a mine. And when

the Setliffe crowd shook down Idaho, and reorganized the smelter trust, and roped in the rest of the

landscape, and put through the big hydraulic scheme at Twin Pines, why I sure got squeezed. I never had a

run for my money. I was scratched off the card before the first heat. And so, tonight, being broke and my

friend needing me bad, I just dropped around to make a raise outa your pa. Seeing as I needed it, it kinda was

"Granting all that you say is so," she said, "nevertheless it does not make housebreaking any the less

"I know that," he confessed meekly. "What's right ain't always legal. And that's why I am so uncomfortable

asettin' here and talking with you. Not that I ain't enjoying your companyI sure do enjoy itbut I just

can't afford to be caught. I know what they'd do to me in this here city. There was a young fellow that got

fifty years only last week for holding a man up on the street for two dollars and eightyfive cents. I read

about it in the paper. When times is hard and they ain't no work, men get desperate. And then the other men

who've got something to be robbed of get desperate, too, and they just sure soak it to the other fellows. If I

got caught, I reckon I wouldn't get a mite less than ten years. That's why I'm hankering to be on my way."

"No; wait." She lifted a detaining hand, at the same time removing her foot from the bell, which she had been

"Then . . . Dave," she laughed with pretty confusion. "Something must be done for you. You are a young

man, and you are just at the beginning of a bad start. If you begin by attempting to collect what you think is

coming to you, later on you will be collecting what you are perfectly sure isn't coming to you. And you know

what the end will be. Instead of this, we must find something honorable for you to do."

"I need the money, and I need it now," he replied doggedly. "It's not for myself, but for that friend I told you

about. He's in a peck of trouble, and he's got to get his lift now or not at all."

"I can find you a position," she said quickly. "Andyes, the very thing!I'll lend you the money you want

"About three hundred would do," he said slowly. "Three hundred would pull him through. I'd work my

fingers off for a year for that, and my keep, and a few cents to buy Bull Durham with."

Her hand went out over the revolver toward his hand, as she pointed to the telltale yellow stain on his

fingers. At the same time her eyes measured the nearness of her own hand and of his to the weapon. She

ached to grip it in one swift movement. She was sure she could do it, and yet she was not sure; and so it was

With his left band he dipped into his side pocket, brought out a loose wheatstraw paper and shifted it to his

right hand close by the revolver. Again he dipped, transferring to the paper a pinch of brown, flaky tobacco.

"From the way you hover close to that nasty weapon, you seem to be afraid of me," she challenged.

"Not exactly afraid of you, ma'am, but, under the circumstances, just a mite timid."

"That's right," he acknowledged promptly, "and you ain't been scairt of me. Mebbe I am over anxious."

Even as she spoke, her slipper felt for the bell and pressed it. At the same time her eyes were earnest with a

"You are a judge of men. I know it. And of women. Surely, when I am trying to persuade you from a criminal

"I sure beg your pardon, ma'am," he said. "I reckon my nervousness ain't complimentary."

As he spoke, he drew his right hand from the table, and after lighting the cigarette, dropped it by his side.

"Thank you for your confidence," she breathed softly, resolutely keeping her eyes from measuring the

"About that three hundred," he began. "I can telegraph it West tonight. And I'll agree to work a year for it

"You will earn more than that. I can promise seventyfive dollars a month at the least. Do you know horses?"

"Then go to work for meor for my father, rather, though I engage all the servants. I need a second

"And wear a uniform?" he interrupted sharply, the sneer of the freeborn West in his voice and on his lips.

"We have a stock farm, and there's room for just such a man as you. Will you take it?"

"Will I, ma'am?" His voice was rich with gratitude and enthusiasm. "Show me to it. I'll dig right in

tomorrow. And I can sure promise you one thing, ma'am. You'll never be sorry for lending Hughie Luke a

"I did, ma'am. I did. And I sure beg your pardon. It was just plain bluff. My real name is Hughie Luke. And if

you'll give me the address of that stock farm of yours, and the railroad fare, I head for it first thing in the

Throughout the conversation she had never relaxed her attempts on the bell. She had pressed it in every

alarming waythree shorts and a long, two and a long, and five. She had tried long series of shorts, and,

once, she had held the button down for a solid three minutes. And she had been divided between objurgation

"I am so glad," she said; "so glad that you are willing. There won't be much to arrange. But you will first have

She saw the doubt flicker momentarily in his eyes, and added hastily, "But you see I am trusting you with the

"I believe you, ma'am," he came back gallantly. "Though I just can't help this nervousness."

But before she could receive consent, a slight muffled jar from the distance came to her ear. She knew it for

the swingdoor of the butler's pantry. But so slight was itmore a faint vibration than a soundthat she

would not have heard had not her ears been keyed and listening for it. Yet the man had heard. He was startled

For answer, her left hand flashed out to the revolver and brought it back. She had had the start of him, and she

needed it, for the next instant his hand leaped up from his side, clutching emptiness where the revolver had

"Sit down!" she commanded sharply, in a voice new to him. "Don't move. Keep your hands on the table."

She had taken a lesson from him. Instead of holding the heavy weapon extended, the butt of it and her

forearm rested on the table, the muzzle pointed, not at his head, but his chest. And he, looking coolly and

obeying her commands, knew there was no chance of the kickup of the recoil producing a miss. Also, he

saw that the revolver did not wabble, nor the hand shake, and he was thoroughly conversant with the size of

hole the softnosed bullets could make. He had eyes, not for her, but for the hammer, which had risen under

"I reckon I'd best warn you that that there triggerpull is filed dreadful fine. Don't press too hard, or I'll have

"That's better," he commented. "You'd best put it down all the way. You see how easy it works. If you want

to, a quick light pull will jiffy her up and back and make a pretty mess all over your nice floor."

A door opened behind him, and he heard somebody enter the room. But he did not turn his bead. He was

looking at her, and he found it the face of another womanhard, cold, pitiless yet brilliant in its beauty. The

"Thomas," she commanded, "go to the telephone and call the police. Why were you so long in answering?"

The robber never took his eyes from hers, nor did she from his, but at mention of the bell she noticed that his

"Beg your pardon," said the butler from behind, "but wouldn't it be better for me to get a weapon and arouse

The butler slippered out of the room, and the man and the woman sat on, gazing into each other's eyes. To her

it was an experience keen with enjoyment, and in her mind was the gossip of her crowd, and she saw notes in

the society weeklies of the beautiful young Mrs. Setliffe capturing an armed robber singlehanded. It would

"When you get that sentence you mentioned," she said coldly, "you will have time to meditate upon what a

fool you have been, taking other persons' property and threatening women with revolvers. You will have time

to learn your lesson thoroughly. Now tell the truth. You haven't any friend in trouble. All that you told me

He did not reply. Though his eyes were upon her, they seemed blank. In truth, for the instant she was veiled

to him, and what he saw was the wide sunwashed spaces of the West, where men and women were bigger

than the rotten denizens, as he had encountered them, of the thrice rotten cities of the East.

"Go on. Why don't you speak? Why don't you lie some more? Why don't you beg to be let off?"

"I might," he answered, licking his dry lips. "I might ask to be let off if . . . "

"I was trying to think of a word you reminded me of. As I was saying, I might if you was a decent woman."

"You don't dast kill me," he sneered. "The world's a pretty low down place to have a thing like you prowling

around in it, but it ain't so plumb low down, I reckon, as to let you put a hole in me. You're sure bad, but the

trouble with you is that you're weak in your badness. It ain't much to kill a man, but you ain't got it in you.

"Be careful of what you say," she repeated. "Or else, I warn you, it will go hard with you. It can be seen to

"Something's the matter with God," he remarked irrelevantly, "to be letting you around loose. It's clean

beyond me what he's up to, playing suchlike tricks on poor humanity. Now if I was God"

"Something is wrong with the telephone, madam," he announced. "The wires are crossed or something,

"Go and call one of the servants," she ordered. "Send him out for an officer, and then return here."

"Will you kindly answer one question, ma'am?" the man said. "That servant fellow said something about a

"Thank you, ma'am. I reckoned I'd seen your kind before, and now I sure know I have. I spoke to you true

"You made eyes at me, looking soft and kind, playing up all the time the fact that you wore skirts instead of

pantsand all the time with your foot on the bell under the table. Well, there's some consolation. I'd sooner

be poor Hughie Luke, doing his ten years, than be in your skin. Ma'am, hell is full of women like you."

There was silence for a space, in which the man, never taking his eyes from her, studying her, was making up

"Yes, ma'am, I'll say something. I'll sure say something. Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to get

right up from this chair and walk out that door. I'd take the gun from you, only you might turn foolish and let

it go off. You can have the gun. It's a good one. As I was saying, I am going right out that door. And you ain't

going to pull that gun off either. It takes guts to shoot a man, and you sure ain't got them. Now get ready and

see if you can pull that trigger. I ain't going to harm you. I'm going out that door, and I'm starting."

Keeping his eyes fixed on her, he pushed back the chair and slowly stood erect. The hammer rose halfway.

"Pull harder," he advised. "It ain't half up yet. Go on and pull it and kill a man. That's what I said, kill a man,

spatter his brains out on the floor, or slap a hole into him the size of your. fist. That's what killing a man

The hammer lowered jerkily but gently. The man turned his back and walked slowly to the door. She swung

the revolver around so that it bore on his back. Twice again the hammer came up halfway and was reluctantly

At the door the man turned for a moment before passing on. A sneer was on his lips. He spoke to her in a low

voice, almost drawling, but in it was the quintessence of all loathing, as he called her a name unspeakable and

NOBODY knew his history they of the Junta least of all. He was their "little mystery," their "big patriot,"

and in his way he worked as hard for the coming Mexican Revolution as did they. They were tardy in

recognizing this, for not one of the Junta liked him. The day he first drifted into their crowded, busy rooms,

they all suspected him of being a spyone of the bought tools of the Diaz secret service. Too many of the

comrades were in civil an military prisons scattered over the United States, and others of them, in irons, were

even then being taken across the border to be lined up against adobe walls and shot.

At the first sight the boy did not impress them favorably. Boy he was, not more than eighteen and not over

large for his years. He announced that he was Felipe Rivera, and that it was his wish to work for the

Revolution. That was allnot a wasted word, no further explanation. He stood waiting. There was no smile

on his lips, no geniality in his eyes. Big dashing Paulino Vera felt an inward shudder. Here was something

forbidding, terrible, inscrutable. There was something venomous and snakelike in the boy's black eyes. They

burned like cold fire, as with a vast, concentrated bitterness. He flashed them from the faces of the

conspirators to the typewriter which little Mrs. Sethby was industriously operating. His eyes rested on hers

but an instantshe had chanced to look upand she, too, sensed the nameless something that made her

pause. She was compelled to read back in order to regain the swing of the letter she was writing.

Paulino Vera looked questioningly at Arrellano and Ramos, and questioningly they looked back and to each

other. The indecision of doubt brooded in their eyes. This slender boy was the Unknown, vested with all the

menace of the Unknown. He was unrecognizable, something quite beyond the ken of honest, ordinary

revolutionists whose fiercest hatred for Diaz and his tyranny after all was only that of honest and ordinary

patriots. Here was something else, they knew not what. But Vera, always the most impulsive, the quickest to

"Very well," he said coldly. "You say you want to work for the Revolution. Take off your coat. Hang it over

there. I will show you, comewhere are the buckets and cloths. The floor is dirty. You will begin by

scrubbing it, and by scrubbing the floors of the other rooms. The spittoons need to be cleaned. Then there are

Rivera looked cold suspicion at all of them, then proceeded to take off his coat.

And nothing more. Day after day he came to his worksweeping, scrubbing, cleaning. He emptied the ashes

from the stoves, brought up the coal and kindling, and lighted the fires before the most energetic one of them

Ah, ha! So that was itthe hand of Diaz showing through! To sleep in the rooms of the Junta meant access

to their secrets, to the lists of names, to the addresses of comrades down on Mexican soil. The request was

denied, and Rivera never spoke of it again. He slept they knew not where, and ate they knew not where nor

how. Once, Arrellano offered him a couple of dollars. Rivera declined the money with a shake of the head.

It takes money to raise a modern revolution. and always the Junta was pressed. The members starved and

toiled, and the longest day was none too long, and yet there were times when it appeared as if the Revolution

stood or fell on no more than the matter of a few dollars. Once, the first time, when the rent of the house was

two months behind and the landlord was threatening dispossession, it was Felipe Rivera, the scrubboy in the

poor, cheap clothes, worn and threadbare, who laid sixty dollars in gold on May Sethby's desk. There were

other times. Three hundred letters, clicked out on the busy typewriters (appeals for assistance, for sanctions

from the organized labor groups, requests for square news deals to the editors of newspapers, protests against

the highhanded treatment of revolutionists by the United States courts), lay unmailed, awaiting postage.

Vera's watch had disappearedthe oldfashioned gold repeater that had been his father's. Likewise had gone

the plain gold band from May Setbby's third finger. Things were desperate. Ramos and Arrellano pulled their

long mustaches in despair. The letters must go off, and the Post Office allowed no credit to purchasers of

stamps. Then it was that Rivera put on his hat and went out. When he came back he laid a thousand twocent

They elevated their brows and could not decide. And Felipe Rivera, the scrubber for the Revolution,

And still they could not bring themselves to like him. They did not know him. His ways were not theirs. He

gave no confidences. He repelled all probing. Youth that he was, they could never nerve themselves to dare to

"A great and lonely spirit, perhaps, I do not know, I do not know," Arrellano said helplessly.

"His soul has been seared," said May Sethby. "Light and laughter have been burned out of him. He is like one

"He has been through hell," said Vera. "No man could look like that who has not been through helland he

Yet they could not like him. He never talked, never inquired, never suggested. He would stand listening,

expressionless, a thing dead, save for his eyes, coldly burning, while their talk of the Revolution ran high and

warm. From face to face and speaker to speaker his eyes would turn, boring like gimlets of incandescent ice,

"He is no spy," Vera confided to May Sethby. "He is a patriotmark me, the greatest patriot of us all. I

know it, I feel it, here in my heart and head I feel it. But him I know not at all."

"I know," said Vera, with a shudder. "He has looked at me with those eyes of his. They do not love; they

threaten; they are savage as a wild tiger's. I know, if I should prove unfaithful to the Cause, that he would kill

me. He has no heart. He is pitiless as steel, keen and cold as frost. He is like moonshine in a winter night

when a man freezes to death on some lonely mountain top. I am not afraid of Diaz and all his killers; but this

boy, of him am I afraid. I tell you true. I am afraid. He is the breath of death."

Yet Vera it was who persuaded the others to give the first trust to Rivera. The line of communication between

Los Angeles and Lower California had broken down. Three of the comrades had dug their own graves and

been shot into them. Two more were United States prisoners in Los Angeles. Juan Alvarado, the Federal

commander, was a monster. All their plans did he checkmate. They could no longer gain access to the active

Young Rivera was given his instructions and dispatched south. When he returned, the line of communication

was reestablished, and Juan Alvarado was dead. He had been found in bed, a knife hiltdeep in his breast.

This had exceeded Rivera's instructions, but they of the Junta knew the times of his movements. They did not

"I have told you," said Vera. "Diaz has more to fear from this youth than from any man. He is implacable. He

The bad temper, mentioned by May Sethby, and sensed by them all, was evidenced by physical proofs. Now

he appeared with a cut lip, a blackened cheek, or a swollen ear. It was patent that he brawled, somewhere in

that outside world where he ate and slept, gained money, and moved in ways unknown to them. As the time

passed, he had come to set type for the little revolutionary sheet they published weekly. There were occasions

when he was unable to set type, when his knuckles were bruised and battered, when his thumbs were injured

and helpless, when one arm or the other hung wearily at his side while his face was drawn with unspoken

"But where does he get the money?" Vera demanded. "Only today, just now, have I learned that he paid the

"I should not care to be that spy," said Vera. "I fear you would never see me again, save to bury me. He has a

terrible passion. Not even God would he permit to stand between him and the way of his passion."

"To me he is powerhe is the primitive, the wild wolf, the striking rattlesnake, the stinging centipede," said

"He is the Revolution incarnate," said Vera. "He is the flame and the spirit of it, the insatiable cry for

vengeance that makes no cry but that slays noiselessly. He is a destroying angel in moving through the still

"I could weep over him," said May Sethby. "He knows nobody. He hates all people. Us he tolerates, for we

are the way of his desire. He is alone. . . . lonely." Her voice broke in a half sob and there was dimness in her

Rivera's ways and times were truly mysterious. There were periods when they did not see him for a week at a

time. Once, he was away a month. These occasions were always capped by his return, when, without

advertisement or speech, he laid gold coins on May Sethby's desk. Again, for days and weeks, he spent all his

time with the Junta. And yet again, for irregular periods, he would disappear through the heart of each day,

from early morning until late afternoon. At such times he came early and remained late. Arrellano had found

him at midnight, setting type with fresh swollen knuckles, or mayhap it was his lip, newsplit, that still bled.

The time of the crisis approached. Whether or not the Revolution would be depended upon the Junta, and the

Junta was hardpressed. The need for money was greater than ever before, while money was harder to get.

Patriots had given their last cent and now could give no more. Section gang laborersfugitive peons from

Mexicowere contributing half their scanty wages. But more than that was needed. The heartbreaking,

conspiring, undermining toil of years approached fruition. The time was ripe. The Revolution hung on the

balance. One shove more, one last heroic effort, and it would tremble across the scales to victory. They knew

their Mexico. Once started, the Revolution would take care of itself. The whole Diaz machine would go down

like a house of cards. The border was ready to rise. One Yankee, with a hundred I.W.W. men, waited the

word to cross over the border and begin the conquest of Lower California. But he needed guns. And clear

across to the Atlantic, the Junta in touch with them all and all of them needing guns, mere adventurers,

soldiers of fortune, bandits, disgruntled American union men, socialists, anarchists, roughnecks, Mexican

exiles, peons escaped from bondage, whipped miners from the bullpens of Coeur d'Alene and Colorado who

desired only the more vindictively to fightall the flotsam and jetsam of wild spirits from the madly

complicated modern world. And it was guns and ammunition, ammunition and gunsthe unceasing and

Fling this heterogeneous, bankrupt, vindictive mass across the border, and the Revolution was on. The

custom house, the northern ports of entry, would be captured. Diaz could not resist. He dared not throw the

weight of his armies against them, for he must hold the south. And through the south the flame would spread

despite. The people would rise. The defenses of city after city would crumple up. State after state would totter

down. And at last, from every side, the victorious armies of the Revolution would close in on the City of

But the money. They had the men, impatient and urgent, who would use the guns. They knew the traders who

would sell and deliver the guns. But to culture the Revolution thus far had exhausted the Junta. The last dollar

had been spent, the last resource and the last starving patriot milked dry, and the great adventure still

trembled on the scales. Guns and ammunition! The ragged battalions must be armed. But how? Ramos

lamented his confiscated estates. Arrellano wailed the spendthriftness of his youth. May Sethby wondered if

it would have been different had they of the Junta been more economical in the past.

"To think that the freedom of Mexico should stand or fall on a few paltry thousands of dollars," said Paulino

Despair was in all their faces. Jose Amarillo, their last hope, a recent convert, who had promised money, had

been apprehended at his hacienda in Chihuahua and shot against his own stable wall. The news had just come

Rivera, on his knees, scrubbing, looked up, with suspended brush, his bare arms flecked with soapy, dirty

They looked their amazement. Vera nodded and swallowed. He could not speak, but he was on the instant

"Order the guns," Rivera said, and thereupon was guilty of the longest flow of words they had ever heard him

utter. "The time is short. In three weeks I shall bring you the five thousand. It is well. The weather will be

Vera fought his faith. It was incredible. Too many fond hopes had been shattered since he had begun to play

the revolution game. He believed this threadbare scrubber of the Revolution, and yet he dared not believe.

After hurrying and scurrying, much telephoning and bad language, a night session was held in Kelly's office.

Kelly was rushed with business; also, he was unlucky. He had brought Danny Ward out from New York,

arranged the fight for him with Billy Carthey, the date was three weeks away, and for two days now,

carefully concealed from the sporting writers, Carthey had been lying up, badly injured. There was no one to

take his place. Kelly had been burning the wires East to every eligible lightweight, but they were tied up with

"You've got a hell of a nerve," Kelly addressed Rivera, after one look, as soon as they got together.

"Who'd you ever fight, anyway!" Michael Kelly demanded. Michael was the promotor's brother, and ran the

"Well, you know Roberts," Kelly broke the hostile silence. "He ought to be here. I've sent for him. Sit down

and wait, though f rom the looks of you, you haven't got a chance. I can't throw the public down with a bum

When Roberts arrived, it was patent that he was mildly drunk. He was a tall, lean, slackjointed individual,

"Look here, Roberts, you've been bragging you discovered this little Mexican. You know Carthey's broke his

arm. Well, this little yellow streak has the gall to blow in today and say he'll take Carthey's place. What

"No, I won't say that. Ward's a topnotcher and a ring general. But he can't hashhouse Rivera in short order. I

know Rivera. Nobody can get his goat. He ain't got a goat that I could ever discover. And he's a twohanded

"Never mind that. What kind of a show can he put up? You've been conditioning and training fighters all

your life. I take off my hat to your judgment. Can he give the public a run for its money?"

"He sure can, and he'll worry Ward a mighty heap on top of it. You don't know that boy. I do. I discovered

him. He ain't got a goat. He's a devil. He's a wizzywooz if anybody should ask you. He'll make Ward sit up

with a show of local talent that'll make the rest of you sit up. I won't say he'll lick Ward, but he'll put up such

"All right." Kelly turned to his secretary. "Ring up Ward. I warned him to show up if I thought it worth while.

"Never told you how I discovered the little cuss. It was a couple of years ago he showed up out at the

quarters. I was getting Prayne ready for his fight with Delaney. Prayne's wicked. He ain't got a tickle of

mercy in his makeup. I chopped up his pardner's something cruel, and I couldn't find a willing boy that'd

work with him. I'd noticed this little starved Mexican kid hanging around, and I was desperate. So I grabbed

him, shoved on the gloves and put him in. He was tougher'n rawhide, but weak. And he didn't know the first

letter in the alphabet of boxing. Prayne chopped him to ribbons. But he hung on for two sickening rounds,

when he fainted. Starvation, that was all. Battered! You couldn't have recognized him. I gave him half a

dollar and a square meal. You oughta seen him wolf it down. He hadn't had the end of a bite for a couple of

days. That's the end of him, thinks I. But next day he showed up, stiff an' sore, ready for another half and a

square meal. And he done better as time went by. Just a born fighter, and tough beyond belief. He hasn't a

heart. He's a piece of ice. And he never talked eleven words in a string since I know him. He saws wood and

"All the big little fellows has tried out on him," Roberts answered. "And he's learned from 'em. I've seen

some of them he could lick. But his heart wasn't in it. I reckoned he never liked the game. He seemed to act

"He's been fighting some before the little clubs the last few months," Kelly said.

"Sure. But I don't know what struck 'm. All of a sudden his heart got into it. He just went out like a streak and

cleaned up all the little local fellows. Seemed to want the money, and he's won a bit, though his clothes don't

look it. He's peculiar. Nobody knows his business. Nobody knows how he spends his time. Even when he's

on the job, he plumb up and disappears most of each day soon as his work is done. Sometimes he just blows

away for weeks at a time. But he don't take advice. There's a fortune in it for the fellow that gets the job of

managin' him, only he won't consider it. And you watch him hold out for the cash money when you get down

It was at this stage that Danny Ward arrived. Quite a party it was. His manager and trainer were with him,

and he breezed in like a gusty draught of geniality, goodnature, and allconqueringness. Greetings flew

about, a joke here, a retort there, a smile or a laugh for everybody. Yet it was his way, and only partly sincere.

He was a good actor, and he had found geniality a most valuable asset in the game of getting on in the world.

But down underneath he was the deliberate, coldblooded fighter and business man. The rest was a mask.

Those who knew him or trafficked with him said that when it came to brass tacks he was

DannyontheSpot. He was invariably present at all business discussions, and it was urged by some that his

Rivera's way was different. Indian blood, as well as Spanish, was in his veins, and he sat back in a corner,

silent, immobile, only his black eyes passing from face to face and noting everything.

"So that's the guy," Danny said, running an appraising eye over his proposed antagonist. "How de do, old

Rivera's eyes burned venomously, but he made no sign of acknowledgment. He disliked all Gringos, but this

"Gawd!" Danny protested facetiously to the promoter. "You ain't expectin' me to fight a deef mute." When

the laughter subsided, he made another hit. "Los Angeles must be on the dink when this is the best you can

"He's a good little boy, Danny, take it from me," Roberts defended. "Not as easy as he looks."

"And half the house is sold already," Kelly pleaded. "You'll have to take 'm on, Danny. It is the best we can

"You gotta be careful," Danny's manager warned. "No taking chances with a dub that's likely to sneak a lucky

"Oh, I'll be careful all right, all right," Danny smiled. "I'll get in at the start an' nurse 'im along for the dear

public's sake. What d' ye say to fifteen rounds, Kellyan' then the hay for him?"

"Then let's get down to biz." Danny paused and calculated. "Of course, sixtyfive per cent of the gate

receipts, same as with Carthey. But the split'll be different. Eighty will just about suit me." And to his

"Well, it is this way," Kelly exposited. "The purse'll be sixtyfive per cent of the gate receipts. You're a dub,

and an unknown. You and Danny split, twenty per cent goin' to you, an' eighty to Danny. That's fair, isn't it,

"Oh, maybe five thousand, maybe as high as eight thousand," Danny broke in to explain. "Something like

that. Your share'll come to something like a thousand or sixteen hundred. Pretty good for takin' a licking from

"I'm not casting reflections on the referee, or the present company. I'm not sayin' nothing about bookmakers

an' frameups that sometimes happen. But what I do say is that it's poor business for a fighter like me. I play

safe. There's no tellin'. Mebbe I break my arm, eh? Or some guy slips me a bunch of dope?" He shook his

Danny half started to take off his coat. But, as his manager knew, it was a grand stand play. The coat did not

come off, and Danny allowed himself to be placated by the group. Everybody sympathized with him. Rivera

"Look here, you little fool," Kelly took up the argument. "You're nobody. We know what you ve been doing

the last few monthsputting away little local fighters. But Danny is class. His next fight after this will be for

the championship. And you're unknown. Nobody ever heard of you out of Los Angeles."

"Then what are you holdin' out for?" Rivera countered. "If the money's that easy, why don't you go after it?"

"I will, so help me!" Danny cried with abrupt conviction. "I'Il beat you to death in the ring, my boyyou

monkeyin' with me this way. Make out the articles, Kelly. Winner take all. Play it up in the sportin' columns.

Danny nodded. That settled it. He would enter the ring in his full ripeness of strength.

"You've given too much away. You've thrown the fight right there. Danny'll lick you sure. He'll be as strong

Rivera's answer was a calculated look of hatred. Even this Gringo he despised, and him had he found the

Barely noticed was Rivera as he entered the ring. Only a very slight and very scattering ripple of halfhearted

handclapping greeted him. The house did not believe in him. He was the lamb led to slaughter at the hands

of the great Danny. Besides, the house was disappointed. It had expected a rushing battle between Danny

Ward and Billy Carthey, and here it must put up with this poor little tyro. Still further, it had manifested its

disapproval of the change by betting two, and even three, to one on Danny. And where a betting audience's

The Mexican boy sat down in his corner and waited. The slow minutes lagged by. Danny was making him

wait. It was an old trick, but ever it worked on the young, new fighters. They grew frightened, sitting thus and

facing their own apprehensions and a callous, tobaccosmoking audience. But for once the trick failed.

Roberts was right. Rivera had no goat. He, who was more delicately coordinated, more finely nerved and

strung than any of them, had no nerves of this sort. The atmosphere of foredoomed defeat in his own corner

had no effect on him. His handlers were Gringos and strangers. Also they were scrubsthe dirty driftage of

the fight game, without honor, without efficiency. And they were chilled, as well, with certitude that theirs

"Now you gotta be careful," Spider Hagerty warned him. Spider was his chief second. "Make it last as long as

you canthem's my instructions from Kelly. If you don't, the papers'll call it another bum fight and give the

All of which was not encouraging. But Rivera took no notice. He despised prize fighting. It was the hated

game of the hated Gringo. He had taken up with it, as a chopping block for others in the training quarters,

solely because he was starving. The fact that he was marvelously made for it had meant nothing. He hated it.

Not until he had come in to the Junta, had he fought for money, and he had found the money easy. Not first

among the sons of men had he been to find himself successful at a despised vocation.

He did not analyze. He merely knew that he must win this fight. There could be no other outcome. For behind

him, nerving him to this belief, were profounder forces than any the crowded house dreamed. Danny Ward

fought for money, and for the easy ways of life that money would bring. But the things Rivera fought for

burned in his brainblazing and terrible visions, that, with eyes wide open, sitting lonely in the corner of the

ring and waiting for his tricky antagonist, he saw as clearly as he had lived them.

He saw the whitewalled, waterpower factories of Rio Blanco. He saw the six thousand workers, starved

and wan, and the little children, seven and eight years of age, who toiled long shifts for ten cents a day. He

saw the perambulating corpses, the ghastly death's heads of men who labored in the dyerooms. He

remembered that he had heard his father call the dyerooms the "suicideholes," where a year was death. He

saw the little patio, and his mother cooking and moiling at crude housekeeping and finding time to caress and

love him. And his father he saw, large, bigmoustached and deepchested, kindly above all men, who loved

all men and whose heart was so large that there was love to overflowing still left for the mother and the little

muchacho playing in the corner of the patio. In those days his name had not been Felipe Rivera. It had been

Fernandez, his father's and mother's name. Him had they called Juan. Later, he had changed it himself, for he

had found the name of Fernandez hated by prefects of police, jefes politicos, and rurales.

Big, hearty Joaquin Fernandez! A large place he occupied in Rivera's visions. He had not understood at the

time, but looking back he could understand. He could see him setting type in the little printery, or scribbling

endless hasty, nervous lines on the muchcluttered desk. And he could see the strange evenings, when

workmen, coming secretly in the dark like men who did ill deeds, met with his father and talked long hours

As from a remote distance he could hear Spider Hagerty saying to him: "No layin' down at the start. Them's

Ten minutes had passed, and he still sat in his comer. There were no signs of Danny, who was evidently

But more visions burned before the eye of Rivera's memory. The strike, or, rather, the lockout, because the

workers of Rio Blanco had helped their striking brothers of Puebla. The hunger, the expeditions in the hills

for berries, the roots and herbs that all ate and that twisted and pained the stomachs of all of them. And then,

the nightmare; the waste of ground before the company's store; the thousands of starving workers; General

Rosalio Martinez and the soldiers of Porfirio Diaz, and the deathspitting rifles that seemed never to cease

spitting, while the workers' wrongs were washed and washed again in their own blood. And that night! He

saw the flat cars, piled high with the bodies of the slain, consigned to Vera Cruz, food for the sharks of the

bay. Again he crawled over the grisly heaps, seeking and finding, stripped and mangled, his father and his

mother. His mother he especially rememberedonly her face projecting, her body burdened by the weight of

dozens of bodies. Again the rifles of the soldiers of Porfirio Diaz cracked, and again he dropped to the ground

To his ears came a great roar, as of the sea, and he saw Danny Ward, leading his retinue of trainers and

seconds, coming down the center aisle. The house was in wild uproar for the popular hero who was bound to

win. Everybody proclaimed him. Everybody was for him. Even Rivera's own seconds warmed to something

akin to cheerfulness when Danny ducked jauntily through the ropes and entered the ring. His face continually

spread to an unending succession of smiles, and when Danny smiled he smiled in every feature, even to the

laughterwrinkles of the corners of the eyes and into the depths of the eyes themselves. Never was there so

genial a fighter. His face was a running advertisement of good feeling, of good fellowship. He knew

everybody. He joked, and laughed, and greeted his friends through the ropes. Those farther away, unable to

suppress their admiration, cried loudly: "Oh, you Danny!" It was a joyous ovation of affection that lasted a

Rivera was disregarded. For all that the audience noticed, he did not exist. Spider Lagerty's bloated face bent

"An' remember instructions. You gotta last. No layin' down. If you lay down, we got instructions to beat you

The house began to applaud. Danny was crossing the ring to him. Danny bent over, caught Rivera's right

hand in both his own and shook it with impulsive heartiness. Danny's smilewreathed face was close to his.

The audience yelled its appreciation of Danny's display of sporting spirit. He was greeting his opponent with

the fondness of a brother. Danny's lips moved, and the audience, interpreting the unheard words to be those

"You little Mexican rat," hissed from between Danny's gaily smiling lips, "I'll fetch the yellow outa you."

The crowd began to hiss and boo him for his unsportsmanlike conduct, but he sat unmoved. Another great

When Danny stripped, there was ohs! and ahs! of delight. His body was perfect, alive with easy suppleness

and health and strength. The skin was white as a woman's, and as smooth. All grace, and resilience, and

power resided therein. He had proved it in scores of battles. His photographs were in all the physical culture

A groan went up as Spider Hagerty peeled Rivera's sweater over his head. His body seemed leaner, because

of the swarthiness of the skin. He had muscles, but they made no display like his opponent's. What the

audience neglected to see was the deep chest. Nor could it guess the toughness of the fiber of the flesh, the

instantaneousness of the cell explosions of the muscles, the fineness of the nerves that wired every part of

him into a spendid fighting mechanism. All the audience saw was a brownskinned boy of eighteen with

what seemed the body of a boy. With Danny it was different. Danny was a man of twentyfour, and his body

was a man's body. The contrast was still more striking as they stood together in the center of the ring

Rivera noticed Roberts sitting directly behind the newspaper men. He was drunker than usual, and his speech

"He can't kill you, remember that. He'll rush you at the gooff, but don't get rattled. You just and stall, and

clinch. He can't hurt cover up, much. Just make believe to yourself that he's choppin' out on you at the trainin'

"Sullen little devil," Roberts muttered to the man next to him. "He always was that way."

But Rivera forgot to look his usual hatred. A vision of countless rifles blinded his eyes. Every face in the

aidience, far as he could see, to the high dollarseats, was transformed into a rifle. And he saw the long

Mexican border arid and sunwashed and aching, and along it he saw the ragged bands that delayed only for

Back in his corner he waited, standing up. His seconds had crawled out through the ropes, taking the canvas

stool with them. Diagonally across the squared ring, Danny faced him. The gong struck, and the battle was

on. The audience howled its delight. Never had it seen a battle open more convincingly. The papers were

right. It was a grudge fight. Threequarters of the distance Danny covered in the rush to get together, his

intention to eat up the Mexican lad plainly advertised. He assailed with not one blow, nor two, nor a dozen.

He was a gyroscope of blows, a whirlwind of destruction. Rivera was nowhere. He was overwhelmed, buried

beneath avalanches of punches delivered from every angle and position by a past master in the art. He was

overborne, swept back against the ropes, separated by the referee, and swept back against the ropes again.

It was not a fight. It was a slaughter, a massacre. Any audience, save a prize fighting one, would have

exhausted its emotions in that first minute. Danny was certainly showing what he could doa splendid

exhibition. Such was the certainty of the audience, as well as its excitement and favoritism, that it failed to

take notice that the Mexican still stayed on his feet. It forgot Rivera. It rarely saw him, so closely was he

enveloped in Danny's maneating attack. A minute of this went by, and two minutes. Then, in a separation, it

caught a clear glimpse of the Mexican. His lip was cut, his nose was bleeding. As he turned and staggered

into a clinch, the welts of oozing blood, from his contacts with the ropes, showed in red bars. across his back.

But what the audience did not notice was that his chest was not heaving and that his eyes were coldly burning

as ever. Too many aspiring champions, in the cruel welter of the training camps, had practiced this

maneating attack on him. He had learned to live through for a compensation of from half a dollar a go up to

Then happened the amazing thing. The whirling, blurring mixup ceased suddenly. Rivera stood alone.

Danny, the redoubtable Danny, lay on his back. His body quivered as consciousness strove to return to it. He

had not staggered and sunk down, nor had he gone over in a long slumping fall. The right hook of Rivera had

dropped him in midair with the abruptness of death. The referee shoved Rivera back with one hand, and stood

over the fallen gladiator counting the seconds. It is the custom of prizefighting audiences to cheer a clean

knockdown blow. But this audience did not cheer. The thing had been too unexpected. It watched the toll of

the seconds in tense silence, and through this silence the voice of Roberts rose exultantly:

By the fifth second, Danny was rolling over on his face, and when seven was counted, he rested on one knee,

ready to rise after the count of nine and before the count of ten. If his knee still touched the floor at "ten," he

was considered "down," and also "out." The instant his knee left the floor, he was considered "up," and in that

instant it was Rivera's right to try and put him down again. Rivera took no chances. The moment that knee

left the floor he would strike again. He circled around, but the referee circled in between, and Rivera knew

that the seconds he counted were very slow. All Gringos were against him, even the referee.

At "nine" the referee gave Rivera a sharp thrust back. It was unfair, but it enabled Danny to rise, the smile

back on his lips. Doubled partly over, with arms wrapped about face and abdomen, he cleverly stumbled into

a clinch. By all the rules of the game the referee should have broken it, but he did not, and Danny clung on

like a surfbattered barnacle and moment by moment recuperated. The last minute of the round was going

fast. If he could live to the end, he would have a full minute in his corner to revive. And live to the end he

"The smile that won't come off!" somebody yelled, and the audience laughed loudly in its relief.

"The kick that Greaser's got is something Godawful," Danny gasped in his corner to his adviser while his

The second and third rounds were tame. Danny, a tricky and consummate ring general, stalled and blocked

and held on, devoting himself to recovering from that dazing firstround blow. In the fourth round he was

himself again. Jarred and shaken, nevertheless his good condition had enabled him to regain his vigor. But he

tried no maneating tactics. The Mexican had proved a tartar. Instead, he brought to bear his best fighting

powers. In tricks and skill and experience he was the master, and though he could land nothing vital, he

proceeded scientifically to chop and wear down his opponent. He landed three blows to Rivera's one, but they

were punishing blows only, and not deadly. It was the sum of many of them that constituted deadliness. He

was respectful of this twohanded dub with the amazing shortarm kicks in both his fists.

In defense, Rivera developed a disconcerting straightleft. Again and again, attack after attack he

straightlefted away from him with accumulated damage to Danny's mouth and nose. But Danny was

protean. That was why he was the coming champion. He could change from style to style of fighting at will.

He now devoted himself to infighting. In this he was particularly wicked, and it enabled him to avoid the

other's straightleft. Here he set the house wild repeatedly, capping it with a marvelous lockbreak and lift of

an inside uppercut that raised the Mexican in the air and dropped him to the mat. Rivera rested on one knee,

making the most of the count, and in the soul of him he knew the referee was counting short seconds on him.

Again, in the seventh, Danny achieved the diabolical inside uppercut. He succeeded only in staggering

Rivera, but, in the ensuing moment of defenseless helplessness, he smashed him with another blow through

the ropes. Rivera's body bounced on the heads of the newspaper men below, and they boosted him back to the

edge of the platform outside the ropes. Here he rested on one knee, while the referee raced off the seconds.

Inside the ropes, through which he must duck to enter the ring, Danny waited for him. Nor did the referee

Danny did his best, but Rivera, at the count of eight, instead of nine, came unexpectedly through the ropes

and safely into a clinch. Now the referee worked, tearing him away so that he could be hit, giving Danny

But Rivera lived, and the daze cleared from his brain. It was all of a piece. They were the hated Gringos and

they were all unfair. And in the worst of it visions continued to flash and sparkle in his brainlong lines of

railroad track that simmered across the desert; rurales and American constables, prisons and calabooses;

tramps at water tanksall the squalid and painful panorama of his odyssey after Rio Blanca and the strike.

And, resplendent and glorious, he saw the great, red Revolution sweeping across his land. The guns were

there before him. Every hated face was a gun. It was for the guns he fought. He was the guns. He was the

The audience began to grow incensed with Rivera. Why didn't he take the licking that was appointed him? Of

course he was going to be licked, but why should he be so obstinate about it? Very few were interested in

him, and they were the certain, definite percentage of a gambling crowd that plays long shots. Believing

Danny to be the winner, nevertheless the y had put their money on the Mexican at four to ten and one to

three. More than a trifle was up on the point of how many rounds Rivera could last. Wild money had

appeared at the ringside proclaiming that he could not last seven rounds, or even six. The winners of this,

now that their cash risk was happily settled, had joined in cheering on the favorite.

Rivera refused to be licked. Through the eighth round his opponent strove vainly to repeat the uppercut. In

the ninth, Rivera stunned the house again. In the midst of a clinch he broke the lock with a quick, lithe

movement, and in the narrow space between their bodies his right lifted from the waist. Danny went to the

floor and took the safety of the count. The crowd was appalled. He was being bested at his own game. His

famous rightuppercut had been worked back on him. Rivera made no attempt to catch him as he arose at

"nine." The referee was openly blocking that play, though he stood clear when the situation was reversed and

Twice in the tenth, Rivera put through the rightuppercut, lifted from waist to opponent's chin. Danny grew

desperate. The smile never left his face, but he went back to his maneating rushes. Whirlwind as he would,

be could not damage Rivera, while Rivera through the blur and whirl, dropped him to the mat three times in

succession. Danny did not recuperate so quickly now, and by the eleventh round he was in a serious way. But

from then till the fourteenth he put up the gamest exhibition of his career. He stalled and blocked, fought

parsimoniously, and strove to gather strength. Also, he fought as foully as a successful fighter knows how.

Every trick and device he employed, butting in the clinches with the seeming of accident, pinioning Rivera's

glove between arm and body, heeling his glove on Rivera's mouth to clog his breathing. Often, in the

clinches, through his cut and smiling lips he snarled insults unspeakable and vile in Rivera's ear. Everybody,

from the referee to the house, was with Danny and was helping Danny. And they knew what he had in mind.

Bested by this surprisebox of an unknown, he was pinning all on a single punch. He offered himself for

punishment, fished, and feinted, and drew, for that one opening that would enable him to whip a blow

through with all his strength and turn the tide. As another and greater fighter had done before him, he might

do a right and left, to solar plexus and across the jaw. He could do it, for he was noted for the strength of

Rivera's seconds were not halfcaring for him in the intervals between rounds. Their towels made a showing,

but drove little air into his panting lungs. Spider Hagerty talked advice to him, but Rivera knew it was wrong

advice. Everybody was against him. He was surrounded by treachery. In the fourteenth round he put Danny

down again, and himself stood resting, hands dropped at side, while the referee counted. In the other corner

Rivera had been noting suspicious whisperings. He saw Michael Kelly make his way to Roberts and bend and

whisper. Rivera's ears were a cat's, deserttrained, and he caught snatches of what was said. He wanted to

hear more, and when his opponent arose he maneuvered the fight into a clinch over against the ropes.

"Got to," he could hear Michael, while Roberts nodded. "Danny's got to winI stand to lose a mintI've

got a ton of money coveredmy own. If he lasts the fifteenth I'm bustthe boy'll mind you. Put something

And thereafter Rivera saw no more visions. They were trying to job him. Once again he dropped Danny and

He spoke with authority, as he had often spoken to Rivera at the training quarters. But Rivera looked hatred at

him and waited for Danny to rise. Back in his corner in the minute interval, Kelly, the promoter, came and

"Throw it, damn you," he rasped in, a harsh low voice. "You gotta lay down, Rivera. Stick with me and I'll

make your future. I'll let you lick Danny next time. But here's where you lay down."

Rivera showed with his eyes that he heard, but he made neither sign of assent nor dissent.

"You lose, anyway," Spider Hagerty supplemented. "The referee'll take it away from you. Listen to Kelly,

At the strike of the gong Rivera sensed something impending. The house did not. Whatever it was it was

there inside the ring with him and very close. Danny's earlier surety seemed returned to him. The confidence

of his advance frightened Rivera. Some trick was about to be worked. Danny rushed, but Rivera refused the

encounter. He sidestepped away into safety. What the other wanted was a clinch. It was in some way

necessary to the trick. Rivera backed and circled away, yet he knew, sooner or later, the clinch and the trick

would come. Desperately he resolved to draw it. He made as if to effect the clinch with Danny's next rush.

Instead, at the last instant, just as their bodies should have come together, Rivera darted nimbly back. And in

the same instant Danny's corner raised a cry of foul. Rivera had fooled them. The referee paused irresolutely.

The decision that trembled on his lips was never uttered, for a shrill, boy's voice from the gallery piped, "Raw

Danny cursed Rivera openly, and forced him, while Rivera danced away. Also, Rivera made up his mind to

strike no more blows at the body. In this he threw away half his chance of winning, but he knew if he was to

win at all it was with the outfighting that remained to him. Given the least opportunity, they would lie a foul

on him. Danny threw all caution to the winds. For two rounds he tore after and into the boy who dared not

meet him at close quarters. Rivera was struck again and again; he took blows by the dozens to avoid the

perilous clinch. During this supreme final rally of Danny's the audience rose to its feet and went mad. It did

"You're yellow! You're yellow!" "Open up, you cur! Open up!" "Kill'm, Danny! Kill 'm!" "You sure got 'm!

In all the house, bar none, Rivera was the only cold man. By temperament and blood he was the

hottestpassioned there; but he had gone through such vastly greater heats that this collective passion of ten

thousand throats, rising surge on surge, was to his brain no more than the velvet cool of a summer twilight.

Into the seventeenth round Danny carried his rally. Rivera, under a heavy blow, drooped and sagged. His

hands dropped helplessly as he reeled backward. Danny thought it was his chance. The boy was at, his mercy.

Thus Rivera, feigning, caught him off his guard, lashing out a clean drive to the mouth. Danny went down.

When he arose, Rivera felled him with a downchop of the right on neck and jaw. Three times he repeated

Danny, battered and heroic, still kept coming up. Kelly and others near to the ring began to cry out to the

police to stop it, though Danny's corner refused to throw in the towel. Rivera saw the fat police captain

starting awkwardly to climb through the ropes, and was not sure what it meant. There were so many ways of

cheating in this game of the Gringos. Danny, on his feet, tottered groggily and helplessly before him. The

referee and the captain were both reaching for Rivera when he struck the last blow. There was no need to stop

And when the count was finished, Danny's seconds gathered him up and carried him to his corner.

There were no congratulations for Rivera. He walked to his corner unattended, where his seconds had not yet

placed his stool. He leaned backward on the ropes and looked his hatred at them, swept it on and about him

till the whole ten thousand Gringos were included. His knees trembled under him, and he was sobbing from

exhaustion. Before his eyes the hated faces swayed back and forth in the giddiness of nausea. Then he