Contraband
Date: 2023-11-08T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Detective and mystery stories; Smuggling -- Fiction; Women journalists -- Fiction; Disappeared persons -- Fiction

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Title: Contraband

Author: Clarence Budington Kelland

Release date: November 8, 2023 [eBook #72066]

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Harper & Brothers, 1923

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/72066

Credits: Tim Lindell, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONTRABAND ***

CONTRABAND

Books by
CLARENCE BUDINGTON KELLAND

Youth Challenges
The High Flyers
The Little Moment of Happiness
Scattergood Baines
Conflict
Contraband
The Hidden Spring
The Source
Sudden Jim

HARPER & BROTHERS
Publishers

CONTRABAND

By
Clarence Budington Kelland
Author of
“YOUTH CHALLENGES” “THE HIGH FLYERS”
“THE LITTLE MOMENT OF HAPPINESS”
“SCATTERGOOD BAINES”
“CONFLICT” ETC.

Harper & Brothers Publishers
New York and London

CONTRABAND

Copyright, 1923
By Harper & Brothers
Printed in the U.S.A.

First Edition
A-X

CONTRABAND

CONTRABAND

CHAPTER I

TUBAL gave the key another quarter turn in the quoins and tested the security of the type in the form with the heel of his grimy hand. After which he shut his eyes very tight and ran his tongue carefully over his upper teeth and clucked. Then, in the voice of one who pronounces a new and wonderful thought he spoke:

“Simmy,” he said, “I dunno. Mebby so—mebby not. There’s p’ints in favor and p’ints against.”

“I,” said Simmy with the cocksureness of his seventeen years, “am goin’ to git through. Don’t ketch me workin’ for no woman.”

“She’s one of them college wimmin we’ve been readin’ about.”

“Makes it wuss. Wimmin,” said Simmy, who had given deep thought to such matters and reached profound conclusions, “hain’t got no business gittin’ all eddicated up. What they ought to study is cook books. That’s what I say.”

“Calc’late she’ll be gifted with big words.”

“She’ll wear them kind of glasses,” said Simmy, “that’ll make you think you’re lookin’ into the show winders of the Busy Big Store if you come onto her face to face.”

“Simmy, I’ll tell you suthin’.... I’ll be fifty year old, come September, and I hain’t never married one of ’em yit.”

“I hain’t never goin’ to marry, neither.”

“Shake,” said Tubal.

There ensued a silence while Tubal completed the locking of the form and secured it on the job press.

“Well,” said Tubal for the hundredth time, “Ol’ Man Nupley’s dead and gone.”

“Seems like he might ’a’ left this here paper to you ’n’ me that’s worked and slaved fer him, instid of to this female nephew of his’n....”

“Niece,” corrected Tubal. “No.... Ol’ Man Nupley wa’n’t fond of me, but he didn’t owe me no grudge to warrant him wishin’ this thing onto me. Say, we got out two issues since he passed away, hain’t we? You ’n’ me—alone and unaided.... Gawd!” Tubal mopped his brow at recollection of the mental anguish suffered in achieving this feat of editorship.

“They was dum good issues,” Simmy said, pridefully.

Tubal was not without his pride in the accomplishment—a pride tinctured with doubt which had been made acute that very morning when he stopped in the post office for the mail. Certain of the village’s professional humorists had greeted him with enthusiasm, and quoted from his works with relish. Tubal had been very much put to it for copy to fill the paper, and had seized upon every incident, great or small, as worthy of mention, and as lengthy mention as he could achieve. He had not used one word where there was a possibility of enlisting two. For instance, after hearing it quoted, he felt there was some defect in the style of the personal which stated:

Our fellow townsman, Herbert Whitcomb, has painted his large and spacious and comfortable residence on Pine Street near the corner with a coat of white paint. Herb did the job himself, working evenings, but not Sundays, he being a Methodist and superintendent of the Sunday School. Many assembled to watch our Selectman and tyler of the Masonic lodge (Herb) working at the job of painting his residence, and thus, besides showing public spirit in improving the general appearance of our village, gave many something to do, there being no other amusement in town. Good for you, Herb. That is the spirit we like.

He had rather fancied the item about Jim Bagby, and considered he had filled the maximum space with a minute piece of news.

Jim Bagby our prominent farmer and Democrat from north of town, has been dynamiting out the stumps out of the pasture lot that he has used to pasture cattle. Jim used for the purpose the best and most powerful brand of dynamite he could get and the numerous explosions of the dynamite, each blast removing a stump out of the pasture, could be heard the length and breadth of the village. Dynamite, says Jim, is the thing to make the wilderness blossom like a rose. Another year we hope to see the pasture out of which Jim dynamited the stumps covered with the verdure of potatoes or other garden truck.

Tubal recalled the mental anguish which went into the composition of these and columns of other similar items, and solemnly renounced forever the dignities of editorship.

“No,” he said, waggling his head gravely, “I calc’late Ol’ Man Nupley done us a favor by leavin’ this sheet to somebody else.”

“She’ll be comin’ on the noon train,” said Simmy. “That’s when I quit.”

“I s’pose,” Tubal said, as he cocked his eye at a cockroach scurrying across the floor, “she’ll favor Ol’ Man Nupley in looks. Seems like that’s a cross heavier ’n any woman ought to bear.” He estimated the rate of progress of the roach, and, as it were, brought down his bird with a supremely skillfully aimed deluge of the juice of the weed. “If wimmin is goin’ to insist on keepin’ on bein’ wimmin, they ought to see to it you kin look at ’em without sufferin’.”

“Mebby she’s jest comin’ up to sell out,” said Simmy, hopefully.

“Sell? Sell this here rag?... Say!”

“Why not, I’d like to know?”

“Because,” said Tubal, “it owes about two hundred dollars more’n it’s wuth ... and, now we lost the county advertisin’, it’ll owe a dum sight more.”

He walked to the door which gave from the front of the shop to the business and editorial office of the paper, and there he stood as if upon some vantage point, surveying all that existed of the Gibeon Free Press. What he saw was not especially inviting; nowhere was an indication of that romance which is believed to lurk about the business of disseminating news. The shop wore the haphazard look of a junk yard, contented to recline and snore in dust and frowziness. The room wore the air of a place where nothing ever happens and where nothing is apt to happen.... Just inside the door squatted the antiquated, limping cylinder press which gave birth weekly to the Free Press, and which gave off with sullen brazenness the look of overmuch child-bearing. It knew it was going to break down in the middle of every run, and it had been cursed at so often and so fluently that it was utterly indifferent. It was a press without ambition. Of late years it had gotten into a frame of mind where it didn’t care a hang whether it printed a paper or not—which is an alarming state of mind for a printing press to be in.... Over to the right were shelves of stock, ill sorted, dusty, dog eared at the corners where Tubal had rubbed his shoulder against them in passing. Thin stacks of red and blue board, upon which tickets for the Methodist lawn sociable or the Baptist chicken dinner might be painted, lopped with discouraged limpness over the edge of the shelving and said improper and insulting things to the slatternly press. A couple of stones elbowed each other and a case of type a little further back, and a comparatively new (and unpaid-for) job press, whose paint still existed even to shininess in spots, rather stuck up its nose at the rest of the company and felt itself altogether too good for such society. There was also a theoretical spittoon—theoretical because it was the one spot in the room safe from Tubal’s unerring jets of tobacco juice. These were the high spots arising from a jumble of rubbish which it was easier to kick about from place to place than to remove altogether.... Tubal waggled his head.

He turned to survey the business and editorial office, and found nothing there to uplift his soul. There was a grimy railing of matched lumber, inside which a table staggered under an accumulation of exchanges and catalogues and old cuts brought in to pass the evening of their lives as paper weights. An old black-walnut desk with a bookcase in its second story tried to maintain a faded dignity beside an old safe from which the combination knob had been removed for fear somebody would shut and lock it, as once happened, with disastrous results. On the wall hung a group picture of the state legislature of 1882. One could have bedded down a cow very comfortably in the waste paper on the floor.

“Simmy,” said Jake, solemnly, “she’s a hell of a messy place. Seems like we ought to kind of tidy up some for the new proprietor—or suthin’. No use, though. Hain’t no place to begin. Only thing wuth cleanin’ up is the chattel mortgage Abner Fownes holds over the place....” He turned and scowled at Simmy and smote his hands together. “By Jing!” he said, “the’s one thing we kin do—we kin wash your face. That’ll show.”

Simmy responded by jerking his thumb toward the front door, before which two men had paused, one a diminutive hunchback, the other an enormous, fleshy individual with a beard of the sort worn, not for adornment, but as the result of indolence which regards shaving as a labor not to be endured. The pair talked with manifest excitement for a moment before they entered.

“Mornin’,” said Tubal.

“Mornin’,” said the corpulent one. The hunchback squinted and showed his long and very white teeth, but did not respond verbally to the greeting.

“Say,” said the big man, “seen the sheriff?”

“Why?” replied Tubal.

“’Cause,” said Deputy Jenney, “if you hain’t nobody has.”

“Since last night about nine o’clock,” said the hunchback in the unpleasant, high-pitched voice not uncommon to those cursed as he was cursed.

“He got off’n the front porch last night around nine o’clock and says to his wife he was goin’ out to pump him a pail of fresh water. Didn’t put on a hat or nothin’.... That’s the last anybody’s seen of him. Yes, sir. Jest stepped into the house and out of the back door——”

“Mebby he fell down the well,” said Tubal, helpfully.

“His wife’s terrible upsot. I been searchin’ for him since daybreak, but not a hide or hair kin I find—nor a soul that seen him. He might of went up in a balloon right out of his back yard for all the trace he’s left.”

“What d’ye mistrust?” asked Tubal.

“You hain’t seen him?”

“No.”

“Well, say, don’t make no hullabaloo about it in the paper—yit. Mebby everything’s all right.”

The hunchback laughed, not a long, hearty laugh of many haw-haw-haws after the fashion of male Gibeon, but one short nasal sound that was almost a squawk.

“Might be,” said Simmy, “he sneaked off to lay for one of them rum runners.”

“What rum runners?” said the hunchback, snapping out the words viciously and fixing his gimlet eyes on the boy with an unblinking stare.

“The ones,” said Simmy, with perfect logic, “that’s doin’ the rum runnin’.”

“Hum!... Jest dropped in to ask if you seen him—and to kind of warn you not to go printin’ nothin’ prematurelike. We’ll be gittin’ along, Peewee and me.... Seems mighty funny a man ’u’d up and disappear like that, especial the sheriff, without leavin’ no word with me.” Deputy Jenney allowed his bulk to surge toward the door, and Peewee Bangs followed at his heels—a good-natured, dull-witted mastiff and an off-breed, heel-snapping, terrier mongrel....

“Well,” said Tubal, “that’s that. I hain’t mislaid no pet sheriff.”

“Mebby,” said Simmy, with bated breath, “them miscreants has waylaid him and masacreed him.”

“Shucks!... Say, you been readin’ them dime-novel, Jesse James stories ag’in.... Go wash your face.”

In the distance, echoing from hill to hill and careening down the valley, sounded the whistle of a locomotive.

“On time,” said Tubal.

“And her comin’ on it,” said Simmy.

From that moment neither of them spoke. They remained in a sort of state of suspended animation, listening for the arrival of the train, awaiting the arrival of the new proprietor of the Gibeon Free Press.... Ten minutes later the bus stopped before the door and a young woman alighted. Two pairs of eyes inside the printing office stared at her and then turned to meet.

“’Tain’t her,” said Tubal.

Tubal based his statement upon a preconception with which the young lady did not at all agree. She was small and very slender. Tubal guessed she was eighteen, when, as a matter of fact, she was twenty-two. There was about her an air of class, of breeding such as Tubal had noted in certain summer visitors in Gibeon. From head to feet she was dressed in white—a tiny white hat upon her chestnut hair, a white jacket, a white skirt, not too short, but of suitable length for an active young woman, and white buckskin shoes.... All these points Tubal might have admitted in the new owner of the Free Press, but when he scrutinized her face, he knew. No relative of Old Man Nupley could look like that! She was lovely—no less—with the dazzling, bewitching loveliness of intelligent youth. She was something more than lovely, she was individual. There was a certain pertness about her nose and chin, humor lurked in the corners of her eyes. She would think and say interesting things, and it would be very difficult to frighten her.... Tubal waggled his head, woman-hater that he was, and admitted inwardly that there were points in her favor.

And then—and then she advanced toward the door and opened it.

“This is the office of the Free Press, is it not?” she said.

“Yes ’m. What kin we do for you?”

“I’m not sure. A great deal, I hope.... I am Carmel Lee—the—the new editor of this paper.”

In his astonishment Tubal pointed a lean, inky finger at the tip of her nose, and poked it at her twice before he could speak. “You!... You!” he said, and then swallowed hard, and felt as if he were unpleasantly suspended between heaven and earth with nothing to do or say.

“I,” she answered.

Tubal swung his head slowly and glared at Simmy, evidently laying the blame for this dénoûement upon the boy’s shoulders.

“Git out of here,” he whispered, hoarsely, “and for Gawd’s sake—wash your face.”

Simmy vanished, and Tubal, praying for succor, remained, nonplused, speechless for once.

“Is that my desk?” asked Miss Lee. “Um!...” Then she won Tubal’s undying devotion at a single stroke. “I presume,” she said, “you are foreman of the composing room.”

He nodded dumbly.

“You—you look very nice and efficient. I’m glad I’m going to have a man like you to help me.... Is it very hard to run a real newspaper?”

“It’s easy. You hain’t got any idea how easy it is. Why, Simmy and me, we done it for two issues, and ’twan’t no chore to speak of!... Where’s that Simmy?... Hey, Simmy!”

“He went,” said Miss Lee, “to wash his face.... Now I think I shall go to the hotel. It’s next door, isn’t it?... After I have lunch I’ll come back, and we’ll go to work. You’ll—have to take me in hand, won’t you?... Is this a—a profitable paper?”

“By gosh! it will be. We’ll make her the doggonedest paper ’n the state. We’ll——”

“Thank you,” said Miss Lee. “Right after lunch we’ll start in.” And with that she walked daintily out of the office and turned toward the Commercial House.... Tubal gave a great sigh and leaned on the office railing.

“Has she gone?” came a whisper from the shop.

“You come here. Git in here where I kin talk to you.”

“Here I be.... Say, when do we quit?”

“Quit? Quit what?”

“Our jobs. We was goin’ to. You ’n’ me won’t work for no woman?”

“Who said so? Who said anythin’ about quittin’, I’d like to know. Not me.... And say, if I ketch you tryin’ to quit, I’ll skin you alive.... You ’n’ me, we got to stick by that leetle gal, we have.... Foreman of the composin’ room!... By jing!... Perty as a picture.... By jing!”

“Say, you gone crazy, or what?”

“She’s a-comin’ back right after lunch. Git to work, you. Git this office cleaned up and swept up and dusted up.... Think she kin work amongst this filth.... Git a mop and a pail. We’ll fix up this hole so’s she kin eat off’n the floor if she takes a notion.... Simmy, she’s goin’ to stay and run this here paper. That cunnin’ leetle gal’s goin’ to be our boss.... Goddlemighty!...”

CHAPTER II

CARMEL LEE had been told by everybody, ever since she could remember being told anything, that she was headstrong and impulsive. Her parents had impressed it upon her and, rather proudly, had disseminated the fact among the neighbors until it became a tradition in the little Michigan town where she was born. People held the idea that one must make allowances for Carmel and be perpetually ready to look with tolerance on outbursts of impulse. Her teachers had accepted the tradition and were accustomed to advise with her upon the point. The reputation accompanied her to the university, and only a few weeks before, upon her graduation, the head of the Department of Rhetoric (which included a course in journalism) spent an entire valuable hour beseeching her to curb her willfulness and to count as high as fifty before she reached a decision.

So Carmel, after being the victim of such propaganda for sixteen or seventeen years, could not be censured if she believed it herself. She had gotten to be rather afraid of Carmel and of what Carmel might do unexpectedly. Circumspection and repression had become her watchwords, and the present business of her life was to look before she leaped. She had made a vow of deliberation. As soon as she found herself wanting to do something she became suspicious of it; and latterly, with grim determination, she had taken herself in hand. Whenever she became aware of a desire to act, she compelled herself to sit down and think it over. Not that this did a great deal of good, but it gave her a very pleasing sensation of self-mastery. As a matter of fact, she was not at all introspective. She had taken the word of bystanders for her impulsiveness; it was no discovery of her own. And now that she was schooling herself in repression, she did not perceive in the least that she failed to repress. When she wanted to do a thing, she usually did it. The deliberation only postponed the event. When she forced herself to pause and scrutinize a desire, she merely paused and scrutinized it—and then went ahead and did what she desired.

It may be considered peculiar that a girl who had inherited a newspaper, as Carmel had done, should have paid so cursory a first visit. It would have been natural to rush into the shop with enthusiasm and to poke into corners and to ransack the place from end to end, and to discover exactly what it was she had become owner of. However, Carmel merely dropped in and hurried away.... This was repression. It was a distinct victory over impulse. She wanted to do it very much, so she compelled herself to turn her back and to go staidly to lunch at the hotel.

She ate very little and was totally unaware of the sensation she created in the dining room, especially over at the square table which was regarded as the property of visiting commercial travelers. It was her belief that she gave off an impression of dignity such as befitted an editor, and that a stern, businesslike air sat upon her so that none could mistake the fact that she was a woman of affairs. Truthfulness compels it to be recorded that she did not give this impression at all, but quite another one. She looked a lovely schoolgirl about to go canoeing with a box of bonbons on her lap. The commercial travelers who were so unfortunate as to be seated with their back toward her acquired cricks in their necks.

After dinner (in a day or two she would learn not to refer to it as luncheon) she compelled herself to go up to her room and to remain there for a full fifteen minutes. After this exercise, so beneficial to her will, she descended and walked very slowly to the office of the Free Press. Having thus given free rein to her bent for repression, she became herself and pounced. She pounced upon the office; she pounced upon the shop. She made friends with the cylinder press much as an ordinary individual would make friends with a nice dog, and she talked to the little job press as to a kitten and became greatly excited over the great blade of the paper cutter, and wanted Tubal to give her an instant lesson in the art of sticking type. For two hours she played with things. Then, of a sudden, it occurred to her to wonder if a living could be made out of the outfit.

It was essential that the paper should provide her with a living, and that it should go about the business of doing so almost instantly. At the moment when Carmel first set foot in Gibeon she was alone in the world. Old Man Nupley had been her last remaining relative. And—what was even more productive of unease of mind—she was the owner of exactly seventy-two dollars and sixteen cents!

Therefore she pounced upon the records of the concern and very quickly discovered that Old Man Nupley had left her no placer mine out of which she could wash a pan of gold before breakfast. She had, she found, become the owner of the right to pay off a number of pressing debts. The plant was mortgaged. It owed for paper; there were installments due on the job press; there were bills for this, that, and the other thing which amounted to a staggering total....

She was not daunted, however, until she examined the credit side of the affair. The year had brought the Free Press a grand total of five hundred and sixty-one paid subscriptions; the advertising, at the absurd rate of fifteen cents an inch, had been what politicians call scattering; and the job work had hardly paid for the trouble of keeping the dust off the press. The paper was dead on its feet, as so many rural weeklies are. She could not help thinking that her uncle Nupley had died in the nick of time to avoid bankruptcy.

It is worth recording that Carmel did not weep a tear of disappointment, nor feel an impulse to walk out of the place and go the thousand miles back to Michigan to take the job of teaching English in the home high school. No. The only emotion Carmel felt was anger. Her eyes actually glinted, and a red spot made its appearance upon each cheek. She had arrived in Gibeon with a glowing illusion packed in her trunk; unkind fact had snatched it away and replaced it with clammy reality.

She got up from her desk and walked into the shop, where Tubal was pretending to be busy.

“Gibeon is the county seat, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Yes ’m.”

“How many people live here?”

“We claim two thousand. Ol’ Man Nupley allowed the’ was four thousand in the township.”

“Then” (her manner put Tubal in the wrong at once and compelled him to fumble about for a defense) “why have we only a little more than five hundred subscribers?”

“Wa-al, one thing or another, seems as though. Folks never took to this paper much.... Mostly they take in the Standard from over to Litchfield.”

“Why?”

Tubal shifted the blame to Gibeon. “Seems like this hain’t much of a town.... It’s a dum funny town. I guess folks didn’t set much store by this paper on account of Abner Fownes.”

“Abner Fownes? Who is he, and what has he to do with it?”

“Abner,” said Tubal, “comes clost to bein’ a one-man band. Uh huh!... Owns the saw mills, owns half of Main Street, owns the Congo church and the circuit judge and the selectmen, and kind of claims to own all the folks that lives here.... Ol’ Man Nupley was a kind of errand boy of his’n.”

Carmel’s intuition carried her to the point. “And the people didn’t take this paper because they didn’t trust it. That was it, wasn’t it—because this Abner Fownes—owned Uncle Nupley.”

“I calc’late,” said Tubal, “you’re twittin’ on facts....” He chuckled. “Las’ fall the folks kind of riz ag’in’ Abner and dum nigh trompled on him at election time. Yes, sir. Made a fight fer it, but they didn’t elect nobody but one sheriff. Good man, too.... But Abner was too slick for ’em and he run off with all the other offices.... He holds a chattel mortgage onto this plant.”

“Is he a bad man?”

“Wa-al I dunno’s a feller could call him bad. Jest pig-headed, like, and got the idee nobody knows nothin’ but him. My notion is he gits bamboozled a lot. The Court House crowd tickles his ribs and makes him work for ’em. No, he hain’t bad. Deacon, and all that.”

“The local politicians flatter him and make use of the power his money gives him, is that it?”

“You hit the nail plumb on the head.”

“Who is the real boss?”

“Wa-al now, that’s kind of hard to say. Kind of a ring. Half a dozen of ’em. Calc’late Supervisor Delorme is close to bein’ the queen bee.”

She could visualize Abner Fownes, smug, fatuous, in a place of power which he did not know how to use, a figurehead and cat’s-paw for abler and wickeder men.... It must be confessed that her interest in him was not civic, but personal. He was, at that moment, of no importance to her except as the man who held a chattel mortgage on her plant and whose influence over her uncle had withered the possible prosperity of the paper.

She was saying to herself: “I’ve got to find a way. I’ve got to make a success of this. I can’t go back home and admit I couldn’t do it.... Everybody said I couldn’t run a paper. But I can. I can.”

The field was there, a prosperous town with a cultivated countryside to the south and rich forest lands to north and west. There was a sufficient population to support well a weekly paper; there was all of Main Street, two dozen merchants large and small, whose advertising patronage should flow in to the Free Press.

“What it needs,” she told herself, “is somebody to get behind and push.”

As a matter of fact she was convinced the failure of the paper was not due to Abner Fownes, nor to politics or outside influences, but to the lack of initiative and ability of her uncle. So much of the town as she had seen was rather pleasing; it had no appearance of resting over subterranean caverns of evil, nor had the men and women she saw on the streets the appearance of being ground down by one man’s wealth, or of smarting under the rule of an evil political ring. On the contrary, it seemed an ordinary town, full of ordinary people, who lived ordinary lives in reasonable happiness. She discounted Tubal’s disclosures and jumped to a conclusion. No, she told herself, if she proved adequate, there was no reason why she could not succeed where Uncle Nupley failed.

The telephone interrupted her reflections and she lifted the receiver.

“Is this the Free Press?” asked a voice.

“Yes.”

“Wait a moment, please.”

After some delay another voice, a large, important voice, repeated the question, and Carmel admitted a second time the identity of the paper.

“This,” said the voice, evidently impressed by the revelation it was making, “is Abner Fownes.”

“Yes,” said Carmel.

“Are you the young woman—Nupley’s niece?”

“I am.”

“Will you step over to my office at once, then. I want to see you?”

Carmel’s eyes twinkled and her brows lifted. “Abner Fownes,” she said. “The name has a masculine sound. Your voice is—distinctly masculine?”

“Eh?... What of it?”

“Why,” said Carmel, “the little book I studied in school says that when a gentleman wishes to see a lady he goes to her. I fear I should be thought forward if I called on you.”

“Not at all.... Not at all,” said the voice, and Carmel knew she had to deal with a man in whom resided no laughter.

“I shall be glad to see you whenever you find it convenient to call,” she said—and hung up the receiver.

As she turned about she saw a young man standing outside the railing, a medium-sized young man who wore his shoulders slightly rounded and spectacles of the largest and most glittering variety. The collar of his coat asked loudly to be brushed and his tie had the appearance of having been tied with one hand in a dark bedroom. He removed his hat and displayed a head of extraordinarily fine formation. It was difficult to tell if he were handsome, because the rims of his spectacles masked so much of his face and because his expression was one of gloomy wrath. Carmel was tempted to laugh at the expression because it did not fit; it gave the impression of being a left-over expression, purchased at a reduction, and a trifle large for its wearer.

“May I ask,” he said, in a voice exactly suited to his stilted diction, “if you are in charge of this—er—publication?”

“I am,” said Carmel.

“I wish,” said the young man, “to address a communication to the citizens of this village through the—er—medium of your columns.”

So this, thought Carmel, was the sort of person who wrote letters to newspapers. She had often wondered what the species looked like.

“On what subject?” she asked.

“Myself,” said he.

“It should be an interesting letter,” Carmel said, mischievously.

The young man lowered his head a trifle and peered at her over the rims of his glasses. He pursed his mouth and wrinkled one cheek, studying her as a naturalist might scrutinize some interesting, but not altogether comprehensible, bug. Evidently he could not make up his mind as to her classification.

“I fancy it will be found so,” he said.

“May I ask your name?”

He fumbled in an inner pocket and continued to fumble until it became an exploration. He produced numerous articles and laid them methodically upon the railing—a fountain pen, dripping slightly, half a dozen letters, a large harmonica, a pocket edition of Plato’s Republic, a notebook, several pencils, and a single glove. He stared at the glove with recognition and nodded to it meaningly, as much as to say: “Ah, there you are again.... Hiding as usual.” At last he extracted a leather wallet and from the wallet produced a card which he extended toward Carmel.

Before she read it she had a feeling there would be numerous letters upon it, and she was not disappointed. It said:

Evan Bartholomew Pell, A.B., Ph.D., LL.D., A.M.

“Ah!” said Carmel.

“Yes,” said the young man with some complacency.

“And your letter.”

“I am,” he said, “or, more correctly, I was, superintendent of schools in this village. There are, as you know, three schools only one of which gives instruction in the so-called high-school branches.”

“Indeed,” said Carmel.

“I have been removed,” he said, and stared at her with lips compressed. When she failed to live up to his expectations in her manifestations of consternation, he repeated his statement. “I have been removed,” he said, more emphatically.

“Removed,” said Carmel.

“Removed. Unjustly and unwarrantably removed. Autocratically and tyrannically removed. I am a victim of nepotism. I have, I fancy, proven adequate; indeed, I may say it is rare to find a man of my attainments in so insignificant a position.... But I have been cast out upon the streets arbitrarily, that a corrupt and self-seeking group of professional politicians may curry favor with a man more corrupt than themselves. In short and in colloquial terms, I have been kicked out to provide a place for Supervisor Delorme’s cousin.”

Carmel nodded. “And you wish to protest.”

“I desire to lay before the public my ideas of the obligation of the public toward its children in the matter of education. I desire to protest against glaring injustice. I desire to accuse a group of men willing to prostitute the schools to the level of political spoils. I wish to protest at being set adrift penniless.”

His expression as he uttered the word “penniless” was one of helpless bewilderment which touched Carmel’s sympathy.

“Penniless?” she said.

“I am no spendthrift,” he said, severely. “I may say that I am exceedingly economical. But I have invested my savings, and—er—returns have failed to materialize from the investment.”

“What investment?”

The young man eyed her a moment as if he felt her to be intruding unwarrantably in his private concerns, but presently determined to reply.

“A certain gold mine, whose location I cannot remember at the moment. It was described as of fabulous wealth, and I was assured the return from my investment of five hundred dollars would lift me above the sordid necessity of working for wages.... I regret to say that hitherto there has been no material assurance of the truth of the statements made to me.”

“Poor lamb!” said Carmel under her breath.

“I beg your pardon?”

Carmel shook her head. “So you are—out of a job—and broke?” she said.

“Broke,” he said, lugubriously, “is an exceedingly expressive term.”

“And what shall you do?”

He looked about him, at his feet, through the door into the shop, under the desk, at the picture on the wall in a helpless, bewildered way as if he thought his future course of action might be hiding some place in the neighborhood.

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” he said.

Carmel considered. Inexperienced as she was, new to the intrigues of Gibeon, she was able to perceive how the professor’s letter was loaded with dynamite—not for him, but for the paper which published it. Notwithstanding, it was her impulse to print it. Indeed, her mind was firmly made up to print it. Therefore she assumed an attitude of deliberation, as she had schooled herself to do.

“If you give me the letter,” she said, “I will read it and consider the wisdom of making it public.”

“I shall be obliged to you,” he said, and turned toward the door. Midway he paused. “If,” he said, “you chance to hear of a position—as teacher or otherwise—to which I may be adapted, I shall be glad to have you communicate with me.”

He moved again toward the door, opened it, paused again, and turned full to face Carmel. Then he made a statement sharply detached from the context, and astonishing not so much for the fact it stated as because of the man who stated it, his possible reasons for making the statement, and the abruptness of the change of subject matter.

“Sheriff Churchill has disappeared,” he said. Having made the statement, he shut the door after him and walked rapidly up the street.

CHAPTER III

CARMEL more than half expected Abner Fownes to appear in the office, but he did not appear. Indeed, it was some days before she caught so much as a casual glimpse of him on the street. But she was gathering information about him and about the town of Gibeon and the county of which it was the center. Being young, with enthusiasm and ideals, and a belief in the general virtue of the human race, she was not pleased.

She set about it to study Gibeon as she would have studied some new language, commencing with elementals, learning a few nouns and verbs and the local rules of the grammar of life. She felt she must know Gibeon as she knew the palm of her hand, if she were to coax the Free Press out of the slough into which it had slipped.

But it was not easy to know Gibeon, for Gibeon did not know itself. Like so many of our American villages, it was not introspective—even at election time. The tariff and the wool schedule and Wall Street received from it more attention than did keeping its own doorstep clean. It was used to its condition, and viewed it as normal. There were moments of excited interest and hot-blooded talk. Always there was an undercurrent of rumor; but it seemed to Carmel the town felt a certain pride in the iniquity of its politics. A frightful inertia resides in the mass of mankind, and because of this inertia tsars and princes and nobilities and Tammany Societies and bosses and lobbies and pork barrels and the supreme tyranny of war have existed since men first invented organization.... Sometimes it seems the world’s supply of energy is cornered by the ill-disposed. Rotten governments and administrations are tolerated by the people because they save the people the trouble of establishing and conducting something better.

In a few days Carmel perceived a great deal that was going on in Gibeon, and understood a little of it, and, seeing and understanding as she did, an ambition was born in her, the ambition to wake up Gibeon. This ambition she expressed to Tubal, who listened and waggled his head.

“One time,” he said, “I worked fer a reform newspaper—till it went into bankruptcy.”

“But look—”

“I been lookin’ a sight longer ’n’ you have, Lady.” At first he had called her Lady as a dignified and polite form of greeting. After that it became a sort of title of affection, which spread from Tubal to Gibeon. “I been lookin’ and seein’, and what I see is that they’s jest one thing folks is real int’rested in, and that’s earnin’ a livin’.”

“I don’t believe it, Tubal. I believe people want to do right. I believe everybody would rather do right and be good—if some one would just show them how.”

“Mebby, but you better let somebody else take the pointer and go to the blackboard. You got to eat three times a day, Lady, and this here paper’s got to step up and feed you. Look at it reasonable. What d’ye git by stirrin’ things up? Why, half a dozen real good folks claps their hands, but they don’t give up a cent. What d’ye git if you keep your hands off and let things slide? You git the county printin’, and consid’able advertisin’ and job work that Abner Fownes kin throw to you. You git allowed to eat. And there you be.... Take that letter of the perfessor’s, fer instance——”

“I’m going to print that letter if—if I starve.”

“Which is what the perfessor’s doin’ right now.... And where’s Sheriff Churchill? Eh? Tell me that.”

“Tubal, what is this about the sheriff? Has he really disappeared?”

“If you don’t b’lieve it, go ask his wife. The Court House crowd lets on he’s run off with a woman or mebby stole some county funds. They would.... But what woman? The’ wa’n’t no woman. And Churchill wa’n’t the stealin’ kind.”

“What do you think, Tubal?”

“Lady, I don’t even dast to think.”

“What will be done?”

“Nothin’.”

“You mean the sheriff of a county can disappear—and nothing be done about it?”

“He kin in Gibeon. Oh, you keep your eye peeled. Delorme and Fownes’ll smooth it over somehow, and the folks kind of likes it. Gives ’em suthin’ to talk about. Sure. When the’ hain’t no other topic they’ll fetch up the sheriff and argue about what become of him. But nobody’ll ever know—for sure.”

“I’m going to see Mrs. Churchill,” said Carmel, with sudden determination. “It’s news. It’s the biggest news we’ll have for a long time.”

“H’m!... I dunno. Deputy Jenney and Peewee Bangs they dropped in here a few days back and give me a tip to lay off the sheriff. Anyhow, everybody knows he’s gone.”

Carmel made no reply. She reached for her hat, put it on at the desirable angle, and went out of the door. Tubal stared after her a moment, fired an accurate salvo at a nail head in the floor, and walked back into the shop with the air of a man proceeding to face a firing squad.

Carmel walked rapidly up Main Street past the Busy Big Store and Smith Brothers’ grocery and Miss Gammidge’s millinery shop, rounding the corner on which was Field & Hopper’s bank. She cut diagonally across the Square, past the town pump, and proceeded to the little house next the Rink. The Rink had been erected some twenty-five years before during the roller-skating epidemic, but was now utilized as a manufactory of stepladders and plant stands and kitchen chairs combined in one article. This handy device was the invention of Pazzy Hendee, whose avocation was inventing, but whose occupation was constructing models of full-rigged ships. It was in the little house, square, with a mansard roof, that Sheriff Churchill’s family resided. Carmel rang the bell.

“Come in,” called a woman’s voice.

Carmel hesitated, not knowing this was Gibeon’s hospitable custom—that one had but to rap on a door to be invited to enter.

“Come in,” said the voice after a pause, and Carmel obeyed.

“Right in the parlor,” the voice directed.

Carmel turned through the folding doors to the right, and there, on the haircloth sofa, sat a stout, motherly woman in state. She wore her black silk with the air common to Gibeon when it wears its black silk. It was evident Mrs. Churchill had laid aside her household concerns in deference to the event, and, according to precedent, awaited the visits of condolence and curiosity of which it was the duty, as well as the pleasure, of her neighbors to pay.

“Find a chair and set,” said Mrs. Churchill, scrutinizing Carmel. “You’re the young woman that Nupley left the paper to, hain’t you?”

“Yes,” said Carmel, “and I’ve come to ask about your husband—if the subject isn’t too painful.”

“Painful! Laws! ’Twouldn’t matter how painful ’twas. Folks is entitled to know, hain’t they? Him bein’ a public character. Was you thinkin’ of havin’ a piece in the paper?”

“If you will permit,” said Carmel.

In spite of the attitude of state, in spite of something very like pride in being a center of interest and a dispenser of news, Carmel liked Mrs. Churchill. Her face was the face of a woman who had been a faithful helpmeet to her husband; of a woman who would be summoned by neighbors in illness or distress. Motherliness, greatness of heart, were written on those large features; and a fine kindliness, clouded by present sorrow, shone in her wise eyes. Carmel had encountered women of like mold. No village in America but is the better, more livable, for the presence and ready helpfulness of this splendid sisterhood.

“Please tell me about it,” said Carmel.

“It was like this,” said Mrs. Churchill, taking on the air of a narrator of important events. “The sheriff and me was sittin’ on the porch, talkin’ as pleasant as could be and nothin’ to give a body warnin’. We was kind of arguin’ like about my oldest’s shoes and the way he runs through a pair in less’n a month. The sheriff he was holdin’ it was right and proper boys should wear out shoes, and I was sayin’ it was a sin and a shame sich poor leather was got off on the public. Well, just there the sheriff he got up and says he was goin’ to pump himself a cold drink, and he went into the house, and I could hear the pump squeakin’, but no thought of anythin’. He didn’t come back, and he didn’t come back, so I got up, thinkin’ to myself, what in tunket’s he up to now and kind of wonderin’ if mebby he’d fell in a fit or suthin’.” Carmel took note that Mrs. Churchill talked without the air of punctuation marks. “I went out to the back door and looked, and the’ wa’n’t hide or hair of him in sight. I hollered, but he didn’t answer....” Mrs. Churchill closed her eyes and two great tears oozed between the tightly shut lids and poised on the uplands of her chubby cheeks. “And that’s all I know,” she said in a dull voice. “He hain’t never come back.”

“Have you any idea why he disappeared?”

“I got my idees. My husband was a man sot in his ways—not but what I could manage him when he needed managin’, and a better or more generous provider never drew the breath of life. But he calc’lated to do his duty. I guess he done it too well!”

“What do you mean, Mrs. Churchill?”

“The sheriff was an honest man. When the folks elected him they chose him because he was honest and nobody couldn’t move him out of a path he set his foot to travel. He was close mouthed, too, but I seen for weeks past he had suthin’ on his mind that he wouldn’t come out with. He says to me once, ‘If folks knew what they was livin’ right next door to!’ He didn’t say no more, but that was a lot for him....” Suddenly her eyes glinted and her lips compressed. “My husband was done away with,” she said, “because he was a good man and a smart man, and I’m prayin’ to God to send down vengeance on them that done it.”

She paused a moment and her face took on the grimness of righteous anger. “It’s reported to me they’re settin’ afoot rumors that he run off with some baggage—him that couldn’t bear me out of sight these dozen year; him that couldn’t git up in the mornin’ nor go to bed at night without me there to help him! They lie! I know my man and I trust him. He didn’t need no woman but me, and I didn’t need no man but him.... Some says he stole county money. They lie, too, and best for them they don’t make no sich sayin’s in my hearin’....”

“What do you think is at bottom of it all?”

Mrs. Churchill shook her head. “Some day it’ll all come out,” she said, and her word was an assertion of her faith in the goodness of God. There was a pause, and then woman’s heart cried out to woman’s heart for sympathy.

“I try to bear up and to endure it like he’d want me to. But it’s lonely, awful lonely.... Lookin’ ahead at the years to come—without him by me.... Come nighttime and it seems like I can’t bear it.”

“But—but he’ll come back,” said Carmel.

“Back! Child, there hain’t no back from where my husband’s gone.”

Somehow this seemed to Carmel a statement of authority. It established the fact. Sheriff Churchill would never return, and his wife knew it. Something had informed her past doubting. It gave Carmel a strange, uncanny sensation, and she sat silent, chilled. Then an emotion moved in her, swelled, and lifted itself into her throat. It was something more than mere anger, it was righteous wrath.

“Mrs. Churchill,” she said, “if this is true—the thing you believe—then there are men in Gibeon who are not fit to walk the earth. There is a thing here which must be crushed—unearthed and crushed.”

“If it is God’s will.”

“It must be God’s will. And if I can help—if I can do one single small thing to help——”

“Mebby,” said Mrs. Churchill, solemnly, “He has marked you out and set you apart as His instrument.”

“I want to think. I want to consider.” Carmel got to her feet. “I—— Oh, this is a wicked, cruel, cruel thing!...”

She omitted, in her emotion, any word of parting, and walked from the house, eyes shining, lips compressed grimly. In her ears a phrase repeated itself again and again—“Mebby He has set you apart as His instrument....”

On the Square she met Prof. Evan Bartholomew Pell, who first peered at her through his great beetle glasses and then confronted her.

“May I ask,” he said, brusquely, “what decision you have reached concerning my letter?”

“I am going to print it,” she said.

He was about to pass on without amenities of any sort whatsoever, but she arrested him.

“What are your plans?” she asked.

“I have none,” he said, tartly.

“No plans and no money?”

“That is a matter,” he said, “which it does not seem to me is of interest to anyone but myself.”

She smiled, perceiving now he spoke out of a boyish shame and pride, and perceiving also in his eyes an expression of worry and bewilderment which demanded her sympathy.

“No schools are open at this time of year,” she said.

“None. I do not think I shall teach again.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like school trustees,” he said, simply, and one understood how he regarded the genus school trustee as a separate classification of humanity, having few qualities in common with the general human race. “I—I shall work,” he said.

“At what? What, besides teaching, are you fitted to do?”

“I—I can dig,” he said, looking at her hopefully. “Anybody can dig. Men who dig eat—and have a place to sleep. What more is there?”

“A great deal more.... Have you no place to eat or sleep?” she said, suddenly.

“My landlady has set my trunk on the porch, and as for food, I breakfasted on berries.... They are not filling,” he added.

Carmel considered. In her few short days of ownership she had discovered the magnitude of the task of rehabilitating the Free Press. She had seen how she must be business manager, advertising solicitor, and editor, and that any of the three positions could well demand all of her time. It would be useless to edit a paper, she comprehended, if there was no business to support it. Contrariwise, it would be impossible to get business for a paper as futile as the Free Press was at that moment in its history.

“How,” she said, “would you like to be an editor—a kind of an editor?”

“I’d like it,” he said. “Then I could say to the public the things I’d like to say to the public. You can’t educate them. They don’t care. They are sunk in a slough of inertia with a rock of ignorance around their necks. I would like to tell them how thick-headed they are. It would be a satisfaction.”

“I’m afraid,” said Carmel, “you wouldn’t do for an editor.”

“Why not, I should like to know?”

“Because,” said Carmel, “you don’t know very much.”

She could see him swell with offended dignity. “Good morning,” he said, and turned away without lifting his hat.

“And you have very bad manners,” she added.

“Eh?... What’s that?”

“Yes. And I imagine you are awfully selfish and self-centered. You don’t think about anybody but yourself, do you? You—you imagine the universe has its center in Prof. Evan Bartholomew Pell, and you look down on everybody who hasn’t a lot of degrees to string after his name. You don’t like people.” She paused and snapped a question at him. “How much did they pay you for being superintendent of schools?”

“Fifteen hundred dollars a year,” he said, the answer being surprised out of him.

“Doesn’t that take down your conceit?”

“Conceit!... Conceit!...”

“Yes—a good carpenter earns more than that. The world can’t set such a high value on you if it pays a mechanic more than it does you.”

“I told you,” he said, impatiently, “that the world is silly and ignorant.”

“It is you who are silly and ignorant.”

“You—you have no right to talk to me like this. You—you are forward and—and impertinent. I never met such a young woman.”

“It’s for the good of your soul,” she said, “and because—because I think I’m going to hire you to write editorials and help gather news. Before you start in, you’ve got to revise your notions of the world—and of yourself. If you don’t like people, people won’t like you.”

Evidently he had been giving scant attention to her and plenary consideration to himself. “How much will you pay me?” he asked.

“There you are!... I don’t know. Whatever I pay you will be more than you are worth.”

He was thinking about himself again, and thinking aloud.

“I fancy I should like to be an editor,” he said. “The profession is not without dignity and scholarly qualities——”

“Scholarly fiddlesticks!”

Again he paid her no compliment of attention. “Why shouldn’t one be selfish? What does it matter? What does anything matter? Here we are in this world, rabbits caught in a trap. We can’t escape. We’re here, and the only way to get out of the trap is to die. We’re here with the trap fastened to our foot, waiting to be killed. That’s all. So what does anything matter except to get through it somehow. Nobody can do anything. The greatest man who ever lived hasn’t done a thing but live and die. Selfish? Of course I’m selfish. Nothing interests me but me. I want to stay in the trap with as little pain and trouble as I can manage.... Everything and everybody is futile.... Now you can let me be an editor or you can go along about your business and leave me alone.”

“You have a sweet philosophy,” she said, cuttingly. “If that is all your education has given you, the most ignorant scavenger on the city streets is wiser and better and more valuable to the world than you. I’m ashamed of you.”

“Scavenger!...” His eyes snapped behind his beetle glasses and he frowned upon her terribly. “Now I’m going to be an editor—the silly kind of an editor silly people like. Just to show you I can do it better than they can. I’ll write better pieces about Farmer Tubbs painting his barn red, and better editorials about the potato crop. I’m a better man than any of them, with a better brain and a better education—and I’ll use my superiority to be a better ass than any of them.”

“Do you know,” she said, “you’ll never amount to a row of pins until you really find a desire to be of use to the world? If you try to help the world, sincerely and honestly, the world finds it out and helps you—and loves you.... Don’t you want people to like you?”

“No.”

“Well, when you can come to me and tell me you do want people to like you, I’ll have some hopes of you.... Report at the office at one o’clock. You’re hired.”

She walked away from him rapidly, and he stood peering after her with a lost, bewildered air. “What an extraordinary young woman!” he said to himself. Carmel seated herself at her desk to think. Her eyes glanced downward at the fresh blotter she had put in place the day before, and there they paused, for upon its surface lay a grimy piece of paper upon which was printed with a lead pencil:

Don’t meddle with Sheriff Churchill or he’ll have company.

That was all, no signature, nothing but the message and the threat. Carmel bit her lip.

“Tubal,” she called.

“Yes, Lady.”

“Who has been in the office—inside the railing?”

“Hain’t been a soul in this mornin’,” he said—“not that I seen.”

Carmel crumpled the paper and threw it in the waste basket. Then she picked up her pen and began to write—the story of the disappearance of Sheriff Churchill. Without doubt she broke the newspaper rule that editorial matter should not be contained in a news story, but her anger and determination are offered as some excuse for this. She ended the story with a paragraph which said:

“The editor has been warned that she will be sent to join Sheriff Churchill if she meddles with his disappearance. The Free Press desires to give notice now that it will meddle until the whole truth is discovered and the criminals brought to justice. If murder has been done, the murderers must be punished.”

CHAPTER IV

WHEN Carmel entered the office next morning she found Prof. Evan Bartholomew Pell occupying her chair. On his face was an expression of displeasure. He forgot to arise as she stepped through the gate, but he did point a lead pencil at her accusingly.

“You have made me appear ridiculous,” he said, and compressed his lips with pedagogical severity. “In my letter, which you published in this paper, you misspelled the words ‘nefarious’ and ‘nepotist.’ What excuse have you to offer?”

Carmel stared at the young man, nonplused for an instant, and then a wave of pity spread over her. It was pity for a man who would not admit the existence of a forest because he was able to see only the individual trees. She wondered what life offered to Evan Pell; what rewards it held out to him; what promises it made. He was vain, that was clear; he was not so much selfish as egotistical, and that must have been very painful. He was, she fancied, the sort of man to whom correct spelling was of greater importance than correct principle—not because of any tendency toward lack of principle, but because pedantry formed a shell about him, inside which he lived the life of a turtle. She smiled as she pictured him as a spectacled turtle of the snapping variety, and it was a long time before that mental caricature was erased from her mind. Of one thing she was certain; it would not do to coddle him. Therefore she replied, coolly: “Perhaps, if you would use ordinary words which ordinary people can understand, you would run less risk of misspelling—and people would know what you are trying to talk about.”

“I used the words which exactly expressed my meaning.”

“You are sitting in my chair,” said Carmel.

Evan Bartholomew flushed and bit his lips. “I—my mind was occupied——” he said.

“With yourself,” said Carmel. “Have you come to work?”

“That was my intention.”

“Very well. Please clear off that table and find a chair.... You may smoke!”

“I do not use tobacco.”

She shrugged her shoulders, and again he flushed as if he had been detected in something mildly shameful. “I am wondering,” she said, “how you can be of use.”

“I can at least see to it that simple words are correctly spelled in this paper,” he said.

“So can Tubal, given time and a dictionary.... What have you done all your life? What experience have you had?”

He cleared his throat. “I entered the university at the age of sixteen,” he said, “by special dispensation.”

“An infant prodigy,” she interrupted. “I’ve often read about these boys who enter college when they should be playing marbles, and I’ve always wondered what became of them.”

“I have always been informed,” he said, severely, “that I was an exceptionally brilliant child.... Since I entered college and until I came here a year ago I have been endeavoring to educate myself adequately. Before I was twenty I received both LL.B. and A.B. Subsequently I took my master’s degree. I have also worked for my D.C.L., my Ph.D....”

She interrupted again. “With what end in view?” she asked.

“End?...” He frowned at her through his spectacles. “You mean what was my purpose?”

“Yes. Were you fitting yourself for any particular work?”

“No.”

“Merely piling up knowledge for the sake of piling up knowledge.”

“You speak,” he said, “as if you were reprehensible.”

She made no direct reply, but asked his age.

“Twenty-six,” he said.

“Nine years of which you have spent in doing nothing but study; cramming yourself with learning.... What in the world were you going to do with all of it?”

“That,” he said, “is a matter I have had little time to consider.”

“Did you make any friends in college?”

“I had no time——”

“Of course not. Sanscrit is more important than friends. I understand. A friend might have dropped in of an evening and interrupted your studies.”

“Exactly,” he said.

“Of course you did not go in for athletics.”

“Exercise,” he said, “scientifically taken, is essential to a clear mind. I exercise regularly morning and evening. If you are asking whether I allowed myself to be pummeled and trampled into the mud at football, or if I played any other futile game, I did not.”

“So you know almost everything there is to be known about books, but nothing about human beings.”

“I fancy I know a great deal about human beings.”

“Mr. Pell,” she said, becoming more determined to crush in the walls of his ego, “I’ve a mind to tell you exactly what I think of you.”

For an instant his eyes twinkled; Carmel was almost sure of the twinkle and it quite nonplused her. But Evan’s expression remained grave, aloof, a trifle patronizing. “I understood I was coming here to—work.”

“You are.”

“Then,” said he, “suppose we give over this discussion of myself and commence working.”

How Carmel might have responded to this impact must remain a matter for debate, because she had not quite rallied to the attack when the arrival of a third person made continuance impossible. There are people who just come; others who arrive. The first class make no event of it whatever; there is a moment when they are not present and an adjoining moment when they are—and that is all there is to it. The newcomer was an arrival. His manner was that of an arrival and resembled somewhat the docking of an ocean liner. Carmel could imagine little tugs snorting and coughing and churning about him as he warped into position before the railing. It seemed neither right nor possible that he achieved the maneuver under his own power alone. His face, as Carmel mentally decapitated him, and scrutinized that portion of his anatomy separately from the whole, gave no impression of any sort of power whatever. It was a huge putty-mask of placid vanity. There was a great deal of head, bald and brightly glistening; there was an enormous expanse of face in which the eyes and nose seemed to have been crowded in upon themselves by aggressive flesh; there were chins, which seemed not so much physical part of the face as some strange festoons hung under the chin proper as barbaric adornments. On the whole, Carmel thought, it was the most face she had ever seen on one human being.

She replaced his head and considered him as a whole. It is difficult to conceive of the word dapper as applying to a mastodon, but here it applied perfectly. His body began at his ears, the neck having long since retired from view in discouragement. He ended in tiny feet dressed in patent-leather ties. Between ears and toes was merely expanse, immensity, a bubble of human flesh. One thought of a pan of bread dough which had been the recipient of too much yeast.... The only dimension in which he was lacking was height, which was just, for even prodigal nature cannot bestow everything.

He peered at Carmel, then at Evan Bartholomew Pell, with an unwinking baby stare, and then spoke suddenly, yet carefully, as if he were afraid his voice might somehow start an avalanche of his flesh.

“I am Abner Fownes,” he said in a soft, effeminate voice.

“I am Carmel Lee,” she answered.

“Yes.... Yes.... I took that for granted—for granted. I have come to see you—here I am. Mountain come to Mohammed—eh?...” He paused to chuckle. “Very uppity young woman. Wouldn’t come when I sent for you—so had to come to you. What’s he doing here?” he asked, pointing a sudden, pudgy finger at Evan Pell.

“Mr. Pell is working for the paper.”

“Writing more letters?” He did not pause for an answer. “Mistake, grave mistake—printing letters like that. Quiet, friendly town—Gibeon. Everybody friends here.... Stir up trouble. It hurt me.”

Carmel saw no reason to reply.

“Came to advise you. Friendly advice.... I’m interested in this paper—er—from the viewpoint of a citizen and—er—financially. Start right, Miss Lee. Start right. Catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.... You commenced with vinegar. Nobody likes it. Can’t make a living with vinegar. To run a paper in Gibeon you must be diplomatic—diplomatic. Can’t expect me to support financially a paper which isn’t diplomatic, can you? Now can you?”

“What do you mean by being diplomatic?”

“Why—er taking advice—yes, taking advice.”

“From whom?”

His little eyes opened round as if in great astonishment.

“From me,” he said. “People in Gibeon—er—repose great confidence in my judgment. Great confidence.”

“What sort of advice?”

“All sorts,” he said, “but principally about what you print about different things.... Now, I should have advised you against printing this young man’s letter.”

“Would you have advised me against printing anything about the threatening note I found on my desk?”

“Ah—sense of humor, miss. Boyish prank.... Jokers in Gibeon. Town’s full of ’em.... Best-natured folks in the world, but they love to joke and to talk. Love to talk better than to joke. Um!... Mountains out of molehills—that’s Gibeon’s specialty. Mean no harm, Lord love you, not a particle—but they’ll tell you anything. Not lying—exactly. Just talk.”

“Is Sheriff Churchill’s disappearance just talk?”

“Um!... Sheriff Churchill—to be sure. Disappeared. Um!... Gabble, gabble, gabble.”

“Talk of murder is not gabble,” said Carmel.

“Ugly word.... Shouldn’t use it. Makes me shiver.” He shivered like a gelatin dessert. “Forget such talk. My advice—straight from the heart.... Stirs things up—things best forgot. Best let rest for the sake of wife and children.... Paper can’t live here without my support. Can’t be done. Can’t conscientiously support a paper that stirs up things.”

“Is that a threat, Mr. Fownes.”

“Goodness, no! Gracious, no! Just want to help.... Kind heart, Miss Lee. Always think of me as a kind heart. Love to do things for folks.... Love to do things for you.”

“Thank you, Mr. Fownes. You hold a chattel mortgage on this plant.”

“Don’t think of it. Not a breath of worry—cancel it if you say so—cancel it this minute.”

“In consideration of what?”

“Why—you put it so sharplike, so direct. I wasn’t thinking of consideration. Just being friendly and helpful.... Public-spirited gift to Gibeon. Newspaper a wonderful benefit to a town—the right kind of a newspaper.”

“That’s it, of course. The right kind of a newspaper.

“Naturally you wouldn’t make so munificent a gift to the wrong kind of newspaper. Is this the right kind?”

“It always has been,” said Mr. Fownes.

“What made it the right kind?”

“Your uncle—the former proprietor—relied on my advice. Consulted with me daily.... During many years his paper made few mistakes.”

“So, if I consult with you—daily—and act upon your advice, I’m sure to have the right kind of a paper, too?... And in that case you would cancel the chattel mortgage?”

“To be sure—exactly.”

“But if, on the contrary, I should decide to run this paper myself, as I see fit, without taking advice from anybody, and printing what I think should be printed?”

Mr. Fownes pondered this briefly. “Then,” he said, “I should have to wait—and determine how sound your judgment is.... I fear your sympathies—natural sympathies for a young woman—sway you.... Er ... as in the instance of this young man. His letter was not kindly, not considerate. It hurt people’s feelings. Then, it appears, you have hired him.... I hope that step may be reconsidered.... Gibeon—found this young man unsatisfactory.”

“Would that have anything to do with—the chattel mortgage?”

“It might—it might.”

“My uncle always followed your advice?”

“Ah ... implicitly.”

“He did not grow rich,” said Carmel.

“He lived,” said Mr. Fownes, and blinked his little eyes as he turned his placid gaze full upon her.

“I think you have made yourself clear, Mr. Fownes. I shall think over what you have said—and you will know my decision.”

“Consider well—er—from all angles.... Mountain came to Mohammed....”

He commenced to warp himself away from the railing, and slowly, ponderously, testing the security of each foot before he trusted his weight to it, he moved toward the door. There he paused, turned his bulk, the whole of him, for it was quite impossible for him to turn his head without his shoulders going along with it, and smiled the most placid smile Carmel ever saw. “Er—I am a widower,” he said....

Carmel remained standing, her eyes following him as he turned up the street. “What’s underneath it all?” she said, aloud. “What’s it all about?”

Evan Pell turned in his chair and said, sharply, “Textbooks have this merit at least—they can instruct in the simplest rules of logic.”

“The fatuous idiot,” said Carmel.

“It must be a great satisfaction,” said Evan, dryly, “to understand human beings so thoroughly.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was admiring,” said Evan, “the unerring certainty with which you arrived at Mr. Fownes’s true character.”

She peered at him, searching for a trace of irony, but his face was innocent, bland.

“Why does a wealthy man like Mr. Fownes—a powerful man—give a thought to so insignificant a thing as this paper?”

“An interesting speculation—provided your premises are true.”

“What premises?”

“Your major premise, so to speak—wealth.”

“Why, is he not rich?”

“All the indications bear you out.”

“He owns mills, and miles of timberland.”

“Um!... Am I to remain in your employ—or shall you accept the—advice—of Mr. Fownes?”

“This is my paper. So long as it is mine I’m going to try to run it. And if that man thinks he can threaten me with his old chattel mortgage, he’s going to wake up one bright morning to find his mistake. Maybe he can take this paper away from me, but until he does it’s mine.... You are working for me, Mr. Pell.”

“Very gratifying.... In which case, if you mean what you say, and if I, with so many years wasted upon books, as you say, may offer a word of advice, this would be it: Find out who owns the Lakeside Hotel.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Protracted study of the various sciences may be folly, but it does train the mind to correct observation and in the ability to arrange and classify the data observed. It teaches how to move from cause to effect. It teaches that things which equal the same thing are equal to each other.”

“What is the Lakeside Hotel?”

“A resort of sordid reputation some three miles from town.”

“And who owns it?”

“Jonathan Bangs, colloquially known as Peewee, is the reputed owner.”

“And what has that to do with Abner Fownes?”

“That,” he said, “is a matter which has aroused my curiosity for some time.”

CHAPTER V

CARMEL was not long in discovering Gibeon’s attitude toward advertising. The local merchants regarded it much as they did taxes, the dull season, so called (for in Gibeon’s business world there were only two seasons, the dull and the busy) and inventory sales. All were inevitable, in the course of nature, and things which always had and always would happen. One advertised, not with enthusiasm and in expectancy of results, but because men in business did advertise. Smith Brothers’ grocery bore reluctantly the expense of a four-inch double-column display which was as unchanging as the laws of the Medes and Persians. It stated, year in and year out, that Smith Brothers were the headquarters for staple and fancy groceries. The advertisement was as much a part of their business as the counter. The Busy Big Store was more energetic; its copy was changed every year on the 1st of January. Seven years before, Miss Gammidge let it be known through the columns of the Free Press that she was willing to sell to the public millinery and fancy goods, and that statement appeared every week thereafter without change of punctuation mark. The idea that one attracted business by means of advertising was one which had not penetrated Gibeon, advertising was a business rite, just as singing the Doxology was an indispensable item in the service of the local Presbyterian church. It was done, as cheaply and inconspicuously as possible, and there was an end of it.

As for subscribers, they were hereditary. Just as red hair ran in certain families, subscribing to the paper ran in others. It is doubtful if anybody took in the paper because he wanted it; but it was tradition for some to have the Free Press, and therefore they subscribed. It was useful for shelf covering. Red hair is the exception rather than the rule; so were subscribing families.

Carmel pondered deeply over these facts. If, she said to herself, all the merchants advertised as they should advertise, and if all the inhabitants who should subscribe did subscribe, then the Free Press could be made a satisfactorily profitable enterprise. How might these desirable results be obtained? She was certain subscribers might be gotten by making the paper so interesting that nobody could endure to wait and borrow his neighbor’s copy; but how to induce merchants to advertise she had not the remotest idea.

There was the bazaar, for instance, which did not advertise at all; the bank did not advertise; the two photographers did not advertise; the bakery did not advertise. She discussed the matter with Tubal and Simmy, who were not of the least assistance, though very eager. She did not discuss it with Prof. Evan Bartholomew Pell because that member of the staff was engaged in writing a snappy, heart-gripping article on the subject of “Myths and Fables Common to Peoples of Aryan Derivation.” It was his idea of up-to-date journalism, and because Carmel could think of nothing else to set him to work at, she permitted him to continue.

“Advertising pays,” she said to Tubal. “How can I prove it to these people?”

“Gawd knows, Lady. Jest go tell ’em. Mebby they’ll believe you.”

“They won’t b’lieve nothin’ that costs,” said Simmy, with finality.

“I’m going out to solicit advertising,” she said, “and I’m not coming back until I get something.”

“Um!... G’-by, Lady. Hope we see you ag’in.”

In front of the office Carmel hesitated, then turned to the left. The first place of business in that direction was identified by a small black-and-gold sign protruding over the sidewalk, making it known that here one might obtain the handiwork of Lancelot Bangs, Photographer. In glass cases about the doors were numerous specimens of Lancelot’s art, mostly of cabinet size, mounted on gilt-edged cards. Mr. Bangs, it would appear, had few ideas as to the posturing of his patrons. Gentlemen, photographed alone, were invariably seated in a huge chair, the left hand gripping the arm, inexorably, the right elbow leaning upon the other arm, and the head turned slightly to one side as if the sitter were thinking deep thoughts of a solemn nature. Ladies stood, one foot advanced, hands clasped upon the stomach in order that the wedding ring might show plainly; with chins dipped a trifle downward and eyes lifted coyly, which, in dowagers of sixty, with embonpoints and steel-rimmed spectacles, gave a highly desirable effect.

Carmel studied these works of art briefly and then climbed the uncarpeted stairs. Each step bore upon its tread a printed cardboard sign informative of some business or profession carried on in the rooms above, such as Jenkins & Hopper, Fire Insurance; Warren P. Bauer, D.D.S., and the like. The first door at the top, curtained within, was labeled Photographic Studio, and this Carmel entered with some trepidation, for it was her first business call. As the door swung inward a bell sounded in the distance. Carmel stood waiting.

Almost instantly a youngish man appeared from behind a screen depicting a grayish-blue forest practically lost to view in a dense fog. At sight of Carmel he halted abruptly and altered his bearing and expression to one of elegant hospitality. He settled his vest cautiously, and passed his hand over his sleek hair daintily to reassure himself of its perfect sleekness. Then he bowed.

“A-aa-ah.... Good morning!” he said, tentatively.

“Mr. Bangs?”

“The same.”

“I am Miss Lee, proprietor of the Free Press.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Lee, though, of course, I knew who you were right off. I guess everybody in town does,” he added. “We don’t have many move here that would photograph as well as you would—bust or full length.... What kin I do for you?”

“I came to talk to you about advertising in the Free Press.”

“Advertising!” Manifestly he was taken aback. “Why, I haven’t ever advertised. Haven’t anythin’ to advertise. I just take pictures.”

“Couldn’t you advertise that?”

“Why—everybody knows I take pictures. Be kind of funny to tell folks what everybody knows.” He laughed at the humor of it in a very genteel way.

“You would like to take more pictures than you do, wouldn’t you? To attract more business.”

“Can’t be done.”

“Why?”

“Wa-al, folks don’t get their pictures taken like they buy flour. Uh-uh!... They got to have a reason to have ’em taken—like a weddin’, or an engagement, or gettin’ to be sixty year old, or suthin’ sim’lar. No. Folks in Gibeon don’t just go off and get photographed on the spur of the moment, like you might say. They hain’t got any reason to.”

“There are lots of people here who have never been photographed, aren’t there?”

“Snags of ’em.”

“Then why not induce them to do it at once?”

“Can’t be done, no more’n you can induce a man to have a weddin’ anniversary when he hain’t got one.”

“I believe it could. I think we could put the idea into their heads and then offer them inducements to do it right off.”

He shook his head stubbornly and glanced down at the crease in his trousers. Carmel’s eyes twinkled as she regarded him, for he was quite the dressiest person she had seen in Gibeon. He was painstakingly dressed, laboriously dressed. He was so much dressed that you became aware of his clothes before you became aware of him.

“Mr. Bangs,” she said, “you look to me like a man who is up to the minute—like a man who would never let a chance slip past him.”

“Folks do give me credit for keepin’ my eyes open.”

“Then I believe I can make you a proposition you can’t refuse. I just want to prove to you what advertising can do for your business. Now, if you will let me write an ad for you, and print it, I can show you, and I know it. How much are your best cabinet photographs?”

“Twelve dollars a dozen.”

“Would there be a profit at ten dollars?”

“Some—some.”

“Then let me advertise that for a week you will sell your twelve-dollar pictures for ten. The advertisement will cost five dollars. If my advertisement brings you enough business so your profit will be double that amount, you are to pay for the ad. If it is less, you needn’t pay.... But if it does bring in so many customers, you must agree to run your ad every week for three months.... Now, I—I dare you to take a chance.”

Now there was one thing upon which Lancelot Bangs prided himself, and that was his willingness to take a chance. He had been known to play cards for money, and the horse races of the vicinity might always count upon him as a patron. Beside that, he had a natural wish to impress favorably this very pretty girl whose manner and clothes and bearing coincided with his ideal of a “lady.”

“I’ll jest go you once,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said, and was turning toward the door when Lancelot arrested her.

“Er—I wonder if I could get your opinion?” he said. “You come from where folks know what’s what.... This suit, now.” He turned completely around so she might view it from all sides. “How does it stand up alongside the best dressers where you come from?”

“It—it is very impressive, Mr. Bangs.”

“Kind of figgered it would be. Had it made to order. Got a reputation to keep up, even though there’s them that tries to undermine it. Folks calls me the best-dressed man in Gibeon, and I feel it’s my duty to live up to it.... Well, I ain’t vain. Jest kind of public duty. Now George, he’s set out to be the best-dressed man, and so’s Luke. That’s why I got this suit and this shirt and tie. I aim to show ’em.”

“I should say you were doing it,” said Carmel. “And who are Luke and George?”

“George Bogardus is the undertaker, and Luke Smiley clerks in the bank.”

“I haven’t seen them,” said Carmel, “but I’m certain you haven’t the least cause for worry.”

“Would you call this suit genteel?”

“That’s the word. It is exactly the word. It—it’s the most genteel suit I ever saw.”

She was about to leave when a rapping on the back door of the studio attracted Mr. Bangs’s attention, and attracted it so peculiarly that Carmel could not but remark it with something more than curiosity. If one can have suspicion of an individual one does not know, with whose life and its ramifications she is utterly unaware, Carmel was suspicious of Mr. Bangs. It was not an active suspicion—it was a vague suspicion. It resembled those vague odors which sometimes are abroad in the air, odors too faint to be identified, so adumbrant one cannot be sure there is an odor at all.... Mr. Bangs, who had been the picture of self-satisfaction, became furtive. For the first time one ceased to be aware of his clothes and focused upon his eyes....

“Er—pardon me a moment,” he said, in a changed voice, and made overrapid progress to answer the knock. It was inevitable that Carmel’s ears should become alert.

She heard a door opened and the entrance of a man who spoke in an attempted whisper, but not a successful whisper. It was as if a Holstein bull had essayed to whisper.

“Sh-sssh!” warned Mr. Bangs.

“It’s here,” said the whisper. “Back your jitney into the first tote road this side of the hotel, and then mosey off and take a nap. Everything’ll be fixed when you git back.”

“Sh-sssh!” Mr. Bangs warned a second time.

Carmel heard the door open and close again, and Mr. Bangs returned.

“Express Parcel,” he said, with that guilty air which always accompanies the unskillful lie.

The zest for selling advertising space had left Carmel; she wanted to think, to be alone and to consider various matters. She felt a vague apprehension, not as to herself, but of something malign, molelike, stealthy, which dwelt in the atmosphere surrounding Gibeon. Perfunctorily she took her leave, and, instead of pursuing her quest, returned to her desk and sat there staring at the picture above her head.

Gibeon! She was thinking about Gibeon. The town had ceased to be a more or less thriving rural community, peopled by simple souls who went about their simple, humdrum round of life pleasantly, if stodgily. Rather the town and its people became a protective covering, a sort of camouflage to conceal the real thing which enacted itself invisibly. She wondered if Gibeon itself realized. It seemed not to. It laughed and worked and went to church and quarreled about line fences and dogs and gossiped about its neighbors as any other town did.... Perhaps, unaccustomed to the life, excited by new environment, she had given too great freedom to her imagination.... She did not believe so. No. Something was going on; some powerful evil influence was at work, ruthless, malevolent. Its face was hidden and it left no footprints. It was capable of murder!... What was this thing? What was its purpose? What activity could include the doing away with a sheriff and the services of a rural fop like Lancelot Bangs?...

Carmel was young. She was dainty, lovely. Always she had been shielded and protected and petted—which, fortunately, had not impaired the fiber of her character.... Now, for the first time, she found herself staring into the white, night eyes of one of life’s grim realities; knew herself to be touched by it—and the knowledge frightened her....

Evan Bartholomew Pell stayed her unpleasant thoughts, and she was grateful to him.

“Miss Lee—I have—ah—been engaged upon a computation of some interest—academically. It is, of course, based upon an arbitrary hypothesis—nevertheless it is instructive.”

“Yes,” said Carmel, wearily.

“We take for our hypothesis,” said Evan, “the existence of a number of men willing to evade or break the law for profit. Having assumed the existence of such an association, we arrive upon more certain ground.... Our known facts are these. Intoxicating liquor is prohibited in the United States. Second, intoxicants may be bought freely over the Canadian line. Third, the national boundary is some twenty miles distant. Fourth, whisky, gin, et cetera, command exceedingly high prices in the United States. I am informed liquor of excellent quality commands as much as a hundred dollars per dozen bottles, and less desirable stock up to fifty and seventy-five dollars. Fifth, these same liquors may be bought for a fraction of that cost across the line. Now, we arrive at one of our conclusions. The hypothetical association of lawless men, provided they could smuggle liquor into this country, would realize a remarkable percentage of profit. Deducting various costs, I estimate the average profit per dozen bottles would approximate thirty-five dollars. I fancy this is low rather than excessive. One thousand cases would fetch a profit of thirty-five thousand dollars.... Let us suppose an efficient company engaged in the traffic. They would smuggle into the country a thousand cases a month.... In that case their earnings would total three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.... Ahem!... Interesting, is it not?”

“Yes,” said Carmel, “but what set you thinking about it?”

Evan peered at her gravely through his spectacles, as he might peer at some minute zoological specimen through a microscope, and was long in replying.

“I—er—was merely wondering,” he said, “if a life of lawlessness could not offer greater rewards than—ah—respectable journalism.”

“Are you proposing that I become a—rum runner?”

“Not exactly,” said Evan Bartholomew, “not precisely. I was, so to speak, offering you an opportunity to exercise your reason.... If exercise is salubrious for the body, why not for the mind?” He cleared his throat and turned his back upon her abruptly.

“The various sciences you have studied,” she said, sharply, “did not include good manners.”

“As I understand it,” said Evan, “our relations are not social, but purely of a business nature. If I am in error, I beg you to correct me.”

Carmel smiled. What a strange, self-centered, egotistical little creature he was! So this was what became of infant prodigies.... They dried up into dusty intellect, lived for intellect alone; became a species of hermit living in social poverty in the cave of their own skulls!

“I cannot,” she said, “fancy you in any relation which remotely approximated social.”

“H’m!” said Professor Pell.

CHAPTER VI

IT was on the morning following the issuance of the second publication of the Free Press under Carmel’s editorship that she became uneasily aware of a marked scrutiny of herself by Evan Bartholomew Pell. There was nothing covert about his study of her; it was open and patent and unabashed. He stared at her. He watched her every movement, and his puckered eyes, wearing their most studious expression, followed her every movement. It was the first sign of direct interest he had manifested in her as a human being—as distinct from an employer—and she wondered at it even while it discomfited her. Even a young woman confident in no mean possession of comeliness may be discomfited by a persistent stare. It was not an admiring stare; rather it was a researchful stare, a sort of anatomical stare. Being a direct young person, Carmel was about to ask him what he meant by it, when he spared her the trouble.

“Er—as I was approaching the office this morning,” he said, in an especially dry and scholarly voice, “I chanced to overhear a young man make the following remark, namely: ‘Mary Jenkins is a pretty girl.’... Now it is possible I have encountered that expression on numerous occasions, but this is the first time I have become conscious of it, and curious concerning it.”

“Curious?”

“Precisely.... As to its significance and—er—its causes. I have been giving consideration to it. It is not without interest.”

“Pretty girls,” said Carmel, somewhat flippantly, “are always supposed to be of interest to men.”

“Um!... I have not found them so. That is not the point. What arrested my thought was this: What constitutes prettiness? Why is one girl pretty and another not pretty? You follow me?”

“I think so.”

“Prettiness, as I understand it, is a quality of the personal appearance which gives to the beholder a pleasurable sensation.”

“Something of the sort.”

“Ah.... Then, what causes it? It is intangible. Let us examine concrete examples. Let us stand side by side Mary Jenkins, who is said to possess this quality, and—shall we say?—Mrs. Bogardus, who is reputed not to possess it. Why is one pretty and the other quite the opposite of pretty?” He shook his head. “I confess I had never become consciously aware of this difference between women....”

“What?”

He opened his eyes in mild surprise at the force of her exclamation.

“As a matter of fact,” he said, patiently, “I do not recall taking special notice of any individual woman.... As to this matter of prettiness—what constitutes it? What assembling of features and contours create a pleasant sensation in the beholder, and why?... Perhaps you noted how I have been scrutinizing you this morning?”

“I most certainly did.”

“Um!... It was for the purpose of determining if your appearance aroused pleasant sensations in myself.”

“And did it?”

He wrinked his eyes behind his glasses and pushed stiff fingers through his hair. “It is difficult to determine with accuracy, or to state in terms the degree of pleasure derived, but I am almost certain that I derive a mild satisfaction from regarding you.”

“I—I am overwhelmed,” said Carmel, and with abruptness she passed through the wicket and out into the composing room, where she sat down in Tubal’s rope-bottomed chair, breathless with laughter.

“Oh, Tubal,” she said, “what sort of creature is he anyhow?”

“The Prof.?”

She nodded weakly.

“H’m.... The Prof.’s a kind of cabbage that never headed up,” said Tubal, with finality. “He’s got all the roots and leaves, like that kind of a cabbage, and, sim’lar, he hain’t no idee how to fold ’em up, or why he’s a cabbage, nor that cabbages is the chief ingredient of sauerkraut.”

“Yes,” said Carmel, “that’s it.” And for a long time after that she continued to think of Evan Pell as a cabbage which had grown to maturity without fulfilling a cabbage’s chief object in life, which is to head. “Only,” she said, “he’s really just the opposite. He’s never done anything but come to head. He’s comatose from his eyebrows to his toes.”

The second issue of the Free Press had brought faint encouragement. There had been a slight increase in advertising, due to Carmel’s solicitations, but her pleasure in this growth was somewhat dimmed by a guilty feeling that it was not due to any merit of the paper, or of her solicitations, but to a sort of rudimentary gallantry on the part of a few merchants.... Perhaps half a dozen men had lounged in to subscribe, investing a dollar and a half in curiosity.... But, to put the worst face on it, she had held her own.

She really felt she had improved the paper. The columns of personals, which had been intrusted to Evan Pell, were full of items. He had shown an unusual aptitude for observing the minutiæ of the community. Having observed, he would have reported in the language of a treatise on sociology, but Carmel referred him to the files, and admonished him to study the style of the late Uncle Nupley. This he had done grimly, ironically, and the result was a parrotlike faithfulness.... He had also read and corrected all the proofs, to the end that the sensibilities of the community be not offended by grammatical gaucheries.

He had been offended close to resignation when Carmel insisted upon running, in inch-tall, wooden type—across the top of the first page—this query:

WHO IS THE HANDSOMEST MAN IN GIBEON

That was her great idea, born of her interview with Lancelot Bangs. “If papers run beauty contests for women,” she said, “why not run handsome contests for men?... Anyhow, it’ll be fun, and I’m entitled to a little pleasure. Men are vain. It will make talk, and talk is advertising, and advertising pays.”

Evan inveighed against the scheme as undignified, stultifying, and belittling to a dignified profession.

“If it brings in subscriptions—and dollars,” said Carmel, “we should worry!”

Evan closed his eyes in pain. “We should worry!... I beg of you.... That barbaric phrase! The basest argot. Our newspapers should be the palladium of the purity of the language. If such expressions are tolerated——” He stopped abruptly because his mind could not encompass the horrors which would result from their toleration.

“Anyhow, I’m going to do it—and you’ll see. A regular voting. Coupons and everything. We’ll have a six months’ subscription worth fifty votes, a year’s subscription worth a hundred votes.”

“But—er—who will they vote for?”

“Just wait,” she said.

Following which she proceeded with enthusiasm. First she printed the rules of the contest in the Free Press, and then she went to Tubal.

“I want to stick things up all over the township,” she said, “telling about it.”

“We got a mess of yaller stock,” he said. “You write it out and I’ll print it, and we’ll make the Prof. go and paste ’em up.”

So it was done, and on a day Gibeon awoke to find itself placarded with large yellow notices making it know that the Free Press was in a fever to discover who was considered the handsomest man in town, and to read the paper for particulars. Carmel was right—it caused talk....

In other matters she was feeling her way, and the way was not plain to her. Of petty news there was aplenty, and this she printed. She also printed a trifling item about a traveling salesman who had been “making” the territory for years in a buggy, and who had been detected in the act of smuggling a few bottles of liquor over the border in his sample case, thus adding to a meager income.

“There’s your vast liquor traffic,” she said to Evan Pell, “a poor, fat little drummer with six bottles of whisky.”

“Um!... Who arrested him?”

“Deputy Jenney,” she said.

“There is,” said Evan, “a phrase which I have noted in the public prints. It is, ‘strangling competition.’”

“What do you mean?”

“Why—er—if you were engaged in a—profitable enterprise, and some individual—er—encroached, you would abate him, would you not? That is the ethics of business.”

“Do you infer this drummer was abated as a competitor?”

“Oh, not in the least—not in the least!” He spoke airily, as one who disposes of a troublesome child.

The incident, small as it was, troubled her. Evan Pell, by his cryptic utterances, set her thinking.... If her imagination had not tricked her wholly there was a reticence about Gibeon; there was something Gibeon hid away from her.... A thing was transpiring which Gibeon did not wish to be known—at least the powerful in Gibeon.... She had encountered whisperings and slynesses.... She laughed at herself. She would be seeing specters presently, she told herself.... But there was the disappearance of Sheriff Churchill. There was the warning note to herself. There were many petty incidents such as the one in Lancelot Bangs’s studio. But why connect them with illicit traffic in intoxicants?... It was absurd to imagine an entire town debauched by the gainfulness of whisky running.... It were a matter best left alone.

And so, pursuing her policy of feeling her way, the current issue of the Free Press was quite innocuous—save for what is known technically as a “follow-up” on the subject of Sheriff Churchill, and an editorial in which was pointed out the lethargy of official Gibeon in assailing the mystery.

As she was leaving the hotel after luncheon that day, she encountered Abner Fownes making his progress down the street. It was a slow, majestic progress, and quite impressive. Mr. Fownes carried himself with an air. He realized his responsibilities as a personage, and proceeded with the air of a statesman riding in a victoria through a cheering crowd. He spoke affably and ostentatiously to everyone, but when he met Carmel face to face, he paused.

“Um!... A hum!... I have read the paper—read it all.”

“I hope it pleased you.”

“It did not,” said Mr. Fownes.

“Indeed! What fault did you find?”

“You didn’t consult with me.... Told you to consult with me.... Number of things shouldn’t have been mentioned. Editorial on Churchill—bad business.... Young woman, you can see past the end of your nose.”

“I hope so.”

“Didn’t I make myself plain?”

“You did.”

“Um!... Hem!... No time for nonsense. After this—want to see every line goes in that paper.”

“Before it is published?” Carmel was stirred to antagonism, but forced herself to speak without heat.

“Before it’s published.... I’ll tell you what to print and what not to print.”

“Oh,” she said, softly, “you will!”

“I own that paper—practically.... I let it live. You’re dependent on me.”

Carmel’s eyes snapped now; she was angry. “I fancied I owned the Free Press,” she said.

“Just so long as I let you—and I’ll let you as long as you—edit it—er—conservatively.”

“And conservatively means so long as I print what you want printed, and omit what you wish omitted?”

“Exactly,” he said. “You’ve kept that schoolteaching fellow after I told you not to.”

She paused a moment, and then she said, very quietly and slowly, “I think, Mr. Fownes, that you and I have got to come to an understanding.”

“Exactly what I’m getting at.”

“Very well, now please listen carefully, and I’m sure you’ll understand.... At this moment I own the Free Press. Until your chattel mortgage falls due—and that is two months away—I shall continue to own it.... During that time I shall edit it as I see fit. I think that is clear.... I shall ask no advice from you. I shall take no dictation from you. What I believe should be printed, I shall print.... Good afternoon, Mr. Fownes.”

She brushed past him and walked rapidly toward the office; Mr. Fownes stood for a moment frowning; then he turned his round head upon his shoulders—apparently there was no neck to assist in the process—and stared after her. It was not an angry stare, nor a threatening stare. Rather it was appraising. If Carmel could have studied his face, and especially his eyes, at that moment, she would have wondered if he were so fatuous as she supposed. She might even have asked herself if he were really, as certain people in Gibeon maintained, nothing but a bumptious figurehead, used by stronger men who worked in his shadow.... There was something in Abner Fownes’s eyes which was quite worthy of remark; but perhaps the matter most worthy of consideration was that he manifested no anger whatever—as a vain man, a little man, bearded as he had been by a mere girl, might have done....

He peered after her briefly, then, by a series of maneuvers, set his face again in the direction he had been traveling, and proceeded magnificently on his way.... Carmel would have been more disturbed, and differently disturbed, could she have seen into the man’s mind and read what was passing in its depths. His thoughts had not so much to do with Carmel as an editor as with Carmel as a woman.

CHAPTER VII

CARMEL entered the office of the Free Press, after her encounter with Abner Fownes, in a temper which her most lenient friend could not describe as amiable. It was no small part of Carmel’s charm that she could be unamiable interestingly. Her tempers were not set pieces, like the Niagara Falls display at a fireworks celebration. They did not glow and pour and smoke until the spectators were tired of them and wanted to see something else. Rather they were like gorgeous aërial bombs which rent the remote clouds with a detonation and lighted the heavens with a multitude of colored stars. Sometimes her choicest tempers were like those progressive bombs which keep on detonating a half a dozen times and illuminating with different colored stars after each explosion. This particular temper was one of her best.

“From now on,” she said to nobody in particular, and not at all for the purpose of giving information, “this paper is going to be run for one single purpose. It’s going to do everything that pompous little fat man, with his ears growing out of his shoulders, doesn’t want it to. It’s going to hunt for things he doesn’t like. It is going to annoy and plague and prod him. If a paper like this can make a man like him uncomfortable, he’ll never know another peaceful moment....”

Evan Pell looked up from his table—over the rims of his spectacles—and regarded her with interest.

“Indeed!” he said. “And what, if I may ask, has caused this—er—declaration of policy?”

“He looked at me,” Carmel said, “and he—he wiggled all his chins at me.”

Tubal thrust his head through the doorway. “What’d he do?” he demanded, belligerently. “If he done anythin’ a gent shouldn’t do to a lady I’ll jest ca’mly walk over there and twist three-four of them chins clean off’n him.”

“I wish you would.... I wish you would.... But you mustn’t.... He gave me orders. He told me I was to let him read every bit of copy which went into this paper. He said I must have his O. K. on everything I print.”

“Ah!” said Evan Pell. “And what did you rejoin?”

“I told him this was my paper, and so long as it was mine, I should do exactly what I wanted with it, and then I turned my back and walked away leaving him looking like a dressed-up mushroom—a fatuous mushroom.”

“A new variety,” said Pell.

“I—I’ll make his life miserable for sixty days anyhow.”

“If,” said Pell, “he permits you to continue for sixty days.”

“I’ll continue, not for sixty days, but for years and years and years—till I’m an old, gray-headed woman—just to spite him. I’ll make this paper pay! I’ll show him he can’t threaten me. I’ll——”

“Now, Lady,” said Tubal, “if I was you I’d set down and cool off. If you’re spoilin’ fer a fight you better go into it level-headed and not jest jump in flailin’ your arms like a Frenchy cook in a tantrum. Abner Fownes hain’t no infant to be spanked and put to bed. If you calc’late to go after his scalp, you better find out how you kin git a grip onto his hair.”

“And,” said Pell, “how you can prevent his—er—getting a grip on yours.”

“I don’t believe he’s as big a man as he thinks he is,” said Carmel.

“I have read somewhere—I do not recall the author at the moment—a word of advice which might apply to this situation. It is to the effect that one should never underestimate an antagonist.”

“Oh, I shan’t. I’ll cool down presently, and then I’ll be as cold-blooded and calculating as anybody. But right now I—I want to—stamp on his pudgy toes.”

The telephone interrupted and Evan Pell put the receiver to his ear. “... Yes, this is the Free Press.... Please repeat that.... In Boston last night?... Who saw him? Who is speaking?” Then his face assumed that blank, exasperated look which nothing can bring in such perfection as to have the receiver at the other end of the line hung up in one’s ear. He turned to Carmel.

“The person”—he waggled his thumb toward the instrument—“who was on the wire says Sheriff Churchill was seen in Boston last night?”

“Alive?”

“Alive.”

“Who was it? Who saw him?”

“When I asked that—he hung up the receiver in my ear.”

“Do you suppose it is true?”

“Um!... Let us scrutinize the matter in the light of logic—which it is your custom to ridicule. First, we have an anonymous communication. Anonymity is always open to suspicion. Second, it is the newspaper which is informed—not the authorities. Third, it is the newspaper which has been showing a curiosity as to the sheriff’s whereabouts—er—contrary to the wishes of certain people....”

“Yes....”

“From these premises I would reason: first, that the anonymous informer wishes the fact to be made public; second, that he wishes this paper to believe it; third, that, if the paper does believe it, it will cease asking where the sheriff is and why; and fourth, that if this report is credited, there will be no search by anybody for a corpus delicti.”

“A corpus delicti! And what might that be?”

Evan Pell sighed with that impatient tolerance which one exhibits toward children asking questions about the obvious.

“It has been suggested,” he said, “that Sheriff Churchill has been murdered. The first requisite in the establishment of the commission of a murder is the production of the corpus delicti—the body of the victim. If the body cannot be produced, or its disposal established, there can be no conviction for the crime. In short, a murder requires the fact of a dead man, and until the law can be shown a veritable body it is compelled, I imagine, to presume the victim still alive. Here, you will perceive, the effort is to raise a presumption that Sheriff Churchill is not a corpus delicti.”

“Then you don’t believe it?”

“Do you?”

“I—I don’t know. Poor Mrs. Churchill! For her sake I hope it is true.”

“H’m!... If I were you, Miss Lee, I would not inform Mrs. Churchill of this—without substantiation.”

“You are right. Nor shall I print it in the paper. You believe some one is deliberately imposing upon us?”

“My mind,” said Evan Pell, “has been trained for years to seek the truth. I am an observer of facts, trained to separate the true from the false. That is the business of science and research. I think I have made plain my reasons for doubting the truth of this message.”

“So much so,” said Carmel, “that I agree with you.”

Evan smiled complacently. “I fancied you could not do otherwise,” he said. “Perhaps you will be further convinced if I tell you I am quite certain I recognized the voice which gave the message.”

“Are you sure? Who was it?”

“I am certain in my own mind, but I could not take my oath in a court of law.... I believe the voice was that of the little hunchback known locally as Peewee Bangs.”

“The proprietor of the Lakeside Hotel?”

Evan nodded.

“What is this Lakeside Hotel?” Carmel asked. “I’ve heard it mentioned, and somehow I’ve gotten the idea that it was—peculiar.”

Tubal interjected an answer before Evan Pell could speak. “It’s a good place for sich as you be to keep away from. Folks drives out there in automobiles from the big town twenty-thirty mile off, and has high jinks. Before prohibition come in folks said Peewee run a blind pig.”

“He seems very friendly with the local politicians.”

“Huh!” snorted Tubal.

“I don’t understand Gibeon,” Carmel said. “Of course I haven’t been here long enough to know it and to know the people, but there’s something about it which seems different from other little towns I’ve known. The people look the same and talk the same. There are the same churches and lodges and the reading club and its auxiliaries, and I suppose there is the woman’s club which is exclusive, and all that. But, somehow, those things, the normal life of the place, affect me as being all on the surface, with something secret going on underneath.... If there is anything hidden, it must be hidden from most of the people, too. The folks must be decent, honest, hardworking. Whatever it is, they don’t know.”

“What gives you such an idea?” Evan Pell asked, with interest.

“It’s a feeling—instinct, maybe. Possibly it’s because I’m trying to find something, and imagine it all. Maybe I’ve magnified little, inconsequential things.”

“What has all this to do with Abner Fownes?”

“Why—nothing. He seems to be a rather typical small-town magnate. He’s egotistical, bumptious, small-minded. He loves importance—and he’s rich. The professional politicians know him and his weaknesses and use him. He’s a figurehead—so far as actual things go, with a lot of petty power which he loves to exercise.... He’s a bubble, and, oh, how I’d love to prick him!”

Evan bowed to her with ironical deference. “Remarkable,” he said. “A clean-cut, searching analysis. Doubtless correct. You have been studying him cursorily for a matter of days, but you comprehend him to the innermost workings of his mind.... I, a trained observer, have watched and scrutinized Abner Fownes for a year—and have not yet reached a conclusion. May I compliment you, Miss Lee?”

Carmel’s eyes snapped. “You may,” she said, and then closed her lips determinedly.

“You were going to say?” Evan asked, in his most irritating, pedagogical tone.

“I was going to say that you have mighty little to be supercilious about. You don’t know any more about this man than I do, and you’ve been here a year. You don’t like him because he hurt your vanity, and you’re so crusted over with vanity that whatever is inside of it is quite lost to sight.... He had you discharged as superintendent of schools, and it rankles.... It’s childish, like that letter of yours.... Oh, you irritate me.”

“Er—at any rate you have the quality of making yourself clear,” he said, dryly, not offended, she was surprised to note, but rather amused and tolerant. He was so cocksure, so wrapped up in himself and his abilities, so egotistical, that no word of criticism could reach and wound him. Carmel wanted to wound him, to see him wince. She was sorry for him because she could perceive the smallness, the narrowness, the poverty of his life; yet, because she felt, somehow, that his character was of his own planning and constructing, and because it was so eminently satisfactory to her, that it was a duty to goad him into a realization of his deficiencies. Evan Pell did not seem to her a human being, a man, so much as a dry-as-dust mechanism—an irritating little pedant lacking in all moving emotions except boundless vanity.

She had taken him into the office, half from sympathy, half because somebody was needed and he was the only help available. At times she regretted it. Now she leaned forward to challenge him.

“You’ve boasted about your abilities as a trained investigator,” she said. “Very well, then, investigate. That’s the business of a reporter. Gibeon is your laboratory. You’ll find it somewhat different to get at facts hidden in human brains than to discover the hidden properties of a chemical or to classify some rare plant or animal.... I haven’t a trained mind. I wasn’t an infant prodigy. I haven’t spent my lifetime in educating my brain out of all usefulness, but I can see there’s something wrong here. Now, Mr. Pell, take your trained faculties out and discover what it is. There’s investigation worth while.”

“Are you sure,” said Evan, “you will have the courage to publish what I find?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “There’s no use talking about that,” she said, “until you find something.”

“What,” he said, provocatively, “do you want me to investigate first?”

“The one thing that cries out for investigation. Find out why nothing is done to discover what happened to Sheriff Churchill. Find out why he disappeared and who made him disappear and what has become of him. Fetch me the answers to these questions and I’ll take back all I’ve said—and apologize.”

“Has it—er—occurred to you that perhaps Sheriff Churchill disappeared because he—investigated too much?”

“Are you afraid?” she asked.

He wrinkled his brows and peered at her through his spectacles, and then, nonplused her by answering, calmly, “I rather fancy I am. Yes, now I come to give consideration to my emotions, I find I am apprehensive.”

“Then,” she said, with a shrug, “we will forget about it.”

“You are trying,” he said, “to make me feel ashamed because I am afraid. It is useless. I shall not be ashamed. It is natural I should be afraid. Self-preservation dictates fear. The emotion of fear was implanted in man and animals as a—er—safety device to prevent them from incurring dangers. No, I am not in the least ashamed.... Fortunately, reason has been provided as well as fear, and, consequently, if reason counsels a course of action which fear would veto, it is only natural that intelligence should govern.... Reason should always control emotion. Therefore, apprehensive as I am of unpleasant consequences to myself, I shall proceed with the investigation as indicated.” His tone was final. There was no boasting in his statement, only the logical presentation of a fact. He was afraid, but his reason indicated to him that it was worth his while to subject himself to the hazards of the situation. Therefore he subordinated fear.

But Carmel—responsibility sat upon her heavily in that moment. She had ordered or goaded a human being into risking his person, perhaps his life. That phase of it had not presented itself to her. She was sending a man into danger, and the responsibility of her doing so arose stark before her.

“I—I have no right,” she said, hesitatingly. “I was wrong. I cannot allow you to put yourself in danger.”

“Unfortunately,” said Evan Pell, “you have no vote in the matter. I have made the decision.... Of course, you may dispense with my services, but that will not affect my conduct. I shall find out what became of Sheriff Churchill and put myself in a position to lay before the proper authorities substantiated facts covering all phases of his disappearance.”

“But——”

He raised his hand, palm toward her. “My decision is final,” he said, with asperity.

CHAPTER VIII

GIBEON was so accustomed to Abner Fownes that it took him for granted, as if he were a spell of weather, or the Opera House which had been erected in 1881, or the river which flowed through the town, tumultuously in spring and parsimoniously in the heat of summer when its moisture was most sorely needed. On the whole, Abner bore more resemblance to the river than to either weather or Opera House. He was tumultuous when he could do most damage, and ran in a sort of trickle when such genius as he had might be of greater service. On the whole, the village was glad it possessed Abner. He was its show piece, and they compared him with the show citizens of adjacent centers of population.

Your remote villages are conscious of their outstanding personalities, and, however much they may dislike them personally and quarrel with them in the family, they flaunt them in the faces of outsiders and boast of their eccentricities and take pride in their mannerisms. So Gibeon fancied it knew Abner Fownes from the meticulous crust in which his tailor incased him inward to his exact geometrical center; it was positive it comprehended his every thought and perceived the motive for his every action. For the most part its attitude was tolerant. Gibeon fancied it allowed Abner to function, and that it could put a stop to his functioning whenever it desired. The power of his money was appraised and appreciated; but it was more than a little inclined to laugh at his bumptious pretense of arbitrary power. George Bogardus, furniture dealer and undertaker, embalmed the public estimate in words and phrases.

“Abner,” said Bogardus, “figgers himself out to be a hell of a feller, and it does him a sight of good and keeps his appetite hearty—and, so fur’s I kin see, ’tain’t no detriment to nobody else.”

Gibeon had its moments of irritation when Abner seemed to take too much for granted or when he drove with too tight a check rein, but these were ephemeral. On the whole, the town’s attitude was to let Abner do it, and then to call him a fool for his pains.

He was a native of Gibeon. His father before him had moved to the town when it was only a four corners in the woods, and had acquired, little by little, timber and mills, which increased in size from year to year. Gibeon had grown with the mills and with the coming of the railroad. Old Man Fownes had been instrumental in elevating it to the dignity of county seat. He had vanished from the scene of his activities when Abner was a young man, leaving his son extraordinarily well off for that day.

Abner, as a youth, had belonged to that short, stout class of men who are made fun of by the girls. He was never able to increase his stature, but his girth responded to excellent cookery. No man denied him the attribute of industry in those early days, and, as Gibeon judged, it was more by doggedness and stodgy determination that he was enabled to increase his inherited fortune than it was by the possession of keen mental faculties.

For ten years Abner was satisfied to devote himself to the husbanding and increasing of his resources. At the end of that time, his wife having died, he discovered to Gibeon an ambition to rule and a predilection for county politics. It was made apparent how he realized himself a figure in the world, and tried to live up to the best traditions of such personages as his narrow vision had enabled him to catch glimpses of. He seemed, of a sudden, to cease taking satisfaction in his moderate possessions and to desire to become a man of commanding wealth. He bought himself garments and caused himself to become impressive. He never allowed himself an unimpressive moment. Always he was before the public and conducting himself as he judged the public desired to see a personage conduct himself. By word and act he asserted himself to be a personage, and as the years went by the mere force of reiterated assertion caused Gibeon to accept him at his own valuation.... He was patient.

The fact that fifty of every hundred male inhabitants were on his payroll gave him a definite power to start with. He used this power to its limit. It is true that Gibeon laughed up its sleeve and said that smarter men than Abner used him as an implement in the political workshop; but if this were true, Abner seemed unconscious of it. What he seemed to desire was the appearance rather than the substance. It seemed to matter little to him who actually made decisions so long as he was publicly credited with making them. Yet, with all this, with all Gibeon’s sure knowledge of his inner workings, it was a little afraid of him because—well, because he might possess some of the power he claimed.

So, gradually, patiently, year by year, he had reached out farther and farther for money and for political power until he was credited with being a millionaire, and had at least the outward seeming of a not inconsiderable Pooh-Bah in the councils of his party.

The word “fatuous” did not occur in the vocabulary of Gibeon. If it had seen the word in print it could not have guessed its meaning, but it owned colloquial equivalents for the adjective, and with these it summed up Abner. He possessed other attributes of the fatuous man; he was vindictive where his vanity was touched; he was stubborn; he followed little quarrels as if they had been blood feuds. In all the ramifications of his life there was nothing large, nothing daring, nothing worthy of the comment of an intelligent mind. He was simply a commonplace, pompous, inflated little man who seemed to have found exactly what he wanted and to be determined to squeeze the last drop of the juice of personal satisfaction out of the realization of his ambitions.

His home was indicative of his personality. It was a square, red-brick house with an octagonal cupola on its top. It boasted a drive and evergreens, and on the lawn stood an alert iron buck. The cupola was painted white and there was a lightning rod which projected glitteringly from the top of it. You knew the lightning rod was not intended to function as a protection against electrical storms as soon as you looked at it. It was not an active lightning rod in any sense. It was a bumptious lightning rod which flaunted itself and its ornamental brass ball, and looked upon itself as quite capping the climax of Abner Fownes’s displayful life. The whole house impressed one as not being intended as a dwelling, but as a display. It was not to live in, but to inform passers-by that here was an edifice, erected at great expense, by a personage. Abner lived there after a fashion, and derived satisfaction from the house and its cupola, but particularly from its lightning rod. An elderly woman kept house for him.

Abner never came out of his house—he emerged from it. The act was a ceremony, and one could imagine he visualized himself as issuing forth between rows of bowing servitors, or through a lane of household troops in wonderful uniforms. Always he drove to his office in a surrey, occupying the back seat, erect and conscious, while his unliveried coachman sagged down in the front seat, sitting on his shoulder blades, and quite destroying the effect of solemn state. Abner, however, was not particular about lack of state except in his own person. Perhaps he had arrived at the conclusion that his own person was so impressive as to render negligible the appearance of any contiguous externals.

It was his office, however, which, to his mind, perfectly set him off. It was the setting for the jewel which was himself, and it was a perfect setting. The office knew it. It oozed self-importance. It realized its responsibilities in being the daily container for Abner Fownes. It was an overbearing office, a patronizing office. It was quite the most bumptious place of business imaginable; and when Abner was in place behind his flat-topped mahogany desk the room took on an air of complacency which would be maddening to an irritated proletariat. It was an impossible office for a lumberman. It might have been the office of a grand duke. Gibeon poked fun at the office, but boasted to strangers about it. It had on its walls two pictures in shadow boxes which were believed to be old masters rifled from some European gallery. What the pictures thought about themselves is not known, but they put the best possible face on the matter and pretended they had not been painted in a studio in the loft of a furniture store in Boston. Their frames were expensive. The walls were paneled with some wood of a golden tone which Abner was reputed to have imported for the purpose from South America. The sole furniture was that occupied by Abner Fownes—his desk and chair. There was no resting place for visitors—they remained standing when admitted to the presence.

If Abner Fownes, for some purpose of his own, with Machiavellian intelligence, had set out to create for himself a personality which could be described only by the word fatuous, he could not have done better. Every detail seemed to have been planned for the purpose of impressing the world with the fact that he was a man with illusions of grandeur, motivated by obstinate folly, blind to his silliness; perfectly contented in the belief that he was a human being who quite overshadowed his contemporaries. If he had possessed a strong, determined, rapacious, keen mind, determined upon surreptitious depredations upon finance and morals, he could not have chosen better. If he wished to set up a dummy Abner which would assert itself so loudly and foolishly as to render the real, mole-digging Abner invisible to the human eye, he could not have wrought more skillfully. He was a perfect thing; his life was a perfect thing.... Many men, possessing real, malevolent power, erect up clothes-horses to function in their names. It was quite unthinkable that such a man should set himself up as his own stalking horse.

Abner sat before his desk, examining a sheaf of tally sheets. They were not the tally sheets of his own lumber yard, but figures showing the amount of spruce and pine and birch and maple piled in numerous mill yards throughout the state. Abner owned this lumber. In the fall he had watched the price of lumber decline until he calculated it had reached a price from which it could only rise. Others had disagreed with him. Nevertheless, he had bought and bought and bought, intent upon one coup which should make him indeed the power in the lumber industry of the country, which was his objective. He had used all available funds and then had carried his credit into the market, stretching it until it cried for mercy. Now he owned enough cut lumber to build a small city—and the price had continued to drop. That morning’s market prices continued the decline. Abner’s state of mind was not one to arouse envy.

The sum of money he must lose if he sold at the market represented something more than the total of his possessions. Gibeon rated him as a millionaire. That he was in difficulties was a secret which he had been able to conceal for months—and being who he was, and having created the myth of Abner Fownes, he had been able to frown down inquisitive bank officials and creditors and to maintain a very presentable aspect of solvency. But Abner needed money. He needed it daily and weekly. Payrolls must be met; current overhead expenses must be taken care of. Notes coming due must be reduced where possible—and with all market conditions in chaos Abner had early seen there could be no hope of legitimate profit lifting him out of the trap into which he had lowered himself.

His reasoning had been good, but he had not foreseen what labor would do. In his lumber camps through the winter of 1919-20 and the succeeding winter, he had paid woodsmen the unprecedented wage of seventy-five to eighty-five dollars a month. Some of his cutting he had jobbed, paying each individual crew eight dollars a thousand feet for cutting, hauling, and piling in the rollways. It had seemed a thing impossible that six months should see these same lumberjacks asking employment at thirty-five dollars, with prospects of a drop of five or six dollars more! With labor up, lumber must go up. It had dropped below cost; now the labor cost had dropped and he found himself holding the bag, and it was a very cumbersome bag indeed.

Therefore he required a steady flow of money in considerable sums. It was a situation which no fatuous, self-righteous man could handle. It called for imagination, lack of righteousness, a cleverness in device, a fearlessness of God and man, lawlessness, daring. Honest methods of business could not save him.... Abner Fownes was in a bad way.... And yet when money had been required it was produced. He tided things over. He produced considerable amounts from nowhere and there was no inquiring mind to ask questions. They accepted the fact. Abner always had controlled money, and it was in no wise surprising that he should continue to control money.... One thing is worthy of note. Abner kept in his private safe a private set of books, or rather, a single book. It was not large, but it was ample for the purpose. In this book Abner’s own gold fountain pen made entries, and of these entries his paid bookkeepers in the office without had no knowledge whatever. The books of Abner Fownes, Incorporated, showed a story quite different from that unfolded by the pages of the little red morocco book in Abner’s safe.

There came a rap on the door, and Abner, with a quick, instinctive movement of his whole gelatinous body, became the Abner Fownes the village knew, pompous, patronizingly urbane, insufferably self-satisfied.

“Come in,” he said.

The door opened and Deputy Jenney quite filled the opening. He stepped quickly inside, and closed the door after him with elaborate caution.

“Don’t be so confounded careful,” Abner said. “There’s nothing like a parade of carefulness to make folks suspect something.”

“Huh!... Jest wanted to report we hain’t seen nothin’ of that motortruck of your’n that was stole.” He grinned broadly. “Figger to git some news of it to-night—along about midnight, maybe.”

“Let Peewee know.”

“I have.”

“Er——” Abner assumed character again. “I have heard stories of this Lakeside Hotel.... Blot on the county.... Canker in our midst. Stories of debauchery.... Corrupt the young.... Duty of the prosecutor to investigate.”

“Eh?”

“I shall come out publicly and demand it,” said Abner. “The place should be closed. I shall lead a campaign against it.”

Deputy Jenney’s eyes grew so big the lids quite disappeared in the sockets.

“Say——” he began.

“This Peewee Bangs—so called—should be driven out. No telling. Probably sells whisky.... Do you suppose he sells liquor, Deputy?”

“I—why—I don’t b’lieve Peewee’d do no sich thing. No, sir.”

“I shall find out.... By the way, I note that Lancelot Bangs has an advertisement in the Free Press. Tell him to discontinue it—or his profits will drop. Make it clear.”

“Say, that professor wrote a piece about me in to-day’s paper. Can’t make out what he’s hittin’ at. For two cents I’d lambaste him till he couldn’t drag himself off on his hind laigs.”

“Er—no violence, Deputy....” Abner Fownes’s lips drew together in an expression which was not at all fatuous. “A paper can do great harm even in a few issues,” he said. “That girl’s a stubborn piece.” His eyes half closed. “What’s the professor doing?”

“Snoopin’ around.”

Abner nodded. “If he could be induced—er—to go away.”

“He kin,” said Mr. Jenney, “on the toe of my boot.”

“Wrote a piece about you, eh?”

“I’ll ’tend to his case,” said Mr. Jenney. “What be you goin’ to do wuth that newspaper?”

“Why—er—Deputy, you wouldn’t have me—ah—interfere with the liberty of the press.... Palladium of freedom. Free speech.... There was nothing else, Deputy?”

“That’s all.”

“I—er—hope you recover my truck. Reward, you know.”

Deputy Jenney grinned again, more broadly than before, and left the room.

CHAPTER IX

DEPUTY JENNEY was a big man. In his stocking feet he stood a fraction more than six feet and two inches, but he possessed more breadth than even that height entitled him to. He was so broad that, if you saw him alone, with no ordinary individual beside him for comparison, he gave the impression of being short and squat. His weight was nearer three hundred than two hundred pounds. He was not fat.

Most big men are hard to provoke. It is rarely you find a giant who uses his size as a constant threat. Such men are tolerant of their smaller fellows, slow to anger, not given to bullying and meanness. Deputy Jenney was a mean big man. He was a blusterer, and it was a joy to him to use his fists. You never knew where you stood with Deputy Jenney, nor what unpleasant turn his peculiar mind might give to conversation or circumstance. He was easily affronted, not overly intelligent, and in his mind was room for no more than a single idea at a time. He was vain of his size and strength, and his chief delight was in exhibiting it, preferably in battle. So much for Deputy Jenney’s outstanding characteristic.

As he left Abner Fownes’s office his humor was unpleasant. It was unpleasant for two reasons, first and foremost because he was afraid of Abner, and it enraged him to be made afraid of anybody. Second, he had been held up to ridicule in the Free Press and he could not endure ridicule. So the deputy required a victim, and Evan Bartholomew Pell seemed to have selected himself for the rôle. If Jenney comprehended the desires of Abner Fownes—and he fancied he did in this case—he had been directed to do what he could to induce Evan to absent himself permanently from Gibeon.

He walked down the street fanning himself into a rage—which was no difficult matter. His rages were very much like the teams which draw fire engines—always ready for business; trained to leap from their stalls and to stand under the suspended harness.... It was the noon hour, and as he arrived at the door of the Free Press office it was Evan Pell’s unpleasant fortune to be coming out to luncheon. Deputy Jenney roared at him.

“Hey, you!” he bellowed.

Evan paused and peered up at the big man through his round spectacles, a calm, self-sufficient, unemotional little figure of a man. The word little is used in comparison to Deputy Jenney, for the professor was not undersized.

“Were you speaking to me?” he asked.

“You’re the skunk that wrote that piece about me,” shouted Deputy Jenney.

“I certainly wrote an article in which you were mentioned,” said Evan, who, apparently, had not the least idea he stood in imminent danger of destruction.

“I’ll teach ye, confound ye!... I’ll show ye how to git free with folkses’ names.” Here the deputy applied with generous tongue a number of descriptive epithets. “When I git through with you,” he continued, “you won’t waggle a pen for a day or two.” And then, quite without warning the professor to make ready for battle, the deputy swung his great arm, with an enormous open hand flailing at its extremity, and slapped Evan just under his left ear. Evan left the place on which he had been standing suddenly and completely, bringing up in the road a dozen feet away dazed, astounded, feeling as if something had fallen upon him from a great height. It was his first experience with physical violence. Never before had a man struck him. His sensations were conflicting—when his head cleared sufficiently to enable him to perceive sensations. He had been struck and knocked down! He, Evan Bartholomew Pell, whose life was organized on a plane high above street brawls, had been slapped on the jaw publicly, had been tumbled head over heels ignominiously!

He sat up dizzily and raised his hand to his eyes as if to assure himself his spectacles were in place. They were not. He stared up at Deputy Jenney with vague bewilderment, and Deputy Jenney laughed at him.

Then Evan lost track of events temporarily. Something went wrong with his highly trained reasoning faculties; in short, these faculties ceased to function. He sprang to his feet, wholly forgetful of his spectacles, and leaped upon Deputy Jenney, uttering a cry of rage. Now Evan had not the least idea what was needful to be done by a man who went into battle; he lost sight of the fact that a man of his stature could not reasonably expect to make satisfactory progress in tearing apart a man of Jenney’s proportions. Of one thing alone he was conscious, and that was a desire to strew the deputy about the road in fragments.

Some one who saw the fracas described it later, and his phrase is worth retaining. “The professor,” said this historian, “jest kind of b’iled up over Jenney.”

That is what Evan did. He boiled up over the big man, inchoate, bubbling arms and legs, striking, kicking. Deputy Jenney was surprised, but delighted. He pushed Evan off with a huge hand and flailed him a second time under the ear. Evan repeated his previous gymnastics. This time he picked himself up more quickly. His head was clear now. The wild rage which had possessed him was gone. But there remained something he had never experienced before—a cold intent to kill!

He sprang upon the deputy again, not blindly this time, but with such effect as a wholly inexperienced man could muster. He even succeeded in striking Jenney before he was sent whirling to a distance again.... Now, your ordinary citizen would have known it was high time to bring the matter to a discreet conclusion, but Evan came to no such realization. He knew only one thing, that he must somehow batter and trample this huge animal until he begged for mercy....

At this instant Carmel Lee issued from the office, and stood petrified as she saw the deputy knock Evan down for the third time, and then, instead of screaming or running for help or of doing any of those things which one would have expected of a woman, she remained fascinated, watching the brutal spectacle. She was not indifferent to its brutality, not willing Evan should be beaten to a pulp, but nevertheless she stood, and nothing could have dragged her away. It was Evan who fascinated her—something about the professor gripped and held her breathless.

She saw him get slowly to his feet, brush his trousers, blink calmly at the deputy as at some rather surprising phenomenon, and then, with the air of a man studiously intent upon some scientific process, spring upon the big man for the third time. Carmel could see the professor was not in a rage; she could see he was not frightened; she could see he was moved by cold, grim intention alone.... The deputy was unused to such proceedings. Generally when he knocked a man down that man laid quietly on his back and begged for mercy. There was no sign of begging for mercy in Evan Pell. Hitherto Jenney had used the flat of his hand as being, in his judgment, a sufficient weapon for the destruction of Evan Pell. Now, for the first time, he used his fist. The professor swarmed upon him so like a wildcat that Jenney was unable to deliver the sort of blow on the exact spot intended. The blow glanced off Evan’s skull and the young man seized Jenney’s throat with both hands. Jenney tore him loose and hurled him away. Again Pell came at him, this time to be knocked flat and bleeding. He arose slowly, swaying on his feet, to rush again. Carmel stood with gripped fists, scarcely breathing, unable to move or to speak. The sight was not pleasant. Again and again the big man knocked down the little man, but on each occasion the little man, more and more slowly, more and more blindly, got to his feet and fell upon his antagonist. He was all but blind; his legs wabbled under him, he staggered, but always he returned to his objective. That he was not rendered unconscious was amazing. He uttered no sound. His battered lips were parted and his clean, white, even teeth showed through.... The deputy was beginning to feel nonplused.... He knocked Evan down again. For an instant the young man lay still upon his back. Presently he moved, rolled upon his face, struggled to his hands and knees, and, by the power of his will, compelled himself to stand erect. He wavered. Then he took a tottering step forward and another, always toward Jenney. His head rolled, but he came on. Jenney watched him vindictively, his hands at his sides. Pell came closer, lifted his right fist as if its weight were more than his muscles could lift, and pushed it into the deputy’s face. It was not a blow, but there was the intention of a blow, unquenchable intention.... The deputy stepped back and struck again. No more was necessary. Evan Pell could not rise, though after a few seconds he tried to do so. But even then the intention which resided in him was unquenched.... On hands and knees he crawled back toward Deputy Jenney—crawled, struggled to his enemy—only to sink upon his face at the big man’s feet, motionless, powerless, unconscious.

Jenney pushed him with his foot. “There,” he said, a trifle uncertainly, “I guess that’ll do fer you.... And that’s what you git every time we meet. Remember that. Every time we meet.”

Carmel seemed to be released now from the enchantment which had held her motionless. She had seen a thing, a thing she could never forget. She had seen a thing called physical courage, and a higher thing called moral courage. That is what had held her, fascinated her.... It had been grim, terrible, but wonderful. Every time she saw Evan return to his futile attack she knew she was seeing the functioning of a thing wholly admirable.

“I never see sich grit,” she heard a bystander say, and with the dictum she agreed. It had been pure grit, the possession of the quality of indomitability.... And this was the man she had looked down upon, patronized!... This possession had been hidden within him, and even he had not dreamed of its presence. She caught her breath....

In an instant she was bending over Evan, lifting his head, wiping his lips with her handkerchief. She looked up in Deputy Jenney’s eyes, and her own eyes blazed.

“You coward!... You unspeakable coward!” she said.

The deputy shuffled on his feet. “He got what was comin’ to him.... He’ll git it ag’in every time I see him. I’ll drive him out of this here town.”

“No,” said Carmel—and she knew she was speaking the truth—“you won’t drive him out of town. You can kill him, but you can’t drive him out of town.”

The deputy shrugged his shoulders and slouched away. He was glad to go away. Something had deprived him of the enjoyment he anticipated from this event. He had a strange feeling that he had not come off victor in spite of the fact that his antagonist lay motionless at his feet.... Scowls and mutterings followed him, but no man dared lift his hand.

Evan struggled to lift his head. Through battered eyes he looked at the crowd packed close about him.

“Er—tell this crowd to disperse,” he said.

“Can you walk?”

“Of course,” he said in his old, dry tone—somewhat shaky, but recognizable.

“Let me help you into the office.”

He would have none of it. “I fancy I can walk without assistance,” he said, and, declining her touch, he made his way through the crowd and into the office, where he sunk into a chair. Here he remained erect, though Carmel could see it was nothing but his will which prevented him from allowing his head to sink upon the table. She touched his arm.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I—I want to apologize for—for things I have said to you.”

He looked at her in his old manner, rather superciliously. “Oh, doubtless you were right,” he said. “I—er—do not seem to be a success as a—pugilist.”

“You were——”

“If you please,” he said, holding up a hand which he strove to keep from shaking. “If you will be so good as to go to luncheon.”

“But——”

“If you get pleasure out of seeing me like this!” he said with acerbity, and she, seeing how his pride was wounded, how he was shaken by this new experience, and understanding very vaguely something of the emotions which must be seething within him, turned away and left him alone....

When Carmel returned to the office Evan Pell was not there, nor did she see him until the following day.

That evening, after her supper, she walked. She could not remain in her room to read, nor go to the office to work. She was lonesome, discouraged, frightened. The events of the day had upset her until she seethed.... Motion was necessary. Only in rapid exercise could she find the anodyne necessary to quiet the jangling of her nerves. The evening was fine, lighted by a summer moon which touched the mountains with magic and transformed the forest into a glowing mystery of silver. She did not walk to think, but as the distance unrolled between her feet and the disturbed nerves became quiescent, she did think.

For the first time she considered Evan Bartholomew Pell as a human being. Never before had he been human to her, but a crackling, parchment creature, not subject to joys and sorrows, not adaptable to friendships and social relations. She had pictured him carelessly as an entity to himself, unrelated to the world which moved about him, and loved and hated and coveted and covered itself with a mantle of charity. He had aroused her sympathy by his helplessness and his incapacity—a rather contemptuous sympathy.... Her contempt was gone, never to return. She speculated upon the possible workings of his mind; what was to become of him; why he was as he was. He became a human possibility in her mind, capable of something. She saw how there resided in him, in spite of his wasted years, in spite of the incubus of precocity which had ridden him from childhood, the spirit of which men are created.... She wondered if he were capable of breaking through the crust and of emerging such a man as the world might admire.... She doubted it. The crust was so thick and so hard.

Of one thing she was certain—never again could she sneer at him or treat him with supercilious superiority, for, whatever his patent defects, she had been compelled to recognize that the foundations of him were admirable.... She vowed, in her impulsive way, to make amends. She went even farther, as is the way with girls both impulsive and calculating—she determined to remake Evan Pell, to remodel him along lines of her own designing.... Women love to renovate men; it is, perhaps, the major side line to the primary business of their lives—and God knows what that may be!

Carmel paid scant attention to the road she followed. It was a pleasant road, a silvery-bright road. It contented her and seemed a road which must lead to some desirable destination. The destination was vague and distant; she did not hope to reach it, but it amused and stirred her to think there must be such a terminal.

She walked away from Gibeon for an hour before she realized that every step she took meant two steps, one coming and one returning. She was unconscious of loneliness, nor did she feel any apprehension of the silent woods. The spot where she paused was lovely with cold light and warm shadows and she looked about for a place to sit and rest a moment before her return journey. She stepped from the roadside and seated herself upon a fallen, rotting log, partially screened from the thoroughfare by clump growth of young spruce.

Hardly had she taken her seat when a small automobile roared around a bend and jounced and rattled toward Gibeon. It was going at high speed. On the front seat she saw two male figures, but so uncertain was the light and so rapid the passage that she was unable to identify them. She started to her feet to stare after the car, when, to her amazement, it came to a skidding stop, with screaming of brakes, a scant hundred yards beyond her. It maneuvered a moment, and then, departing from the road, groaning through the dry ditch that bordered it, the car forced its way into the woods where there was no road at all.

Carmel was intrigued by this eccentric behavior. Automobiles, as she knew them, did not habitually leave excellent roads to roam about in a trackless forest. The cars she knew were creatures of habit, adhering to the beaten paths of hurrying civilization. She could not imagine one adventuring on its own, and most especially she could not conceive of one rambling about in the woods. She had a feeling that it was not right for one to do so—which was natural to her as a human being, for all human beings have a firm belief that anything not sanctioned by immemorial custom must be evil. New paths lead inevitably to damnation.

She was startled, but not frightened. Whatever was going on here could not threaten her, for she knew herself to have been unseen; appreciated how easy it would be to remain in concealment.

Presently she heard the sound of axes.... She crouched and waited—possibly for fifteen minutes. At the end of that time the car pushed its rump awkwardly out of the woods again, swung on to the road, and, stirring a sudden cloud of dust, sped toward Gibeon.... It was only then she realized the car had been traveling without lights.

She waited. The sound of the automobile vanished in the distance and she judged it safe to investigate. Somewhat gingerly she emerged upon the road and walked toward the spot where the car had entered the woods. The wheel tracks were plainly to be seen, and she followed them inward. It was but a step, perhaps fifty yards. At the end there was nothing but a pile of freshly cut sprucelings. Had the season been other than summer, she would have concluded some one was cutting Christmas trees for the market—but one did not cut Christmas trees in July! But why were the little spruces cut? There must be a reason. She stirred them with her foot. Then, with impulsive resolution, she began flinging them aside.

Underneath she came upon a square of canvas—a cover—and concealed by this the last thing in the world she would have expected to come upon.... Bottles and bottles and bottles, carefully laid and piled. Instantly she knew, even before she lifted a bottle and read the label which identified it as whisky of foreign distillage, she had witnessed one step in a whisky smuggler’s progress; had surprised a cache of liquor which had evaded the inspectors at the border, a few miles away. She did not count the bottles, but she estimated their number—upward of a hundred!

She was frightened. How it came about, by what process of mental cross-reference, she could not have said, but the one thing obtruding upon her consciousness was the story of the disappearance of Sheriff Churchill! Had he come upon such a hoard? Had his discovery become known to the malefactors? Did that, perhaps, explain his inexplicable absence?

Carmel’s impulse was to run, to absent herself from that spot with all possible celerity. She started, halted, returned. There could be no danger now, she argued with herself, and there might be some clew, something indicative of the identity of the men she saw in the car. If there were, it was her duty as proprietor of the Free Press to come into possession of that information.

Fortune was with her. In the interstices of the bottles her groping hand came upon something small and hard. She held it in the moonlight. It was a match box made from a brass shotgun shell.... Without pausing to examine it, she slipped it securely into her waist, then—and her reason for doing so was not plain to her—she helped herself to a bottle of liquor, wrapped it in the light sweater she carried, and turned her face toward Gibeon.

CHAPTER X

CARMEL went directly to the room in the hotel which she still occupied pending the discovery of a permanent boarding place. She locked the door carefully and closed the transom. Then with a queer feeling of mingled curiosity and the exultation of a newspaper woman, she placed side by side on her dresser the bottle of liquor she had abstracted from the cache and the match box made from a brass shotgun shell.

She sat down on the bed to regard them and to ask them questions, but found them singularly uncommunicative. Beyond the meagerest replies she could have nothing of them. The bottle seemed sullen, dour, as became a bottle of Scotch whisky. In the most ungracious manner it told Carmel its name and the name of its distillers and its age.... The match box refused to make any answers whatever, being, she judged, of New England descent, and therefore more closed mouth than even the Scotch. The bottle squatted and glowered dully. It wore an air of apprehension, and patently was on its guard. The brass match box, brought to a fine polish by long travel in an active trousers pocket, was more jaunty about it, having a dry, New England humor of its own, recognizable as such. The identifying quality of New England humor is that you are always a little in doubt as to whether it is intended to be humor.

The conversation was one-sided and not illuminating.

“Who brought you over the line?” Carmel asked.

The bottle hunched its shoulders and said nothing, but the match box answered in the dialect of the country, “I fetched him—for comp’ny. A feller gits dry sleepin’ out in the woods.”

“Who made you, anyhow?” Carmel asked of the match box.

“Feller that likes to keep his matches dry.”

“Somebody who likes to hunt,” said Carmel.

“Wa-al, him ’n me knows our way about in the woods.”

“Who was coming to get you from where you were hidden?” Carmel asked the bottle, suddenly.

“D’ye ken,” said the bottle, sourly, “I’m thinkin’ ye are an inqueesitive body. Will ye no gang aboot your business, lassie. Hae doon wi’ ye; ye’ll hae no information frae me.”

“Who were those two men in the car?” said Carmel.

“Strangers to me,” said the match box, nonchalantly.

“One of them dropped you,” said Carmel.

“Mebby he did; dunno if he did,” said the match box.

“Somebody’ll know who owns you,” said Carmel.

“How’ll you go about finding that out?” said the match box. “Findin’ caches of licker in the woods hain’t good fer the health, seems as though. Traipsin’ around town askin’ who owns me might fetch on a run of sickness.”

“You can’t frighten me,” said Carmel.

“Sheriff Churchill wa’n’t the frightenin’ kind, neither,” said the match box, significantly.

“What if I put a piece in my paper telling just how I found you?” said Carmel.

“Be mighty helpful to our side,” said the match box. “Stir up ill feelin’ without gittin’ you any place.”

“What shall I do, then?” Carmel asked.

“Can’t expect me to be givin’ you advice,” said the match box. And there the conversation lapsed. The bottle continued to glower and the match box to glitter with a dry sort of light, while Carmel regarded them silently, her exasperation mounting. She was in the unenviable position of a person to whom belongs the next move, when there seems no place to move to.

In the mass of uncertainty there was, as metallurgists say, of fact only a trace. But the trace of fact was important—important because it was the first tangible evidence coming into her possession of what was going on under the surface of Gibeon. She had promised herself to bring to retribution those who had caused the disappearance of Sheriff Churchill. She felt certain it was the possession of some such evidence as stood before her on her dresser, which lay at the root of the sheriff’s vanishing. The thought was not comforting. Of another thing she felt certain, namely, that the cache she had discovered was no sporadic bit of liquor smuggling, but was a single manifestation of a systematic traffic in the contraband. She calculated the number of the bottles she had seen and the profits derived from that single store of whisky. It amounted to four figures. Supposing that amount were carried across the border weekly!... Here was no little man’s enterprise. Here were returns so great as to indicate the participation of an individual of more than ordinary stature. Also it suggested to her that such individual or group would not tolerate interference with this broad river of dollars.... The fate of Sheriff Churchill corroborated this reflection.

The bottle and match box on her dresser were dangerous. They stood as if they realized how dangerous they were, and leered at her. She arose quickly and placed them in a lower drawer, covering them carefully with garments. The woman in her wished she had not made the discovery, and by it confronted herself with the responsibility for taking action. The newspaper proprietor exulted and planned how the most was to be derived from it. For the first time she felt self-distrust and wished for a sure counselor. She realized her aloneness. There was none to whom she could turn for sure advice; none to whom her confidence moved her.

Her friends were few. In Gibeon she was confident of the loyalty of Tubal and of Simmy, the printer’s devil. They would fight for her, follow her lead to the ultimate—but neither was such as she could appeal to for guidance. Evan Bartholomew Pell owed her gratitude. Doubtless he felt some rudiments of it and possibly of loyalty. She was dubious of both. He was such a crackling, dry, self-centered creature—not contemptible as she had first seen him. Never again could she visualize him as contemptible. But to go to him for advice in this emergency seemed futile. He would guide her by rule and diagram. He would be pedantic and draw upon printed systems of logic. What she wanted was not cold logic out of a book, but warm, throbbing, inspiring co-operation from out the heart. She glanced at her watch. It told her the hour was verging toward ten.

She sat upon the edge of her bed, debating the matter in hand, when there sounded a knocking upon her door.

“What is it,” she called.

“Mr. Fownes is down in the parlor a-waitin’. He wants to know if you’ll come down and see him—if you hain’t to bed yit.” The last sentence was obviously not a part of the message, but interested conjecture on the part of the messenger.

“What does he want?”

“Didn’t say. I asked him, but he let on ’twan’t none of my business. Said it was important, though.”

Carmel pondered a moment. Aversion to the fat little man waged war with woman’s curiosity to know what his errand could be at this hour when Gibeon was tucking itself into its feather beds.

“Please tell him I’ll come down,” she said.

She went down. The parlor of the hotel was tucked off behind the big room which was combined office and lounging room for traveling men and village loafers. It contained a piano which had not been played since it had been tuned and had not been tuned for a time so long that the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. On the wall was a hand painting of a forest fire, done by a talented relative of the hotel’s proprietor. Doubtless this portrayed some very special kind of forest fire, or it would not have called forth the artist’s genius. One would not know at first glance that it depicted a forest fire, because it looked to the uninitiated like a number of dilapidated red feather dusters standing upright in a heavy surf. But it had been done by hand, and Gibeon regarded it as her artistic farthest north. There were also two gilt chairs, evidently peeling after sunburn, a small onyx table and a piece of furniture known to furniture manufacturers of its period as a settee.... Abner Fownes was, on Carmel’s entrance, the settor. He arose with the ease and grace of a man lifting a barrel of flour and bowed.

“You wished to see me?” she said, coldly.

“Very much. Very much indeed.”

“Your business would not wait until morning?”

“I chose this hour, Miss Lee,” he said, pompously. “Dislike to be watched. Whole village watches me.... Doubtless very natural, but annoying.”

“I fancied we said all it was needful to say on our last meeting.”

“Time for reflection. Allowed you time to cool.... Hot youth. Er—must confess I admired your—er—force of character.”

“I’m sure I’m grateful.”

“Be seated. Can’t talk standing up,” he said, as a potentate might invite some favored subject to be at ease in his august presence. “Wish to discuss your affairs.”

“I don’t,” said Carmel, “with you.”

“Um!... How old would you say I am?”

“I’ve never given your age a thought.”

“Fifty-two,” he said, “and well preserved. Well preserved. Careful living. Good habits.”

“It must be a satisfaction to you,” she said, with ill-concealed irony.

“You have—er—style and beauty,” he said. “Valuable attributes.... Be a credit to any man.”

“You came to talk business, did you not?”

“Not exactly.... Not precisely.”

“Will you tell me why you have come,” she said, sharply.

“Certainly. Certainly. Arriving at the point.”

“Please do so. I am tired.”

He paused briefly while his small, sharp eyes traveled over her person with an estimating glance, a glance which heated her resentment. It was an unpleasant glance for a young woman to undergo.

“Ahem!... Present your case. Inventory, so to speak. You own a bankrupt country paper. Never paid—never will. Alone in the world. No relatives. Nobody to help you. No money. Hard future to face.... Debit side of the ledger. Um!... Credit side shows youth—er—intelligence, education. All valuable assets. Shows also beauty and—er—the ability to look like a lady.... Breeding. Difficult to find. Desirable.” He paused again until he appraised her with greedy eyes.

Suddenly she felt apprehensive. A sense of outrage swept over her, but for once words failed in the emergency. She felt her limbs tremble. The man’s eyes were an outrage; his manner was an affront. She was angry as she had never been angry before; terrified with a new sort of crawling, skin-chilling terror. She was aware of being afraid he might touch her; that his fat, pudgy, well-kept fingers might reach out and rest upon her hand or her cheek or her hair. If they should, she knew she would scream. His touch would be intolerable. She had a feeling it would leave a damp, ineradicable mark. She drew back in her chair, crouching, quivering.

“Those assets,” he said, “entitle you to a future. Should realize on them.... Ahem!...” Again he paused and touched his cravat fussily. He glanced down at his little shoes, immaculate, on his tailored legs and impressive abdomen. “Beauty,” he said, “requires ease and care.... Um!... Fades with hard work and economy.”

He crossed his hands on his stomach and smiled fatuously. “I,” he said, “have been a widower fifteen years. A long time.... Not from necessity. No, indeed. But my home, the sort of home I maintain—in keeping with my position—er—requires an adequate mistress.... One possessing qualities. Yes, indeed. Qualities suitable to the wife of Abner Fownes.”

He drew himself up to the utmost of his scanty height, making, as well, the most of his breadth. He resembled, Carmel thought, a dropsical pouter pigeon.

“The mistress of my home—er—mansion,” he amended, “would occupy enviable position. Extremely. Looked up to. Envied. Arbiter of local society. Ease, comfort—luxury. Everything money can buy.... Travel. Yes, indeed.... Clothes suitable to her station and mine.... Women are fond of clothes. Jewels. Amply able to provide my wife with jewels.”

Carmel was breathless. Her heart beat in a manner to cause her alarm lest it outdo itself. Her scalp prickled. She wondered if something physically unpleasant were going to happen—like fainting.

“Enviable picture,” he said, expansively. “Sufficient to attract any woman. Be pointed out as Abner Fownes’s wife. Women take pride in their husbands. Husband of a personage.” At this he swelled to his utmost.

“I have studied you,” he said, in a voice of one coming to the end of an oration. “I have found you in all ways capable of filling the position of my wife. Er—you would be a credit to me. Yes, indeed. End all your difficulties. Satisfy every whim. What more can anybody ask?”

He stared at her pompously, but with a horrid hunger in his eyes, stared as if waiting for an answer.

“I am asking you,” he said, “to become Mrs. Abner Fownes.”

She gasped to hear the unthinkable put into words. It had not seemed possible to her that it could be put into words. It was the sort of thing one hinted at, made use of double entendre to convey. But he dragged it out into the light and gloated over it. He insisted on stating it baldly.... She bore it as she would endure some shock, quivered under the affront of it, caught her breath, grasped at her heart as if to quiet it with her fingers. For moments she could not move nor speak. She was engulfed in material horror of the thing. It was as if she were immersed in some cold, clammy, clinging, living fluid—a fluid endowed with gristly life.

Suddenly she found herself upon her feet, speaking words. The words came from subconscious depths, not directed by intellect or by will, but by the deep-lying soul, by the living, indestructible thing which was herself. Disgust emanated from her.

“You toad!” she heard herself say. “You white, dreadful toad! You dare to say such words to me! You dare to sit there appraising me, coveting me! You ask me to be your wife—your wife!... You are unspeakably horrible—can’t you see how horrible you are?” She heard her voice arguing with him, trying to impress him with his own horribleness. “You dreadful, fat little creature! A credit to you!... I can think of no woman so low, so degraded, so unnatural as to be a credit to what you are. A woman of the streets would refuse you. Your touch would be death to her soul—to what fragment of soul she retained.... How dare you insult me so?...” The words would not stop, the dreadful words. She did not wish to utter them, knew their utterance served no purpose, but they continued to flow as water from a broken spout. She rent and tore him, holding him up to the light of the stars for himself to see. It was a dreadful thing to do to any human being; to sink one’s claws into his body, searching for and finding and rending the soul.

She saw him turn the color of his vest; saw him shrink, compress within himself, crumple, sag like a punctured football. She saw an ugly glint in his little, narrowed eyes; understood how she had put upon him the supreme affront of stripping him of his pretense and showing him to himself as he knew he was. She stood him before his own eyes, stark, horribly vivid; showed him secrets he concealed even from himself. Yet it was not Carmel who did this thing, but some uncontrollable force within her, some force fighting the battle of womanhood.... He got unsteadily to his feet and backed away from her mouthing. He stumbled, recovered, felt behind him for the door.

“Damn you!” he cried shrilly. “Damn you!... You—you’ll suffer for this....”

Then he was gone and she found herself kneeling with her face upon the seat of her chair, shaken by sobs.

CHAPTER XI

IN the morning Carmel Lee had made up her mind. She did not know she had made up her mind, but it was none the less true. Her mind was of the sort which makes itself up upon slight provocation and then permits its owner to reason and argue and apply the pure light of reason to the problem in hand—a sort of ex post facto deliberation. As may have been noted, the salient characteristic of this young woman was a certain impetuosity, a stubborn impulsiveness. Once her mind made itself up to a certain course of action, nothing short of an upheaval of nature could turn her from it. But, notwithstanding, she considered herself to be of a schooled deliberation. She believed she had impressed this deliberation upon herself, and was confident she reasoned out every matter of importance gravely and logically.

Now, having determined just what she would do about the cache of whisky she had discovered, she sat down before her desk to determine what it was best to do.

So enraged, so shaken, had she been by her encounter with Abner Fownes the evening before, that it was necessary for her to take action against somebody or something. She could not demolish Fownes, and nobody else was handy, so she turned to the whisky and vented her anger and disgust upon that.

While she sat before her desk pretending to herself that she was deliberating, Evan Bartholomew Pell came into the office, nodded curtly, and dropped in his chair. Carmel, of a sudden, seized paper and commenced to write. As she set down word after word, sentence after sentence, she became uneasily aware of some distracting influence. Upon looking up she identified this extraneous force as the eyes of Evan Pell. He was staring at her fixedly.

“You forgot your spectacles this morning,” she said, sharply, to cover her embarrassment.

“I have no spectacles,” he said, dryly.

“What became of them?”

“They—er—disappeared during the barbarous episode of the other day.”

“You have no others?”

“None.”

“How can you work without them?”

“I find,” he said, “they are not essential. I was about to discard them in any event.” He paused. “It was clear to me,” he said, simply, “that a scholarly appearance was not necessary to me in my new walk of life.”

He said this so casually, with such good faith and simplicity, that Carmel saw how little he realized the absurdity of it. It demonstrated something of the straightforwardness of the man, something simple and childlike in him.... Carmel turned back to her desk with a warmer feeling of friendship toward Evan. There was something engaging, appealing about the artificially dried, cloistered, egoistic man.

“At any rate,” she said, presently, again aware of his eyes, “you seem perfectly able to stare at me, glasses or no glasses.”

“I was staring at you,” he admitted, with disconcerting directness.

“Well, of all things!... Why?”

“Because,” he said, “you present an interesting problem.”

“Indeed!... What problem, if you please?”

There was no trace of self-consciousness in his answer. It was direct, not made with humorous intent, nor as a man of the world might have uttered similar words. It issued from profound depths of ignorance of life and of the customs and habits of life.

“I find,” he said, “that I think about you a great deal. Yes.... I find my thoughts taken up with you at most inopportune moments. I am even able to visualize you. Very queer. Only last evening, when I should have been otherwise occupied, I suddenly aroused myself to find I had been giving you minute consideration for half an hour. I may even say that I derived a certain pleasure from the exercise. It was startling, if I may use so strong a word. Doubtless there is some cause for such a mental phenomenon.... Will you believe me, Miss Lee, I was perfectly able to see you as if you were in the room with me. I watched you move about. I could see the changing expressions upon your face.... And when I realized how I was frittering away my time, and set about resolutely to take up the business in hand, I could do so only with the greatest difficulty. Actually, I did so with regret, and thereafter found concentration extremely difficult.... Therefore I have been sitting here, studying you with the utmost care to discover, if I can, the reason for these things.”

“And have you discovered it?” Carmel asked, a trifle breathlessly.

He shook his head. “Undoubtedly you are pleasing to the eye,” he said, “but I must have encountered other people who are equally pleasing. I must confess to being at a loss for an answer.”

Carmel experienced a wave of sympathy. She hoped he would never discover the cause of the phenomenon, and fancied it quite likely he would never comprehend it. Mingled with her sympathy was a sense of guilt. She reviewed her conduct toward Evan Pell and could discover no action on her part which justified a feeling of guilt, yet it persisted. This queer, pedantic, crackling man was attracted to her, was, perhaps, on the verge of falling in love with her.... He was coming to life! She paused to wonder what sort of man he would be if he really came to life; if he sloughed off his shell of pedantry and stood disclosed without disguise. Perhaps it would be good for him to fall in love, no matter how vainly. It might be unpleasant for both of them, but, she determined, if he did find out what ailed him, she would be patient and gentle with him and see to it the hurt she would inflict should be as slight as she could make it.... It is to be noted her mind was already made up. Evan had no chance whatever. Already she had refused him, kindly, gently, but firmly.... It was upsetting.

“Probably,” she said, with an artificial laugh, “it is something you have eaten.”

“I have made no alteration in my diet,” he said, and then, with the air of one who wrenches himself away from an engrossing subject, “There seems to be an unusual supply of liquor in Gibeon to-day.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve noted a dozen men on the street this morning who are indicative of the fact.”

“Where do they get it?”

As she turned to ask the question, she saw his face change, saw a glint of determination in his really fine eyes; saw his chin jut forward and the muscles just under his jaw bunch into little white knots. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I’m going to find out.”

Here was a new man, a man she had not seen. This new man was as revealing as that indomitable man she had seen fighting a futile fight with Deputy Jenney.

“If I can find out who dispenses liquor in town,” he said, “that will be a step toward discovering where the dispensers get it. It will be climbing the first round of the ladder.”

For an instant she was about to tell him what she had discovered, but it was vanity which stopped her. It was her discovery, her “beat,” and she wanted to surprise everybody with it.

“Whose business is it to stop this liquor traffic?” she asked.

“First, it is the business of the law-enforcement officials of this county—the sheriff and his subordinates. This is a prohibition state and has been for years. Second, it is the business of Federal enforcement officials.”

“Who, doubtless, are few and far between in this region.”

“Yes. To put a stop to the thing by legal means, we must have the co-operation of the sheriff.”

“And there is no sheriff,” said Carmel.

“Er—removed by the liquor interests for cause,” said Evan, dryly. “If I am a judge of appearances, the sheriff’s office as it is now constituted is not likely to give the rum smugglers a maximum of uneasiness.”

“Mr. Pell, when there is a vacancy in the office of sheriff, how can that vacancy be filled?”

“I was reading the Compiled Statutes of the state last night with that point in mind.... The Governor may appoint a successor to fill the unexpired term of office.”

Carmel turned back to her work, but once more faced Evan abruptly. “Have you noticed an unusual number of men going up to Lancelot Bangs’s photograph gallery to-day?” she asked.

“No. Why do you ask?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “I wondered.”

He eyed her a moment, then shrugged his shoulders. “I shall give Mr. Bangs my attention,” he said, and arose to leave the office.

Carmel arose, too, impulsively. “Please be cautious, be careful.... I could never forgive myself if anything happened to you.”

For an instant his eyes glowed, color mounted to his cheeks. Then a look of astonishment, of sudden apprehension, and of confusion succeeded it. He turned and fled abruptly.

For an hour Carmel continued to write. She completed a circumstantial account of the finding of the liquor cache, omitting only the picking up of the brass match box. It was intuition rather than judgment which caused this omission. Having completed this news story, she composed a three-quarter-column editorial upon the subject, and therein she walked a more dangerous path than in the mere recounting of the news itself. She ventured into realms of conjecture.

First she touched the traffic itself, then upon the apparent magnitude of the industry locally, and then, which was an unsafe thing to do, and unwise, she pointed out with logic that such a huge business required capital, organization, and intelligence. She gave it as the opinion of the Free Press that here was no affair of a few small bad men, but a real conspiracy to break the laws of the land, to the end of a huge profit. She named no names, because here conjecture was forced to pause, but she set afloat upon the current of gossip a raft of suspicion. Who in Gibeon was engaged in this conspiracy? Who was at the head of it?... At the end she asked one sentence:

“Find the men who hid this store of whisky in the woods and you will have the murderers of Sheriff Churchill.”

It was the first time a name had been given the disappearance of the sheriff; the first time in print that the word murder had been attached to it.

Carmel was well satisfied with herself. She took the story and the editorial to Tubal, with directions to set at once.

Ten minutes later he appeared in the door, the manuscript in his left hand, while with his right he transferred ink from his fingers to his face.

“Lady,” he said, “be you serious about printin’ this here?”

“I certainly am.”

“All of it?”

“Every word, sentence, paragraph, and punctuation mark.”

“My Gawd!... Say, Lady, now lookit here! This here thing is loaded with dynamite, nitroglycerin, TNT, and mustard gas. The dum thing’s apt to go off right on the printin’ press and blow the whole shebang to smithereens. If I was to drop a page onto the floor—whoof!... Better think it over.”

“I’ve thought it over.”

“Um!... It’s funny what folks calls thinkin’ sometimes! Hain’t despondent, be ye?”

“No. Why?”

“’Cause, if ye be, and kind of want to shuffle off’n this mortal coil, you kin pick out easier ’n’ pleasanter ways of doin’ it. There’s layin’ down with your head on the railroad track, f’r instance.”

“Are you afraid, Tubal?”

“Bet your life,” said Tubal, unabashed. “Can’t say I git so much joy out of life that it makes me go around hollerin’ and singin’, but what there is of it I kind of like. When you’re dead you can’t chaw tobacker. Ruther chaw than twiddle a harp. Uh huh. Hain’t no printer’s ink to smell in heaven.”

“But maybe you won’t go to heaven, Tubal.”

“Bound to,” he said, gravely. “Got it all figgered out. Says suthin’ in the Bible about the Lord ’u’d rather herd in one sinner to heaven than ninety-nine righteous fellers, don’t it? Wa-al, I’m the sinner he was calc’latin’ on. When he goes to herd me in, I hain’t goin’ to put up no resistance whatever. Yas ’m I’m safe to pass them pearly gates on the run.”

“Tubal, do you ever drink?”

“Frequent—but not too frequent.”

“Where do you get it?”

“Um!... Now there’s a question, Lady. Now hain’t it? Want a feller to do me a favor like gittin’ liquor fer me in a dry and thirsty land, and then fer me to go ’n’ tattle on him? Uh-uh, Lady. Can’t be did.”

“But you’re loyal to me, aren’t you, Tubal?”

“Lady, seems like I’d come clost to lettin’ wild hosses tromple onto me fer you.”

“Then why not help me when I’m trying to find out about this liquor business?”

“Best help I kin give ye is to warn you to leave it alone. Churchill, he meddled with it.”

“I’m going to find out who killed him.”

“Lady, you’re runnin’ up a tree that’s bound to be struck by lightnin’.... Listen, there’s jest you ’n’ Simmy ’n’ that perfessor feller. Count us up—four. What chanct we got?”

“Against whom, Tubal?”

“The ones we hain’t got no chanct ag’in’,” he said noncommittally. “I dunno, Lady, and if I knowed I wouldn’t tell. Men that hain’t afraid to do away with a sheriff wouldn’t come to a sweat over disposin’ of a printer like me.”

“It’s the business of a newspaper——”

“To make a livin’ for the owners of it and to keep out of libel suits. Stick to that, Lady. Hain’t this sheet in a bad enough way without your tyin’ a rock to it and throwin’ it in the river?”

“We’re wasting time,” said Carmel.

“You’re bound and determined to print this here?”

“I’ll print that if it’s the last act of my life.”

“Wa-al, if that’s the way you feel.... Mebby it will be, mebby not, seems as though.” He walked to the door, and there turned. “I own a book of synonyms,” he said.

“Yes, Tubal.”

“Goin’ to throw it away?”

“Why?”

“’Tain’t correct.”

“How is it wrong?”

“Don’t give woman as a synonym for lunatic,” he said, and disappeared abruptly.

CHAPTER XII

DEPUTY JENNEY, with a crumpled copy of the Free Press in his hand, rushed into Abner Fownes’s office—for once omitting the formality of rapping on the door. He threw the paper upon the desk and stood huge, bristling, speechless.

“What’s this?... What’s this?” Abner demanded, sharply.

“Read it. Read it and see.... Hell’s busted loose in the henhouse.”

Abner smoothed out the paper and read. His face did not change, but his little eyes glowed dully, with a light not pleasant to see, one that suggested pent-up heat, a compression of scorching, searing forces capable of awful explosion. He read the story of the finding of the whisky cache from beginning to end; then reread it, missing no word, no suggestion. Jenney directed him to the editorial page with its conjectures and comment. For some moments he did not speak, but stared at his desk top with those dull-glowing eyes until one might have expected to see wisps of smoke arising from the spot they touched.

Strangely enough, the thoughts of Abner Fownes were not upon the words he had read in the newspaper, but on the writer of them. He was thinking of her apart from this journalistic bomb which she had set off under the feet of Gibeon. Presently he would give that his consideration, but now Carmel Lee stood in the midst of his thoughts, and he reached out to engulf her in his hatred. He hated her with a burning, aching, hungry intensity—with the hatred of a vain man who has been humiliated and stripped stark of his vanity. The very words she had used, but, more than those, the expression of her eyes, was with him now. He watched her and listened to her again, and felt himself shrinking and deflating before her anger.... She despised him—him, Abner Fownes! Despised him! And he hated her for despising him. He hated her for stripping away so ruthlessly the mantle of pretense he had erected between himself and his own eyes. She had humiliated him before his own soul, and his soul was sick with the shame of it.

For years he had lived with his pretense until it had become a part of himself, like the grafted branch upon the sterile tree. None in Gibeon had gainsaid his own estimate of himself. In his small realm he had been supreme—until he had come himself to believe his own pretense.... He hid Abner Fownes from himself studiously; allowed him to admire himself, to look upon himself as good and great.... In those wakeful moments of his soul when it opened its eyes and saw him as he was, he suffered acutely—and applied the ever-ready anesthetic.

Now this girl, to whom he had grandly thrown his handkerchief like some Oriental potentate, had dared to snatch away his disguise and to destroy it utterly. Never again could he wear it, because he would feel her eyes piercing it. Such a garment is only to be worn when there is none in all the world to recognize that it is a disguise. Once a single soul lifts the mask and gazes upon the reality lurking within, and the thing is done. Abner Fownes knew Carmel saw him as he was—not by sure knowledge, grounded upon fact, perhaps, but by intuition. Now he would forever question, and his question would be: Did others see him as he was? Was the adulation showered on him a pretense? Was the attitude people maintained before him a sham, an ironical sham? Was the world laughing at and despising him, as Carmel Lee despised him?... It was unbearably bitter to a man whose natural element was vanity; who had existed in vanity, breathed it, fed upon it, for a score of years.

It is no wonder he hated her!... He no longer desired her. His one thought was to revenge himself upon her, to humiliate her publicly as she had humiliated him before his own eyes. He wanted to degrade her, to besmirch her, to defile her so that her soul would cry out with horror at sight of herself, as his soul revolted at the thing she had conjured up before his own eyes. His was not that hatred which kills. It was more cruel than that, more cowardly, more treacherous, more horrible. His was the hatred which could satisfy itself only by setting Carmel in the pillory; by damning her body and soul and then by exhibiting her to a taunting world....

He wrenched his eyes away from his desk, his thoughts away from his hatred.

“What d’you mean by coming here with this, you fool?” he demanded, savagely.

Deputy Jenney reared back on his heels from the shock of it and goggled at Abner.

“Want to advertise to the world that I care a damn what she prints about whisky? Want the town to clack and question and wonder what I’ve got to do with it?”

“I—I thought you’d want to know.”

“I’d find out soon enough.”

“What you aim to do about it?”

“Do.... Get on record as soon as I can. Congratulate the Free Press on its courage and public spirit.”

“But she’ll pull somethin’ down onto us—her and that perfessor. Attractin’ notice to Gibeon. Fust we know, we’ll be havin’ Federal officers here, and then what?”

“We’ve fiddled long enough.... We’ll petition the Governor to appoint a sheriff—before somebody else gets his ear.”

“Me?” said Jenney.

“I guess folks’ll have to stomach you,” said Abner.

“But what about that danged paper? No tellin’ what she’ll hit on if she goes nosin’ around. Anyhow, she’ll git folks all het up and excited.”

“Well, what would you do about it?” Abner snapped.

“Me? I’d git me about a dozen fellers and fill ’em with booze and give ’em sledge hammers. Then I’d turn ’em loose on that printin’ office, and when they got through there wouldn’t be enough left of it to print a ticket to a church sociable with.”

“Um!...”

“That ’u’d settle that.”

“I suppose you’d lead them down yourself?”

“You bet.”

“I always thought you were a fool, Jenney. Why not stand by the town jump and holler that you’re a whisky runner?... And you planning to be sheriff....” Abner waggled his head. “This is the kind of brains I have to trust to,” he said, sourly.

“Hain’t nobody else to do it,” said Jenney, defensively.

“Seems like Peewee Bangs might be kind of irritated by a newspaper piece like this—and you can trust Peewee to keep in the background, too.”

Jenney slapped his leg, “And he’s got a bunch of plug-uglies handy, too.”

Abner motioned to the door. “Get out,” he said, “and don’t come near me again till I send for you. I don’t want the smell of you on my clothes when I walk down the street.”

Deputy Jenney walked down the road and presently turned upon Main Street, which would carry him past the Free Press office. He paused at sight of a knot of people gathered before its window, and joined them. Carmel had carried enterprise—or indiscretion—to its ultimate. On a table in the window stood a quart bottle of Scotch whisky. Behind it stood a placard announcing it to be the evidence in the case—a veritable bottle from the smuggler’s cache in the woods. Jenney ground his teeth, and, seeing Evan Bartholomew Pell seated at his work, saw red for an instant. He was an impulsive man, and temper often carried him somewhat beyond the boundaries where good judgment reigned. It is not easy to prophesy what he would have done had not a hand rested on his arm.

“Whoo!... Easy there! So-ooo!” whispered a voice, and, looking down, he saw the sharp, wolf-like features of the hunchback, Peewee Bangs.

“Interestin’ exhibit,” said Bangs. “Kind of stole a march on the sheriff’s office.” He laughed a thin, shrill laugh.

“Come away from here. I got suthin’ to talk to ye about,” said Jenney.

“That,” said Peewee, “makes two of us.”

“What’s he got to say about it?” Peewee asked when they had turned the next corner and were in a deserted side street.

“He don’t want it to happen ag’in.”

“Don’t wonder at it. Him ’n’ me agrees.”

“It hain’t goin’ to,” said Jenney, meaningly.

“So.... Now, f’r instance.... You listen, Dep’ty, too many folks disappearin’ and onaccounted for is goin’ to raise curiosity. Surer ’n’ shootin’.... More especial if it’s a woman.”

“No disappearin’s figgered on.... Anyhow, I’m goin’ to be appointed sheriff by the Governor.... Naw. This here’s simple. Jest smashin’.”

“Like you done to the perfessor?... Gritty, wa’n’t he? Never kin tell, kin ye?... I tell ye, Jenney, that perfessor’s a feller to figger on. Shouldn’t be s’prised if he got to be dangerous.... I wonder how come she to tie up to him.”

“’Tain’t that kind of smashin’. He says fer you to git a dozen fellers and fill ’em full, and then turn ’em loose on that printin’ shop with sledge hammers. Kind of tinker with it, like. Git the idee?”

“So-oo!... Me, eh? I can’t see me leadin’ no sich percession down Main Street. Hain’t achin’ to git the public eye focused on me any. Talk enough goin’ around now.”

“Fix it anyhow you like—only fix it.”

“What if the sheriff’s office is called to put down the disturbance?”

“It wouldn’t git much result, seems as though,” said the Deputy, humorously.

Peewee Bangs walked leisurely back to reconnoiter the Free Press office, and, having satisfied himself, clambered into his rickety car and drove out of town in the general direction of the Lakeside Hotel.

Carmel Lee was seated at her desk, endeavoring to appear oblivious to the excitement outside and to the air of hostility within. Everybody disapproved. Even Simmy, the printer’s devil, went about with a look of apprehension, and stopped now and then to peer at her reproachfully. Tubal blustered and muttered. He had appeared that morning with an automatic shotgun under his arm, which he stood against the case from which he was sticking type.

“Going hunting?” Carmel asked, with pretended innocence.

“Self-pertection,” said Tubal, “is the fust six laws of nature, and the bulk of all the rest of ’em.”

“You’re trying to frighten me,” Carmel said, “and you can’t do it. I won’t be frightened.”

“Different here. I be frightened.... Now go back and write some more of them dynamite pieces, Lady, and after the next issue of this here rag comes out—if it ever does—I’m goin’ to throw up breast-works and see if I can’t borrow me a machine gun.”

“Fiddlesticks!” said Carmel.

Evan Pell did not refer to her work until she invited his comment. Then he turned his eyes upon her with something of the old superciliousness in them and said, dryly, “What is done is done.”

“I gather you don’t approve.”

“I most certainly do not,” he said.

“Why,” he countered, “did you not discuss this step with me?”

“Why should I?” she answered, sharply.

“In order,” he said, “to receive an intelligent idea of the course of action to take.” He said this with flat finality, and turned his back. Thereafter Carmel sulked.

She had expected some result—beneficial. Just what result she had not envisaged. Perhaps she had expected some public ovation, some sign that Gibeon sided with her in her efforts to the end of law and order. If she had hoped for this, she was disappointed. Gibeon buzzed with excitement, whispered in corners, gathered in knots, but, such of its inhabitants as found reason to address her, studiously ignored the subject. Gibeon was manifestly uneasy.

If merely the selling of newspapers was her object, she accomplished that. The edition was exhausted before ten o’clock in the morning. No new flood of advertising came to take advantage of the increase in circulation.... She came to doubt her own judgment, and to wonder if she had not acted again on impulse. It was an unpleasant feeling—to know that those upon whom she most relied regarded her conduct with hostility.

Nevertheless, she was determined to persist. How, with what material, she did not know. She grew stubborn under opposition, and resolved that no issue of the Free Press should appear in which the thing should not be followed up.

Evan Pell got up from his place and went out without a word. Presently she heard Tubal banging about, preparatory to going home, and then she was alone. She did not like the feeling of aloneness. The thing had worn upon her more than she realized, and her nerve ends jangled. She was conscious of a rising discomfort of mind, which resolved itself into apprehension as dusk fell and shadows filtered in to flood the corners of the room with blackness. Her mind persisted in thinking of Sheriff Churchill, of the suddenness, the completeness of his disappearing. He had stepped to his door—and from that instant the world had lost him to sight. The mystery of it, the cruel efficiency of it, caused her to shudder. If they—they—dared lay hands upon the chief official of the county, what would cause them to hesitate to deal with her in like manner?

She got up hastily, put away her work, and locked the office. It was not until she was in the well-lighted office of the hotel that a feeling of security came to her again. Then she laughed at herself, but the laughter was a pretense and she knew it to be pretense.... Suddenly she thought of Evan Pell. What of him? If there were danger, was not his danger greater than hers? Already he was the victim of more than a threat.

Her appetite for supper was far from robust and she was glad of the quiet and security of her room. There she endeavored to read, and so passed away the hours until her watch told her it was an hour from midnight. She laid down her book, with a mind to retiring, when there came a rush of footsteps in the corridor without and a pounding upon her door.

“Lady! Lady!... Lemme in! Lemme in, quick!... It’s Simmy.”

She snatched open the door, and Simmy, face splotched with ink as it had been hours before, plunged into the room.

“They’re comin’!” he said, so excitedly he could scarcely articulate. “They’re comin’ with sledge hammers! Quick! They’re dum nigh there.”

She heard herself speak as though it were another individual. As for herself, she was singularly calm, even cool. It had come—the emergency. What was it? What did it bring to her?

“Who is coming with sledge hammers?” she asked.

“Mebby a dozen of ’em—drunk and staggerin’.”

“What are they going to do?”

“Smash the office to smithereens. Bust the presses. Knock everythin’ to pieces, so’s we can’t never print no more.”

“How do you know? Who told you?”

“I was—hidin’ behind a fence.” He neglected to state that it was for the purpose of feloniously obtaining watermelons. “And I heard ’em talkin’. Peewee Bangs was givin’ ’em licker and tellin’ ’em what to do.... Oh, what be we goin’ to do?”

Carmel had no idea, except that she was going to do something to avert this destruction which would spell ruin to her and her paper. Not pausing for hat or wrap, she tore open the door and rushed down the stairs into the dark street.

CHAPTER XIII

IT is much to be doubted if violence and scenes of violence are as abhorrent to the so-called gentler sex as it is popular to pretend. There lurks in a corner of the mind an impish suggestion that a woman, underneath a pretense of dismay or horror, enjoys the spectacle of a fight as much as a man. This polite supposition regarding women has barred them from much pleasure in watching the antagonist sex batter itself about. Next to dogs and line fences, women have caused more fights than any other item of creation—they should be permitted to enjoy the fruits of their activities.... Women are more quarrelsome than men. This is because they know words will not merge into fists—or at worst into the vicarious fists of husbands or brothers. It is not unthinkable that the attribute of the ably acrimonious tongue would atrophy and disappear from the feminine part of the human race within a generation or two if it were permitted to resolve into action rather than barbed innuendo. A field for some rising reformer!

Consequently Carmel was not shocked at being involved in such proceedings. She was angry, apprehensive. Her overshadowing sensation was one of impotence. If men were coming to wreck her newspaper, what could she do about it? It was humiliating to be so ineffective in a crisis like this. A man, any man, would be more efficient than she.

The streets were deserted. A quick glance showed her the attacking force—if attacking force existed save in Simmy’s dime-novel-tainted imagination—had not yet made itself visible.... With the boy at her heels she ran in most undignified manner to the Free Press’s door, admitted herself quickly, and lighted a light.

“Well,” she said, breathlessly, “here we are, Simmy.”

“Yes, ’m,” said Simmy with singular helpfulness.

“I shall call the police,” Carmel said, taking refuge in that expedient of the law-abiding. She turned the handle of the old-fashioned telephone with which Gibeon is afflicted and gave the number of the Sheriff’s office. A drowsy voice answered presently.

“This is the Free Press,” said Carmel. “Send some deputies at once. Men are coming to wreck this place with sledge hammers.”

“Aw, go on!” said the voice. “Ye can’t play no jokes on me.”

“This is not a joke. It is Miss Lee speaking. I want police protection.”

“Jest a minute,” said the voice, and then another, heavier voice took its place.

“Dep’ty Jenney speakin’. What’s wanted?”

“This is Miss Lee. A crowd of drunken men are coming to mob this office. Send men here instantly.”

“Um!... Somebody’s jokin’ ye, Miss Lee. This here’s a peaceful, law-abidin’ community. Better go back to bed and fergit it.”

“Will you send men here at once?”

“Now, ma’am, that hain’t possible. Can’t roust men out of bed and send ’em traipsin’ all over jest on account of a woman gittin’ upset. You go back to bed. Nothin’ hain’t goin’ to happen. Nothin’ ever does.” He hung up the receiver.

It was obvious. Carmel knew. There was collusion between the sheriff’s office and whoever had set a party of drunken irresponsibles upon her. No evidence was needed to demonstrate this to her. It was, and she stored the fact away in her mind vengefully.

“Where’s Tubal? Where’s Mr. Pell?” she asked Simmy.

“Dunno. Hain’t seen nuther of ’em. Nobody never sees nobody when they need them.... Oh, what we goin’ to do? What we goin’ to do?”

He ran into the back room—the composing room—as if he hoped to find some workable course of action lying there ready to be picked up. He was frightened. Carmel could not remember ever having seen a boy quite so terrified. Perhaps the ink blotches on his face made him seem paler than he actually was! But he stayed. The way was open for him to desert her, but the thought did not seem to occur to him. Ignorant, not overly bright, there nevertheless glowed in Simmy a spark of loyalty, and Carmel perceived it and, even in that anxious moment, treasured it.

Presently he came out of the press room, eyes gleaming with terror, shock head bristling, dragging after him, by its barrel, Tubal’s automatic shotgun.

“By gum! The’ shan’t nobody tetch you, Lady, ’less ’n it’s over my dead body.” His voice quavered as he spoke, but Carmel knew her one defender would remain stanch so long as the breath of life remained in him.

“Simmy,” she said, “come here.”

He came and stood beside her chair. His head was scarcely higher than Carmel’s, seated in her chair.

“Simmy,” she said, “you do like me, don’t you?”

“Gosh!” Simmy said, worship in his eyes and voice.

She put her hands on his shoulders and kissed his smudgy cheek. “There, I think you’d better run along now, Simmy. They—they might hurt you.”

“I’m a-goin’ to stay right straight here,” he said. “Oh, Lady! What’s that? Listen to that! They’re a-comin’. Sure’s shootin’, they’re a-comin’.”

“Put out the lights,” said Carmel.

They stood in darkness. Carmel stretched out her hand and took the shotgun from Simmy’s grip. The feel of the cold barrel was distasteful to her. She felt a sense of outrage that she should be compelled to come in contact with an event such as this, an event of sordidness and violence. This was a reaction. For the moment she conceived of herself as doing something which, in the words of her grandmother, was unladylike. Even then she smiled at it. This was succeeded by determination. Doubtless her great-grandmothers had defended their homes from the raids of savage Indians. They had not been too delicate to handle firearms in the defense of their lives and their homes. Why should she be less resolute than they.... There was the story of the great-great-aunt who had killed an intruding savage with an ax!... If those things were heroic in pioneer days, why were they so unthinkable to-day? If women could display resolution, high courage, and perform awful acts of fortitude in 1771, why was not the woman of 1921 capable of conduct as praiseworthy?

Then, too, there was a specious unreality about the affair, something of play-acting. Carmel could not dispel the reflection that it was not so. She was making believe. No drunken men were actually approaching with sledge hammers. Her plant and her person were in no danger. It was playing with other toys substituted for dolls. She drew closer to her the cold barrel of the toy she clutched in her fingers.

“The safety’s on,” said Simmy, practically.

“The safety?”

“Yes, ’m, so’s nobody kin shoot himself. You have to take off the safety before the trigger’ll pull.”

“How do you do it?”

“You push this here dingus,” said Simmy.

Carmel promptly pushed it.

Far down the street she heard a single shout, a few maudlin words of a lumber-camp song. She stepped to the door and peered up the shadowy thoroughfare. Across the Square and perhaps two blocks away she made out a number of dark figures, straggling toward her in midstreet. She could not count accurately, but estimated there were ten or a dozen of them. She crouched in the recess of the doorway and waited. Unreality was dispelled now. She was cognizant of fact—literal, visible, potent fact.

Her sensation was not fear, but it was unpleasant. It resembled nothing in her experience so much as the feeling one has in the pit of his stomach when descending rapidly in an elevator. She could feel her knees tremble. Always she had heard this spoken of as a symbol of cowardice, and she tried to restrain their shaking.... The men approached noisily.

“Light the lights,” she said to Simmy when the men were some fifty yards distant. This was instinct—the instinct for surprise. It was excellent strategy. The men had their directions how to proceed, but in these directions no account was taken of lights turning on unexpectedly. They had been led to expect a deserted office and no resistance. They stopped abruptly and gathered in a knot to inquire the meaning of this phenomenon.

Carmel did some calculation for the first time. To reach the office the men would have to cross the area of light passing through its windows. She, herself, was in the darkness beyond. This, she thought, was as it should be.... Presently the men surged forward again, keeping closely together. Carmel stepped out of the shadows into the light, where she and her weapon must be plainly visible, and paused.

“Stop,” she called, sharply.

They stopped, then somebody laughed. The laugh touched the fuse leading to the magazine of Carmel’s anger. She blazed with the explosion of it. The laugh was a slight thing, but it caused the difference between a mere young woman holding a gun in her hands, and a young woman holding a gun in her hands which she would shoot. She stepped backward into the shadows where she could not be seen.

“Go away,” she said.

“Li’l’ girl with li’l’ shotgun,” somebody said, in a tone of interest.

“I’m going to count ten,” said Carmel. “If you haven’t gone then I’ll shoot.”

“Li’l’ girl kin count to ten,” said the same voice. “Hain’t eddication hell!”

“One,” she began, “two, three, four——”

There was a forward movement, raucous laughter, inebriated comments. She hastened her counting—“five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten....” They were still moving forward slowly, evidently viewing the situation as humorous. She lifted the heavy gun and pointed its muzzle at the mass of approaching legs.... Her acquaintance with twelve-gauge automatic shotguns, and with the dispositions thereof, was rudimentary. She did not know what to expect, nevertheless she tugged at the trigger. There was a tremendous report which frightened her as nothing had frightened her that night. She felt as if one of those men had thrown his sledge and struck her shoulder. Dazed, bewildered, she all but lost her balance.

But, steadying herself, keeping her finger on the trigger, she maintained a readiness for what might come next. Howls of agony emanated from the men. Two of them were rolling on the sidewalk clutching shins and cursing. But for this there was silence. Humor had departed from the situation, for even the smallest bird shot, discharged from a shotgun at less than a hundred feet, are not to be disregarded by those who shun pain.

“She’s shot my leg off.... My Gawd!...”

This exclamation of agony trailed off into curses and incoherent ejaculations.

“Now go away,” Carmel called. “Next time I’ll shoot higher.”

The shot, the suddenness, the unexpectedness of it, had cleared tipsy brains. It had created angry, dangerous men.

“’Tain’t nothin’ but bird shot. All rush her to wunst,” shouted a voice. But before they could resolve into action Carmel fired again, and then again.... It was rather more than such a collection of humanity could endure. With shouts and cries of pain they broke and ran. Carmel advanced, ready for another discharge, when, suddenly, there was a diversion. The attackers were taken in the rear, by whom Carmel could not determine. She saw at least two men, arms swinging clubs right and left with rare indiscrimination. The retreat became a rout. These unexpected reserve forces definitely turned the tide of battle, and in a time so brief as to make its recording difficult, the street was again deserted save for Carmel—and the reserves.

They ran to her, Tubal and Evan Bartholomew Pell. It was the professor who reached her first, and stood inarticulate, trembling, his face working. His eyes searched her face and in them was such an expression as she had never seen turned upon her by human eyes before.... Nevertheless she recognized it.

“Carmel,” he said—“Carmel—are you—all right?”

“Perfectly,” she said, endeavoring to maintain an attitude of aloofness toward the whole episode.

“If anything had happened to you—if one of those beasts had touched you—even with the tip of his finger....”

He stopped suddenly, stared at her. It was as if his scholarly mind had once more come into its own, had seen, classified, cross-referenced his actions and sensations. His face mirrored astonishment, then apprehension, embarrassment. It completed the series by becoming that of a man utterly nonplused.

“My goodness!” he said, breathlessly, “I believe I’ve fallen in love with you.”

She made no reply, such was her own astonishment at the manner of this announcement. He glared at her now, angry reproach in his eyes.

“It’s absurd,” he said. “You had no business permitting me to do so.”

With that he turned on his heel and stalked into the office. Carmel gasped....

“Lady,” said Tubal, “you better pass me that gun. You ’n’ a shotgun fits each other about as suitable as a plug hat.... If you was to ask me I’d say right out in meetin’ that you ’n’ a gun is doggone incongruous.”

“I shot it, anyhow,” she said.

“Dummed if you didn’t,” he exclaimed, admiringly. “Dummed if you didn’t. Them fellers’ll be pickin’ bird shot out of the bosoms of their pants fer a month to come.” Then he paused to give rhetorical effect to the moral he was about to draw.

“If you hadn’t went off half cocked with that whisky piece of your’n,” he said, “this here ol’ gun wouldn’t have had to go off at all.”

But she was not thinking of Tubal nor of pointed morals. She was considering the case of Evan Bartholomew Pell and what she would do with him.

CHAPTER XIV

THE days which succeeded that night’s adventure were placid. Carmel awoke in the morning as one awakes after a singularly realistic dream. It was a dream to her, unreal, impossible. She could not imagine herself doing what she had done; in short, she knew she had never done it. That she should have let off a firearm at human beings was an act so impossible as to make it seem laughable.

She went to the office with apprehension. What would happen? How would Gibeon receive the news? Her apprehensions were needless. Gibeon received the news apathetically. In the first place, the town did not know exactly what had happened and was inclined to place little credence in rumors. Most of it strolled past the office before noon, seeking with wary eye for evidences of the war, and finding none. A scanty few passed through the door to speak with Carmel about it. Apparently Gibeon was not interested.

Somehow this hurt Carmel’s pride. Girl-like, she felt herself to be something of a heroine, and wanted folks to recognize her eminence. But even her own staff seemed not to take that view of the matter. Tubal was sullen; Simmy was silent and frightened; Evan Bartholomew Pell failed to revert to the matter at all. He had retired more deeply than ever within his shell of pedanticism, and his supercilious air was more irritating than ever before. Carmel was hurt.

She did not know how shaken Evan Pell was, nor the effect upon him of his discovery that a woman could be of such importance in his life as he found Carmel to be. With women he had no dealings and no experience. They had been negligible in his life, existing only academically, so to speak. Women and fossil specimens and remnants of ancient civilizations and flora and fauna had occupied somewhat similar positions in his experience, with women in the least interesting position. He did not know them as human beings at all. They had never troubled him in the least. Nothing had ever troubled him greatly. He had always considered them in the mass, as a genus, to be studied, perhaps, as all created things should be studied. But never until Carmel’s advent had he entertained the idea that one of them might become personally important to him. Evan would have been no more astonished to find himself involved with a diplodocus than he now was to discover his throbbing personal interest in an individual woman.

He was angry with Carmel. Somehow she had done something to him. He was affronted. He had been taken advantage of, and now he was considering what action to take. Decidedly Carmel must be put in her place, once for all, and the disagreeable situation with all its dreadful possibilities must be terminated with finality.

Evan turned in his chair and felt for his glasses, which were absent.

“Miss Lee,” he said, in his most pedagogical voice, “may I have your attention briefly?”

Carmel faced him with some trepidation.

“Last night,” he said, “moved by an excitement to which I fancied myself immune, certain words were surprised from me.”

“I don’t remember,” Carmel said, weakly.

“Pardon me,” he said, “you do remember. Your manner toward me assures me of your complete recollection.”

“Indeed!”

“However, in order to avoid misapprehensions I shall refresh your memory. My words, and I remember them exactly, were as follows: ‘I believe I’ve fallen in love with you.’”

“Oh, that,” said Carmel, as if the matter were of no moment.

“That.... Exactly. Er—your physical peril aroused in me an excitement and apprehension most distasteful to me. I have been puzzled for some time with respect to yourself and the strange effect your presence has upon me. The matter became clear last night. I said I believed I was in love with you. That was inaccurate. I knew I was in love with you.”

“But——” Carmel began. Evan held up his hand as to an interruption in a classroom.

“If you please.... I discovered a fact, and one must deal with facts. I slept little last night for considering this one. I have reached a definite and final conclusion, and wish the matter to be understood between us once for all, and so disposed of.”

“Mr. Pell——” Again he imposed silence upon her.

“I am unable to perceive how this distressing condition came into being. It was wholly without intention on my part—against my every instinct. I do not wish to be in love with you.”

“Indeed!” said Carmel.

“Quite the contrary. Therefore I wish to impress upon you that nothing can come of it.”

“And do you suppose——” Once again Carmel essayed to speak; once more he interrupted.

“Be so good as to allow me to finish. Please understand my words to be final. I will not marry you. In no circumstances will I make you my wife. I do not want a wife.... It is no fault of mine that I am in love with you, and therefore I shall not permit myself to suffer for what I cannot help. I shall take measures to affect a cure, for the thing, as I see it, is a species of mental ailment.... Therefore, let me repeat, in spite of the condition in which I find myself, you need not expect me to become your husband.... The matter is closed between us.”

He turned from her abruptly and became much occupied with the papers upon his desk.

As for Carmel, she was in a state of mind. The thing manifestly was an outrage, an indignity, a humiliation, and she was angry. On the other hand, it was absurd, impossibly absurd, inhumanly absurd, and the laughter which struggled to come was only repressed by a wave of pity. The pity engulfed both anger and laughter. Poor, dryly crackling man! What must his life be without human warmth and human emotions! She was able to see the thing impersonally—the dreadful abnormality of his existence, so that when she spoke it was without rancor and gently.

“Mr. Pell,” she said, “you need have no apprehensions. I do not wish to marry you. I am very, very sorry if you have fallen in love with me.... And I cannot tell you how sorry I am for you.”

“For me?” he said, bristling.

“For you. You are the most pathetic man I have ever known.”

“Pathetic!”

She nodded. “I have no experience with life,” she said, gently, “but certain knowledge is born in most of us. We know that life—real life—consists only of suffering and happiness. All other things are only incidents. All the good in life is derived either from sorrow or joy. If you pass through life without experiencing either, you have not lived. And, Mr. Pell, the greatest source of grief and of happiness is love. I do not know how I know this, but you may take it as the truth. I have never loved, but if I felt I never should love, I think I should despair. I want to love some man, to give him my life, to make him my life. I want him to be my world.”

“It is useless to argue,” said Evan Pell.

Carmel flamed.

“Argue!” she said. “Mr. Pell, let me tell you this, and as you said to me a moment ago, it is final. If you and I were the sole survivors upon the earth, I could do nothing but pity you. I am not sure I could do that. You are abnormal, and the abnormal is repulsive.... You rather fancy yourself. You are all ego. Please try to believe that you are of no importance to anybody. You are negligible. Whether you live or die can be of no importance to any living creature.... You are accustomed to look down upon those who surround you. Don’t you see how people look down upon you? You think yourself superior. That is absurd. You are nothing but a dry running little machine, which can go out of order and be thrown upon the junk pile at any time without causing the least annoyance to anybody. Why, Mr. Pell, if you should die to-night, who would care? What difference would it make? What do you contribute to this world to make you of value to it?”

He had turned and was regarding her with grave interest. Manifestly her words did not humiliate nor anger him, but they interested him as an argument, a statement of a point of view.

“Go on, please,” he said. “Elucidate.”

“Only those who give something to the world are important to the world. What do you give? What have you ever given? You have studied. You are so crammed with dry knowledge that you crackle like parchment. What good does it do anybody? What good does it do you? Did you ever help a living creature with your knowledge? I cannot imagine it. You study for the sake of increasing your own store, not with the hope of being able to use all your knowledge to do something for the world. You are a miser. You fill your mind with all sorts of things, and keep them there. It is utterly selfish, utterly useless. Think of the great men whose work you study, the great thinkers and scientists of all ages. Why did they work? Was it to hoard knowledge or to give it to the world in order that the world might live more easily or more happily? They are important because they were useful. You—Why, Mr. Pell, you are the most conspicuously useless human being I have ever encountered.”

He regarded her a moment before speaking. “Is your thesis complete?” he asked, gravely.

“It is.”

“I shall give it my best consideration,” he said, and turned again to his work.

It was not easy for Carmel again to concentrate upon the books of the Free Press, which, with only a limited knowledge of the bewildering science of bookkeeping, she was examining. Bookkeeping is a science. It is the science of translating simple financial facts into abstruse cipher in order that nobody may understand them except an individual highly trained in cabalistics. The reason for this is clear. It is a conspiracy among bookkeepers to make bookkeepers necessary and thus to afford themselves with a means of livelihood.... Carmel was reading the cipher in order to determine if the Free Press were in worse or better case for her ownership of it.

Love and bookkeeping are subjects which do not blend, for, as anybody knows, love is not an exact science. Also it is a characteristic that love meddles with everything and blends with nothing. It is intensely self-centered and jealous. Therefore, as may be supposed, Carmel had difficulty in arriving at conclusions.

An ordinary declaration of love must be somewhat upsetting, even to the most phlegmatic. A declaration such as Evan Pell had just uttered would have disturbed the serenity of a plaster-of-Paris Venus of Milo. Carmel wished to compare circulation figures; what she actually did was to compare Evan’s declaration with the declaration of love of which she, in common with every other girl, had visualized in her dreams. It would be idle to state that Carmel had never considered Evan as a possible husband. It is doubtful if any unmarried woman ever encounters an available man without considering him as a possible husband—or if any married woman, no matter how virtuous, ever passes an hour in the society of a gentleman without asking herself if this is the individual with whom she may have the great love affair of her life. Love, being the chief business of all women from six to sixty, this is natural and proper.

Here was a variant of the common situation. Carmel was informed she was loved, but that she need expect nothing to come of it. No woman could like that. It was a challenge. It was an affront. A gage of battle had been cast, and it is to be doubted if there is a woman alive who would not feel the necessity of making Evan alter his views. Carmel did not want him in the least. Quite the contrary; but, now he had spoken his mind so brusquely, she would never be able to live in ease until he came to want her very much and wore his knees threadbare begging for her. This was wholly subconscious. Carmel did not know it, but, nevertheless, she had determined to make Evan Pell pay fully in the coin of the transaction for the damage done by his ineptitude.

With part of her mind on the figures and the rest on Evan Pell, she arrived at certain information. Unquestionably the Free Press had been gaining in circulation. That much she had accomplished. Her policy of reckless disclosure could have no other result, and therefore it must have been good journalism. As for advertising patronage—there, too, she had made progress. Her personal solicitation brought in some few new advertisers and resulted in old patrons enlarging somewhat their space. Also she had taken some business from Litchfield, the largest adjoining town, and, on a visit to the near-by city, she had induced a department store to use half a page weekly. How much of this she could hold was a problem. It became more of a problem within the hour, when no less than three of her patrons called by telephone to cancel. The Busy Big Store canceled a full page which Carmel had labored hard to get; Lancelot Bangs, photographer, and Smith Brothers’ grocery ceased to be assets—and no one of them assigned a reason. It worried her to such an extent that she dropped her work and went to see about it.

Her first call was upon the proprietor of the Busy Big Store. This gentleman was embarrassed, and consequently inclined to bluster, but Carmel, being a persistent young person, cross-examined him ruthlessly.

“I got to borrow from the bank,” he said, finally. “No merchant kin git along without accommodation. Bank says I’m wastin’ too much money advertisin’, and it can’t back me if I keep on.”

“So you take orders from the bank?” she asked, hotly, out of her inexperience.

“You kin bet your bottom dollar I do,” he said.

Carmel bit her lip. “Abner Fownes is a stockholder in the bank, isn’t he?”

“One of the biggest.”

Carmel turned away and left the store. She had run down her fact. No more was necessary. She knew why merchants were canceling their contracts with her—it was because Abner Fownes issued orders to do so. For the first time he showed his hand in overt act. The question now was: How many merchants in Gibeon could Abner Fownes control? How long could he continue to dictate to them?... What good was circulation increase if advertising patronage failed?

She returned to the office in lowest spirits and considered her case. It was not pleasant consideration.

She had arrived in town a few weeks before, a stranger, without friends. She was unacquainted with Gibeon and with its peculiarities, and at the very beginning had made an enemy of its leading citizen, a man ostensibly possessed of great power to blight her prospects. She had made no friends, had not sought to strengthen her position by alliances. Frankly, she knew almost as little about Gibeon to-day as she knew the hour of her arrival. Her acquaintance was altogether with the melodramatic side of the town’s life, with the disappearance of its sheriff; with illicit dealings in liquor; with its political trickery. She did not know who were its solid, dependable, law-respecting citizens. It might have been well to go to the trouble of finding who of Gibeon’s residents were in sympathy with her campaign of disclosures, but she had not done so. She stood alone, without the approval of those who worked with her.

She saw how she had plunged into things with her habitual impulsiveness, without giving consideration to facts or consequences. Without intending it to be so, she had so arranged matters that the battle stood as the Free Press against the world. How much better it would have been to move cautiously; to be sure of her ground; to know she could rely upon powerful support. She wondered if it were too late....

At this stage in her reflections, George Bogardus, undertaker, darkened her door. George was not a youth, but he simulated youth. He wore the sort of clothes one sees in magazine illustrations—with exaggerations. He wore spats. A handkerchief with a colored border allowed its corner to peer from his breast pocket, and useless eyeglasses hung from a broad black ribbon. If George were seen standing in the window of some clothing store catering to the trade of those who dress by ear rather than by eye, he would have been perfection. Once George saw a play in Boston, and since that day he had impersonated a young English nobleman who had been its hero. His speech was a quaint mingling of New England intonation and idiom with what he could remember of the inflections and vocal mannerisms of Lord Algernon Pauncefote.

“Aw—I say,” he began, lifting his eyeglasses to his nose. “Aw—Miss Lee.”

“Yes, Mr. Bogardus.”

“I say—this is the day we kin start depositin’ our votes, hain’t it?... What?”

“In the Handsomest-Man contest?”

“Er—precisely. Y’understand—aw—have no interest myself. Not the least.” This was Lord Pauncefote at his best. “Buy m’ friends. What? Cheerio! Eh?”

“Of course, Mr. Bogardus.”

“Er—say, who else has got any votes in?”

“Nobody, as yet.”

“Satisfactory, very. Yes, yes.... Lance Bangs hain’t entered yit?”

“Not yet.”

“I fawncy ’e will be,” said Mr. Bogardus. “Aw—permit me to—er—deposit with you—aw—eighteen of these so-called coupons.... Guess that’ll give me as good a start as any, seems as though.”

“Yes, indeed, Mr. Bogardus. Good luck to you.”

“Er—notice anything?” He toyed with the ribbon on his eyeglasses and cast an arch glance upon Carmel.

“Oh yes, indeed! How distinguished it makes you look!”

He purred. “That’s the way I calc’late to look. How was it that feller said it in French. Seems like I can’t twist my tongue around French.... Eh?... Oh, dis-tan-gay. Sounds kind of, don’t it. Say.”

He turned toward the door, but paused. “Heard the news?” he asked.

“What news?”

“Aw—fawncy an editor askin’ that. Fawncy!... They’re goin’ to declare the office of sheriff vacant and git the Governor to appoint Jenney to the job.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s bein’ talked all over. Jenney says so himself. Rippin, eh? What?”

So they dared go as far as that—to appoint to the high office of sheriff of the county a man such as Deputy Jenney! The thought was not without its pleasant facets. If she had forced them to take such a step it must mean she was reckoned as dangerous.... She hugged that thought to her breast.

CHAPTER XV

EVAN BARTHOLOMEW PELL was thinking. He had been thinking for hours, and according to present rate of progress, it would be hours more before he arrived at a conclusion. He had found an interesting subject—one discovered rather later in life than by most people, but, perhaps, all the more interesting for that reason. The subject was himself.

It is a fact that never until to-night had he thought about himself as the ordinary run of human beings think. When he had given consideration to himself it had been a sort of aloof, impersonal consideration. He had often thought about Evan Pell’s mind—as one thinks of a warehouse—and much consideration had been given to filling it with intellectual merchandise. No consideration whatever had been given to moving away any of that merchandise out of the warehouse and distributing it.

His requirements had been of the simplest—food, shelter, and an opportunity to lay in intellectual goods, wares, and merchandise. With pleasure he had been unacquainted, and hence felt no desire to possess it. Sorrow was unknown to him. On the whole, he was rather like a chess-playing automaton, except that his range was somewhat wider and more complicated.

But now he had discovered himself as an individual. The discovery was wholly due to Carmel Lee. He had fallen in love with her, which was a monstrous thing, but potent to prepare the soil of his mind for undesired crops. Then she had spoken to him about himself with frankness and logic. He was not disturbed by the frankness, but his antecedents rendered him apt to perceive the logic. That had impressed him. What was the use of himself, anyhow? Such was the question he considered. His object was acquisition, not dissemination. Had he been mistaken in choosing that object? This led further. What were human beings for? Why had people to be born, and to live? He recognized the necessity of utility. Was he inutile?

It was ten minutes after midnight when he admitted he was inutile, or nearly so. What followed? There followed immediately a disagreeable sensation, a sense of humiliation. He, a representative, undoubtedly, of the highest order of human beings, was not useful. Members of much lower orders were useful. The ditch digger was useful; the man who collected the garbage was useful. In that event diggers and garbage men must be of more value to the world than himself.

This was intolerable. He could not allow such a state of affairs to persist, but the method of abolishing it was not manifest. Mentally he tabulated the attributes of such patently useful things as he could remember, looking for their lowest common denominator. It appeared to be something like what Carmel Lee declared it to be—namely, improving some aspect of life upon this planet. If one could touch any phase of life and render it more efficient, he was useful. He wondered what aspect of life he could improve. And then he came to the most important and far-reaching discovery of his life. This discovery came at exactly ten minutes past one in the morning.... In order to find how one might be useful to life, one must know life! That was the discovery, and it quite overturned his conception of how he would live and die.

Inexorably his mind forced him to a corollary. In order to know life, one must know human beings. He elaborated on this. It meant mingling with human beings, taking part in their lives, watching and comprehending the significance of the ramifications of their actions and emotions. It was something one could not derive from books, unless, as he had heard vaguely, works of fiction depicted these things with some degree of verity. But he never read fiction.

All of this led to another alarming discovery. This came at two o’clock in the morning. It was this—that learning, simply as learning, was not worth a tinker’s dam. Of course this is not his phraseology, but it expresses his thought. Learning stored in the mind’s warehouse is like gold not taken from the mine. It is no good even to the possessor. You have to mine and smelt gold before it takes on a measurable value. It has to be put into circulation in some form. The same was true, necessarily, of knowledge.

This meant the overturning of his whole life, for Evan Pell, besides being logical, possessed another quality of greater value—when he perceived that any act was the act to be done, he set about doing it to the best of his ability. This was not courage; it was not resolution; it was natural reaction.

At three o’clock he retired. It was with a sense of humiliation he lay down on his bed. Instead of being, as he had fancied, a wonderful and superior being, he was negligible. His resolution, taken with characteristic finality, was that in the morning he would begin to be the thing he was not. This was very fine, but it possessed one defect: It was purely academic. It emanated wholly from the head, and not in any fraction whatever from the heart. Emotionally he did not give a hoot what became of humanity.

He awoke to a strange world in the morning—felt like a fresh arrival in a strange planet. His duty was to find out what the planet was about and, so to speak, make preparations to take out naturalization papers. How to begin?... Well, he must eat, and therefore it was essential to continue at his present employment. He thought about his present employment superciliously until he caught himself at it; then he considered his employment logically. Hitherto he had taken no interest in it, except as it offered a challenge to his intelligence. Carmel had doubted his ability to do the work, and, in irritation, he had essayed to prove he could do that as well as anything else. The thrashing he had taken from the fists of Deputy Jenney had reached deep enough to touch his latent manhood—to blow upon the ember derived from some sturdy ancestor.... Now he considered briefly the business of news purveying, and was able to see how serviceable it was to mankind. The business of a newspaper, as he saw it, was to give to the community the agenda of the world, and, by editorial argument, to assist in the business of directing public opinion.... This was a worthy business.... More specifically he gave thought to the Free Press and what it was trying to do. Carmel, rushing in where angels feared to tread, was endeavoring to cure a definite, visible sore on the public body. For the first time he viewed the activities of Gibeon’s liquor smugglers as a matter of right and wrong, and not as a problem set in a textbook. If he could help to abolish this malignant sore he would be performing real service.... That aspect of matters interested him. He found that the mere mental exercise of thinking about humanity gave one an emotional interest in humanity.... He was progressing.

One could not attain to results in a laboratory without intimate contact with specimens; one could not attain to results in the world without intimate contacts with human beings. Therefore Evan made up his mind to procure for himself a mantle of sociability.... He wore it to the office, and Tubal was the first human being to see it exhibited. Tubal was mystified.

“Good morning, Tubal,” said Evan, with painstaking courtesy. “How do you do this morning? Er—we must become better acquainted, Tubal.... I trust I make myself clear. Yes, yes. I wish, at your leisure, to converse with you—er—regarding—ah—many things. Yes, indeed.... I wish to obtain your viewpoint.”

Tubal stared, and reared back on his heels mentally.

“Don’t feel dizzy or nothin’, do ye?” he asked.

“I am perfectly well. Why do you ask?”

“Aw—nothin’.... Say!... Looky here. Viewpoint, is it? Aw....”

“What I wish to convey,” said Evan, and he unmasked a smile which was decidedly to his credit, “is—that I wish to be friends.”

Tubal regarded him suspiciously, but Tubal’s eyes were keen and his perceptions keener. He saw embarrassment in Evan’s smile, and sincerity, and something else which might have been called pitiful.

“I’m doggoned!” he exclaimed.

Evan sighed. This business of making human contacts was more difficult than he imagined. “I—you know—I fancy I like you,” he said.

Tubal waved his hands, a fluttering, distracted sort of waving. “’Tain’t licker,” he said to himself. “Must be suthin’ he et....”

“Er—we will resume the subject later,” said Evan, “when both of us have more leisure.... Ah, good morning, Simmy. I trust you slept well.... The weather is—ah—satisfactory. Do you not find it so?”

Tubal leaned against the press and swallowed three several convulsive times. Then he turned upon Simmy fiercely. “Go wash your face,” he shouted.

Evan backed away a step and then beat a retreat. He sat down at his table and leaned his head on his hands. Obviously the thing had not been properly done. The results were quite other than he desired, but why? He had unbent. He had been friendly, made friendly overtures. What was wrong?

At this unsatisfactory juncture Carmel entered, looking very young and fresh and dainty. Evan forgot his disappointment for the moment in his delight at seeing her. He stared at her as a hungry child stares in a bakery window. The sensation was highly pleasurable. He detected this and took immediate measures to suppress it.

“Miss Lee,” he said, with some hesitation, “I gave careful consideration to your yesterday’s arraignment of myself.”

“I’m sorry. I had no intention to wound you, Mr. Pell. I—I hope you will forgive me.”

“You did not wound me. Er—quite the contrary.... As I say, I reflected upon what you said. I slept little. Unquestionably you were right.... I have lived in error. My estimate of myself was mistaken. I have, in short, been of negligible value to the world.”

“Mr. Pell!”

“If you please.... I have reached a determination to revolutionize my life. I shall no longer stand aloof. No. I shall participate in events.... Indeed, I have made a beginning—not altogether auspicious. I essayed to make friends with Tubal this morning, but he seemed not to comprehend my meaning. However, I shall persist.... As to yourself—we are not friends, you and I. You do not rate me highly.... I wish to correct this.” He paused. “As I have been compelled to inform you, I have fallen in love with you.... This moment, as you entered, I glowed with pleasure.... Yesterday I informed you you need expect nothing to come of it. To-day I am in doubt.... I desired to hold myself free from—er—such things as marriage. Doubtless that, also, was a mistake.... I am open-minded.”

“You—you—are open-minded!” Carmel gasped out the words.

“Exactly. I have determined to allow the emotion to follow its natural course, without interference by myself. Even if it results in marriage with you, I shall not interfere.”

“Of all things,” said Carmel.

“Meantime, while the more important matter is working itself out, let us endeavor to be friends.” As he said this there came into his voice a wistfulness, a humility which touched her. Her eyes filled. She held out her hand.

“Friends!... Of course we shall be friends! You must overlook my bad temper. I have so many faults.”

His eyes glowed, his face became animated. “You,” he said, eagerly, “are very lovely. You are—er—wonderful....” He stared at her as if she had been an apparition. Carmel caught her breath and turned away abruptly.

So much for Evan Pell’s effort to break through his chrysalis shell.... The fates had not determined if he were to become a moth or a butterfly....

At that very hour Abner Fownes was opening his mail. His frame of mind was not of the pleasantest, though he had succeeded in tiding over the day before a situation financially threatening. The condition of his affairs was wearing upon him. Constant calls for money, demands upon his shiftiness to prevent a débâcle, never-failing watchfulness, bore heavily upon the man. It was not easy to maintain his attitude of high-spirited public citizen. It was not simple to keep beneath the surface the man who lurked under the skin of the fatuous cat’s-paw. It was difficult to maintain the pretense of being used by smaller men, when constantly he had to twist smaller men to his own ends.

Now he opened with trepidation a letter from a lumber concern with which his dealings had been extensive.

We have received yours of the 20th with respect to renewing your note for $18,750 which falls due two weeks from to-day. We regret that in present conditions this is impossible, and must ask you to take up this paper without fail.

Fownes crumpled the letter in his hand and stared at the paneling of his office as if he hoped by the mere venom of his look to reduce it to ashes. His pudgy, beautifully tailored shoulders moved upward so that his short neck disappeared and his ears rested upon his collar. Then he expelled his breath. He arose and went to the safe, which he opened—to which he alone possessed the combination—and took from its resting place the red leather book in which he kept the true record of his and his company’s condition. This he carried to his desk, and for many minutes he studied it, hoping against hope for some expedient to make itself apparent.... There was no expedient.

He returned the book to its place and locked the safe; then he twisted the handle of the telephone insistently, and gave Central the number of the Court House.

“Deputy Jenney,” he said, arrogantly.

The deputy answered.

“Come to my office immediately,” he said. “Never mind who sees. This is imperative.... At once.” Following that, he waited.

Deputy Jenney entered, breathless, and stood panting.

“Jenney,” said Fownes, “I’ve determined to make another investment.”

“Eh? Already.... Why, we hain’t hardly got the last off’n our hands. It’s takin’ a chance, says I, and crowdin’ the mourners.”

“I’m running this business, Jenney.... This next is to be no retail deal, either. It’s wholesale.”

“You—you want to go easy. By golly! Mr. Fownes, so much stuff comin’ in is goin’ to git somebody mighty curious.”

“If you’re sheriff, Jenney, what will the curiosity amount to?”

“Federal officers!”

Fownes shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll see to your appointment as sheriff. You attend to organizing everybody to receive the shipment. We’ll need all available space and all outlets. I’m going to fetch in enough this time to flood the county.”

“You know what you’re doin’,” Jenney said, sullenly, “but what with that damn paper a-peckin’ at us all the time——”

“Nobody reads it, Jenney. And you’ll be sheriff.”

“I’ll do my dumdest—but I don’t like it.”

“And I don’t care whether you like it or not. And that’s that. Better see Peewee first.”

“When’s it comin’?”

“Inside of ten days.... And, Jenney, I don’t believe the paper’s going to bother much longer.”

“Eh?”

“I’m going to—er—give that girl a hint of our plans.”

“What?”

“I’m going to give her a tip, as they say. She’ll investigate, and that professor will investigate.”

“Like Sheriff Churchill did?”

“The result,” said Fownes, “will be similar.”

CHAPTER XVI

“YOU are not,” said Evan Pell to Carmel Lee, “familiar with laboratory practice—er—with chemical analysis, for instance.”

“I know nothing about it?”

“I judged not,” he said, unwittingly reverting to his patronizing manner. “However, it seems to me the individual who searches for truth—in the happenings of the day—would be better fortified for his labors if he applied the methods of the chemist.”

“As, for instance?”

“Let us suppose there has been a crime. The crime is a result. An inevitable result of the combination of certain elements. Given the crime, the chemist should be able to analyze it and to separate its elements.”

“I believe that is the method of story-book detectives.”

“No.... No.... This is science, logic. A simple example. You hold a substance in your hand. You moisten it with iodine. If the substance turns purple you know starch is present. Do you see?”

“I’m sure I don’t see.”

“What do you think of Abner Fownes?” he asked, with uncharacteristic swerving from the subject.

“I think he is abominable.”

“Possibly.... But impersonally, as an individual—what then?”

“He is a pompous, self-deceiving, hypocritical poseur.”

“Uh!... As to intelligence?”

“As your chemist would say—a trace.”

“I fear,” he said, “you have neglected to moisten him with iodine.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean,” he said, “that you have utterly failed to comprehend what you are facing—what it is you have to do in this headstrong crusade of yours against the liquor smugglers.”

“What has that to do with Abner Fownes?”

“That,” he said, “is the big question.”

“But why should he? That is absurd. Perhaps the smugglers are using him as a cat’s-paw in some manner—but he’s rich. There’s no need. These men take the risks they must for profit.”

“Miss Lee,” he said, “you—er—challenged me to investigate this affair. I promised to do so.... I have set about it in an orderly manner.”

“So I imagine,” she said, a trifle wearily.

“I have started with the compound itself—with the fact that we know there exists a wholesale traffic in liquor, from which a huge profit is derived. This is compounded of many small elements. I think we may take it as fact that the hunchback, Peewee Bangs, is an element; that his hotel is another element; that Deputy Jenney is a rather important ingredient. For myself, I am satisfied numerous citizens of Gibeon are involved—in the distribution and marketing of the liquor. I am quite certain, for instance, that the business of taking photographs is not the sole means of livelihood followed by Lancelot Bangs.... He is, I believe, a cousin to the proprietor of the Lakeside Hotel.... These things are present in the compound, but they could not, joined together, cause the result we see. The principal ingredient is missing.”

“And what is that?”

“A daring, ruthless intelligence. Able leadership. The brain capable of conceiving of bootlegging as an industry, and not as a matter of petty retailing.”

Carmel Lee was impressed. Evan Pell possessed the quality of holding interest, of seeming to speak from sure knowledge.

“I think you are right so far. What we need is to find this intelligence.”

“I rather fancy I have found him. In fact, I have had little doubt as to his identity for a considerable time.”

“Abner Fownes?” She shrugged her shoulders. “I dislike him—he is insufferable—but the idea is absurd. Bumptious little men like him, secure in their wealth and position, do not jeopardize it.”

“That,” said Evan, “is dependent upon their security. What would you say if I were to tell you Abner Fownes has been on the brink of bankruptcy for months? What would you say if I told you this rum running commenced only after his finances became tangled? What would you say if I told you the major part of the profits from this liquor business went to maintain Abner Fownes in the character he has assumed, and keep his imperiled business out of the hands of his creditors?”

“I would say,” she said, “that you are crazy.”

“Nevertheless,” he said, “I am convinced of the fact.”

“But he has no brains. Look at him. Observe him.”

“Miss Lee, it takes a man of tremendous resolution and of very keen intelligence to invent for himself a character such as he has exhibited to Gibeon for years.... If the world supposes you are a nincompoop—a vain figurehead—a puppet set up by other men—you are little in danger of arousing suspicion as to yourself. When a man is commonly admitted to be a fool, he is safe. Fownes has been at infinite pains to prove himself a fool.”

Carmel was far from dull. Her mind flashed to the keystone of the arch Pell was constructing. “Show me he is on the verge of bankruptcy and maybe you can convince me of the rest.”

He told her. He itemized the contracts Fownes had made for the purchase of lumber, and the prices at the time of sale. He showed how the market had declined, and the total sum of Fownes’s losses. “These,” he said, “are facts—not public, but easy to come by.... I first found the trail of them when the cashier of the bank asked me to assist him in an audit of the books. That was some months ago when I occupied my official position.”

“But if you are right, then Abner Fownes is a murderer, or an instigator of murder.... Nobody can look at him and credit that.”

“Abner Fownes,” said Pell, “is capable of any crime to preserve Abner Fownes. I have watched him, studied him. I know.”

“I can’t believe.... It is incredible. No. You must be mistaken.”

“Miss Lee,” said Pell, solemnly, “if you wish to continue to exist, if you hope to come through this affair with your bare life, you must believe. If you cannot believe, pretend it is a fact and act accordingly. Forget everything else and concentrate upon Abner Fownes.... But take this warning: The moment he suspects you suspect him—you will doubtless join Sheriff Churchill.... I believe Churchill was on the road to the discovery. He would not have disappeared otherwise.”

Carmel remained silent, considering. At length she spoke. “You are right,” she said. “One does not insure his house because he believes it will burn, but in case it shall burn. I shall make believe you are right about Abner Fownes—as an insurance policy.... But where does that lead us?”

“To the sheriff’s office,” said Pell.

“What?”

“If Jenney is appointed sheriff to succeed Churchill, where is the machinery to fight Fownes? He could laugh at us. Therefore Jenney must not be appointed.”

“But how can that be averted?”

“I think,” he said, “the sole hope lies in yourself.”

“In me!”

“You must find a man, a man of courage, of public spirit. You must find a man who can be relied upon and whose name will carry weight with the Governor.... When you find him, you must go to the Capitol and make the Governor appoint him—and you must act at once.”

“I?... I go to the Governor?”

“You.... If you could carry a petition, signed by a number of citizens, it would strengthen you, but I don’t see how that can be done.... And yet—and yet——”

“It must be done.... Secretly.”

“To approach one man—who would talk, who was on the other side—would be to ruin the whole project.”

“Nevertheless, it must be done.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “First find a man worthy to hold the office,” he said.

“I shall find him.... I know Mrs. Churchill. She will know her husband’s friends and supporters—the men who worked for his election and whom he trusted.”

“The idea is good,” said Evan. “Suppose you act without delay.”

Carmel found Mrs. Churchill in the kitchen, giving a hearty welcome, in spite of her baking, to the visitor.

“Set,” said Mrs. Churchill, “and lemme pour you a cup of tea. Always keep it simmerin’ on the back of the stove in case of headache.” This was a favorite fiction of Mrs. Churchill’s—that she suffered with her head and that tea was the only remedy. It would appear, however, that she used the beverage as a preventive instead of a cure.

“I’m sorry, but I haven’t time to sit this morning. I’ve come to you because you’re the only person in Gibeon who can help me—and because you are the one most interested in helping me.... I want to know whom to trust.”

“Eh?... Trust? Speakin’ of young men, be ye?”

“No.” Carmel smiled as she saw the fire of matchmaking light Mrs. Churchill’s motherly eyes. “I want to know whom your husband trusted. I’ve got to find a man.... Deputy Jenney is going to be appointed sheriff,” she said.

Mrs. Churchill’s eyes flashed. “In my man’s place! That critter!”

“If,” said Carmel, “I can’t find an honest man—one like your husband—and get there first.”

“Uh huh....” said Mrs. Churchill, ruminatively. “He wa’n’t much give’ to talkin’, but more’n once he says to me, says he, ‘The’ hain’t many in this place I’d trust as fur’s I could throw ’em by the horns,’ he says. But I call to mind that whenever he got kind of out of his depth like, and had to talk things over with somebody, he allus went to spend the evenin’ with Jared Whitefield. Him and Jared was close. I don’t calc’late you’d make no mistake goin’ to Jared and statin’ your case.”

“Thank you,” said Carmel. “There’s not a moment to be wasted. Good-by.”

She did not return to the office, but walked out the main street, past the village cemetery, to the rambling, winged house from which Jared Whitefield ruled his thousand-acre stock farm—a farm he had carved himself out of the forest, cleared, stumped, and planted. She knew the man by sight, but had never held conversation with him. He was not an individual to her, but a name. She opened the gate with trepidation, not because she feared the reception of herself, but because she was apprehensive. Mr. Whitefield, when studied at close range, would not measure up to the stature of the man she felt was needed.

A dog barked. A voice silenced the dog. Carmel noted how suddenly the dog quieted when the voice spoke. Then a man appeared around the corner of the house, an ax in his hand, and stood regarding her. He did not bow, nor did he speak. He merely stood, immobile, as if some cataclysm of nature had caused him to burst through the soil at that spot, and as if there still remained embedded roots of him which anchored him forever to the spot. He was big, straight, bearded. At first glance she thought him grim, but instantly decided it was not grimness, but granite immobility. She approached and greeted him.

“Good morning, Mr. Whitefield,” she said.

He inclined his head and waited.

“I am Miss Lee, proprietor of the Free Press,” she said.

“I know ye,” he said.

Surely he was difficult; but for all that, she felt herself drawn to the man. There was a feeling that if she could scale his granite sides and sit upon the shelf of his shoulder she would be safe—that nothing could topple him from the spot where he had taken root.

“I want to talk to you, Mr. Whitefield. It is a matter of great importance—almost of life and death,” she said.

“Say it,” said Jared Whitefield.

“They’re going to appoint Deputy Jenney sheriff,” she said.

“Know it.”

“It mustn’t be.”

“Why?”

“Is it safe to speak here. A word overhead——”

“This is my yard,” said Jared, and there was much, much more in the words than the mere statement of the fact. It was a declaration of independence. It was a guaranty. It lifted Jared out of the commonplace and made a personage of him—the unquestioned ruler of a principality. Where he was, he ruled.

“You know what my paper has done.”

“Lighted matches nigh a powder keg.”

“I believe, and I hope to prove, there is an organization here for the purpose of wholesale dealing in smuggled liquor. I believe that organization murdered Sheriff Churchill. I believe Jenney is a part of it and that his appointment as sheriff is a move to give the criminals safety in their work. I know there are huge profits. At the top is some man of intelligence who directs. I want to get that man.”

“Who?”

“I think Sheriff Churchill knew—or guessed. That’s why he is dead.”

“Uh!... Wa-al?”

“Our only chance is to block Jenney’s appointment. To get first to the Governor with the name of another man—a man whose name and personality carry weight. If we can get the office of sheriff we are halfway to success.”

“Will Abner Fownes back the man you pick? Go to the Governor fer ye?”

She looked at him briefly, moved a step closer, and lowered her voice.

“Abner Fownes,” she said, “is the man I believe to be the chief of the rum runners. I believe he gave the word to kill Sheriff Churchill.”

Whitefield moved for the first time. He ran a hand through his beard and drew a breath like a sigh.

“Life insured?” he asked.

“You will be my life insurance.”

She took him by surprise; his features actually changed for an instant. “Me?” he said.

“When you are sheriff,” she said.

“I’m fifty. By mindin’ my business I got twenty-odd year to live.”

“He was your friend,” she said.

There was a long silence while she watched his face, and he, looking over the top of her head, stared at the field and woodland stretching to the horizon.

“He was my friend,” said Jared Whitefield.

“Then you will?”

“Can’t be done. Fownes has the say.”

“I think it can be done. Will you let me try?”

He considered in his ponderous way. Then he turned without a word and walked away. He proceeded half a dozen steps and then halted. “Yes,” he said, over his shoulder, and continued on his way.

CHAPTER XVII

CARMEL walked back rapidly, but her pace did not interfere with the activities of her mind. She had many things to reflect upon, and not the least of these was a sudden realization that Evan Bartholomew Pell had, of a sudden, as it were, taken command. It was he, rather than herself, who had risen to the emergency. He had seen the necessities of the situation. He had comprehended the situation itself as she had never done. While she had been obeying impulse he had been acting intelligently. It was true he seemed to have little tangible evidence to work upon, but, somehow, she felt he would be able to find it. The amazing thing was that, without effort, without seeming to do so, he had moved her into secondary place. He had told her what to do, and she had done it without question.... Evan was a surprising person, a person of submerged potentialities. She wondered just what kind of man he would be if he ever came to himself and came into his own personality. In addition to which, Carmel, like all other women, could not but give careful consideration to a man who had declared his love for her.

Then there was Jared Whitefield to appraise. She liked him, but found herself somewhat in awe of his granite impassivity. She felt he had looked through and through her, while she had not been able to penetrate the surface of him. She had talked; he had listened. He had made his decision, and wholly without reference to herself, or to what she had said to him. But, on the other hand, he seemed to have washed his hands of the responsibility for his appointment as sheriff. If it could be managed—well and good. He would serve. But that seemed to be all. He offered no assistance, no suggestion. He had said “Yes” and walked out of the boundaries of the matter.

Jared Whitefield was a personality, of that she was certain. He was a man to impress men, a man to rule, a man never to be overlooked.... Why, she wondered, had he remained inactive in Gibeon. Apparently he had rested like a block of granite beside a busy thoroughfare, negligent of the bustle of passing traffic. What, she wondered, did Gibeon think of Jared. How would he appeal to Gibeon as its candidate for sheriff?

She reached the office and found Evan Pell waiting for her.

“Well?” he said.

“I’ve found the man, and he has agreed to serve.”

“What man?”

“Jared Whitefield.”

He nodded, almost as if he had known it from the beginning. It irritated her.

“You’re not surprised at all,” she said sharply.

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because it would have required colossal stupidity to choose any other man—and you are not stupid.”

She looked at Evan with curiosity, and he sustained her gaze. He was changed. She saw that he had been changing through the days and weeks, gradually, but now he seemed to have made some great stride and reached a destination. He did not look the same. His face was no longer the face of an egoistic pedant. It was not alone the laying aside of his great, round spectacles. The thing lay rather in his expression and in his bearing. He seemed more human. He seemed larger.... She was embarrassed.

“The petition,” she said. “I must have that.”

“Signatures would be easy to get. There are a hundred men who would sign any petition with Jared Whitefield’s name on it. Men of standing. But to approach one man who would go to Abner Fownes with the story—well——” he shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t suppose one man in a hundred realizes what is going on under the surface in Gibeon.”

“We must take the risk.”

“I’ll prepare the petitions and have Tubal print them—at once.”

She sat down at her desk and wrote a moment, then got up and walked with steady steps into the composing room. Evan Pell stood looking after her with a queer expression; it was a look of loneliness, of yearning, of self-distrust, of humility. He was thinking about Evan Pell and of what a failure he had made in the handling of his life. He was considering how little he knew, he who had fancied himself of the wisest. He weighed the value of book knowledge against the value of heart knowledge, and found himself poverty-stricken.... It seemed so hopeless now to turn himself into the sort of man he wanted to be; the sort of man he had come to comprehend it was worth his while to be.

“I never would have found it out,” he said to himself, “if I had not loved her.”

The door opened stealthily and a barefoot urchin entered whose clothing consisted of trousers many sizes too large and a shirt so dirty and torn as not to resemble a garment at all. He glared at Evan and snarled:

“Where’s she?”

“Where’s who?” said Pell.

“The editin’ woman.”

“What do you want of her?”

“None of your business.... Hey, leggo of me, damn you! I’ll bite ye! Leggo!”

Pell had the child by the nape of the neck and held him so he could not escape. He noticed a paper crumpled in one grimy hand and forced the fingers open. It fell to the floor, and as he reached for it the boy wriggled free and darted out to the sidewalk, where he grimaced horribly and twiddled his fingers at his nose. “Ya-aaa-ah!” he squealed, and fled down the street.

Pell smoothed out the paper and read, in cramped, printed letters.

They hain’t treated me square and I’m getting even. They’re fetching it in to-night. Truckloads. You can git evidence at the Lakeside. Eleven o’clock.

That was all, no signature, nothing to indicate the identity of the writer. Evan folded the paper and thrust it into his vest pocket. He looked through the door of the composing room and frowned. The line of his mouth was straight and narrow. Eleven o’clock, at the Lakeside Hotel!... Queerly enough, the thought flashed into his mind. What drew Sheriff Churchill out of his house on the night of his disappearance?... Evan passed through the swinging gate and sat down at his table just as Carmel re-entered the room.

“Who was in?” she asked.

“Nobody,” said Evan Pell. “Just a kid asking for blotters.”

She would go to the Lakeside Hotel. It was not in her character to do otherwise. She would go, she would place herself in peril. Had the note come into her hands, he had no doubt she would have concealed it and have gone alone.... Well, she did not receive it. She would not go. That much was sure.

Carmel spoke. “There goes Abner Fownes,” she said, and, turning, he saw the well-known equipage with the coachman on the front seat and Fownes, pompous, making a public spectacle for the benefit of an admiring public, bolt upright in the rear seat.

“He’s going some place,” said Carmel. “See. He has a bag.”

“Yes,” said Pell. He remembered that Fownes had been absent from Gibeon on the night Churchill had disappeared. “Yes, he’s going some place.”

They watched the equipage until it disappeared, making the turn toward the railroad station.

“Tubal will have the petitions in ten minutes,” she said. “How will we go about getting signatures?”

“I don’t think that matters,” he said, absently.

“What?”

“I—I beg your pardon.... Er—signatures. Of course. Signatures.”

“What ails you, Mr. Pell. Of course, signatures. We weren’t speaking of potatoes.”

His manner was strange, she thought. He seemed a trifle pale. Was he ill?... No, he said, he was not ill, he was afraid he had been a trifle absent-minded. Carmel eyed him sharply. The thing did not look like absent-mindedness to her.

He arose and went to the telephone. “Give me the station, please,” he said, and then waited. “Is this the station? This is the Free Press.... Yes.... No news? Um!... Just saw Mr. Fownes going past with a bag. Thought he might be going away. We like to print something when people go away.... Bought his ticket?... To the capital, eh?... Thank you.” He hung up the receiver, and there was a look of profound relief on his face. This was surprising to Carmel. Why he should be relieved by learning Fownes was on his way to the capital was beyond her comprehension.

“Miss Lee,” he said, “there will be no time to get signers to a petition.”

“Why?”

“Because you must start at once for the capital.”

“But the train is leaving. It will be gone before I can get to the depot.”

“Abner Fownes is going to see the Governor,” he said. “There can be but one reason for it. He has decided he needs a sheriff. He’s gone.... It is a six-hour trip by rail, with the change at Litchfield.”

“What of it?”

“By automobile one can make it in five hours—or less.”

“But——”

“If you will go to your hotel, please, and dress and pack a bag, I will have a car waiting for you here.”

She frowned. This was giving orders with a vengeance.

“I’m still owner of this paper,” she said.

“Please, Miss Lee,” he said, and there was humility, pleading in his voice. “Don’t be unreasonable now. This must be done. Nobody can do it but you. Please, please make haste.”

She did not want to obey. It was her desire to rebel, to put him once for all in his old subordinate place, but she found herself on her feet in obedience. He compelled her. He had power to force her obedience. She was amazed, angered.

“I shan’t——” she began, in a final effort to mutiny.

“Miss Lee,” he said, gravely, gently, and she was touched and perplexed by the gentleness of his voice, “you have spoken to me of service, of forgetting oneself to be of service to others.... Please forget yourself now. You are not doing this for me or for yourself.... It is necessary.... I beg of you to make haste.”

There could be no refusal. She passed through the gate and found herself walking with rapid, almost unladylike strides, to the hotel. Up the stairs she rushed and into her room. In five minutes she was redressed in a gray tailored suit. Then she set about packing her bag, and, singularly enough, the first thing she put into it was an evening gown, the gown which she had worn but once, and that to the final ball at the time of her graduation. Why she included this dress she could not have said, unless feminine vanity were at work—a hope that an opportunity to wear it might present itself.

In fifteen minutes she re-entered the Free Press office. A touring car stood at the door, with a young man, strange to her, behind the wheel.

“I’m ready,” she said to Evan Pell.

“Thank you,” he said, quietly. Then: “Don’t let anything prevent you from coming to the Governor. You will know what to say. See him before Abner Fownes gets his ear ... and ... and come back safely.” His voice dropped, became very low and yearning, as he spoke these final words. “Come back safely—and—try not to think of me as—harshly as you have done.”

“I—have never thought of you harshly,” she said, affected by his manner.

He smiled. “I am very glad I have loved you,” he said. “Will you please remember I said that, and that it came from my heart.... It is the one fine thing which has come into my life.... It might have changed me—made me more as you would—less the man you have criticized.”

“Why, Mr. Pell!... You speak as if I were never to see you again. I shan’t be gone more than a day.”

He smiled, and there came a day not far distant when she remembered that smile, when it haunted her, accused her—and gave her a strange happiness.

“One never knows,” he said, and held out his hand. She placed her hand in his, and then he performed an act so out of tune with Evan Pell, pedant and egoist, that Carmel gasped. He lifted her hand to his lips. The gesture was not artificial, not funny. There was a grave dignity, a sincerity in the act which made it seem quite the right thing to have done. “Good-by,” he said. “You are very lovely.... Please make haste....”

He helped her into the car, and she turned. “Mr. Pell——” she said, but he was gone, had returned to the office and was invisible.

“Ready, miss?” the driver asked.

“You know where you are to go?”

“Yes, miss.”

“Whose car is this?”

“Mr. Whitefield’s,” said the driver, as he threw in his gear and the machine moved up the street.

Carmel’s mind was not on the car, nor on its destination, nor upon her errand. It was upon Bartholomew Pell.... Could she have seen him seated before his table, could she have read his thoughts, have comprehended the expression of happiness upon his face, she would have thought even more urgently of him.... For he was saying to himself: “Thank God she’s out of it. She’s safe. I’ve done that much, anyhow.”

He drew the mysterious note from his pocket and studied it attentively. “She would have gone,” he said, “so I shall go.... Doubtless it is a trap of some sort—but it may not be.... And she is safe—she is safe.”

CHAPTER XVIII

CARMEL wondered how one went about it to obtain a private interview with a Governor. She was still young enough and inexperienced enough in life’s valuations to regard a man in that position as necessarily above the ordinary run of men. His office invested him with a certain glamour, a fictitious greatness. Governors, Senators, Presidents! Youth invested them with a terrific dignity. It is somewhat difficult, even for the wise and prudent, to see the man apart from his vestments; to understand that there is, in reality, very slight difference between human beings, and to approach those in authority with the sure knowledge that, no matter how lofty their position, they have, at best, but two arms and two legs, a fondness for mince pies, and a failing for colds in the nose. Governors quarrel with their wives, and have ingrowing toe nails. The forty-eight of them, heads of the several states of the Union, remind one of the main street in a boom town—two stories on the sidewalk, but a ramshackle shed in the rear....

No sooner did the dome of the Capitol appear through a break in the wheels than Carmel began to dress herself mentally for the meeting. She had a horrible fear she would become tongue-tied and thrust her thumb in her mouth like an embarrassed little girl who has forgotten her piece.... She glanced at her watch. It was five o’clock.

How late did Governors work at governing?... She directed her chauffeur to drive to the Capitol, and there she alighted because she had no idea what else to do. She climbed the imposing steps and entered the building. It was a repellent sort of place; a mausoleum of assassinated ambitions, and it chilled her. The corridors were all but deserted.

Leaning against a column adjacent to a brass cuspidor was an old man in a uniform which might have been that of a prison guard, a janitor, or a retired street car conductor. Carmel approached him.

“Where will I find the Governor?” she asked.

“Gawd knows,” said this official, and made a generous and accurate contribution to the receptacle.

“Who does know?” Carmel asked, impatiently.

“I hain’t here to locate governors. I show folks through the buildin’, and mostly they give me a quarter a head.”

“Well, show me to the Governor’s office and I’ll give you fifty cents a head,” Carmel said.

He peered at her, took a last, regretful look at the cuspidor and sighed. “’Tain’t wuth it,” he said, sententiously. “’Tain’t wuth fifty cents to see no Governor I ever knowed, and I’ve come through the terms of six.... Foller me.”

Grasping at straws, she questioned him. “What sort of man is the Governor.”

“The kind that can git himself elected to office,” said her guide. “Allus worked at it. Had his snoot in the trough since his fust vote.”

“Is it difficult to see him?”

“Depends on who you are.”

“Supposing you’re just nobody.”

“If ye hain’t got nothin’ to give, ye hain’t got nothin’ to git nothin’ with.”

“You don’t seem to approve of him.”

“Him! Don’t think nothin’ about him. He’s jest the Governor. Be another next year, and then another and another. He’s all right as Governors go.”

“Can’t you tell me anything about him?” she asked, desperately.

“He’s dark complected and takes a spoonful of bakin’ sody after each meal,” said the guide. “There’s his office.... Said fifty cents, didn’t ye?”

Thus fortified for her encounter, Carmel opened the door and found herself in a large reception room where were two or three unoccupied desks, and one at which a young man was seated. He looked up as she entered, scowled, but as he comprehended her trim loveliness he manipulated his face into a smirk and got to his feet.

“I wish to see the Governor,” she said.

“Have you an appointment?”

“No.”

He advanced with an ingratiating air. “Well, I might be able to fix it for you....”

“Suppose you try at once,” she said, for his kind was well known to her, as to any pretty girl. His chin dropped. “Take in my card, please,” she said. The young man revised his estimate. She was pretty, but she was class. Class, in his dictionary, meant anyone who could not be approached by the likes of himself. She might even be important. Sometimes women were important. They had rich or influential fathers or husbands. At any rate, here was one it would be unsafe to approach with blandishments. She was able to peg him neatly in the board as an understrapper. He took her card and disappeared through an adjoining door.

Presently he reappeared.

“His secretary will see you,” he said, and as she walked past him he scowled again, and hated her for showing him his lack of importance in the world.

The Governor’s secretary arose courteously as she entered. She appraised him at once; recognized him for what he was, for the mark was strong upon him—a newspaper man, rewarded for services by his position. He was young, intelligent, sure of himself. She knew he would have no awe of personages.

“Miss Lee?” he said, glancing at her card.

“I wish to see the Governor.”

“You have no appointment?”

“None. I drove from Gibeon on a matter of grave importance—almost of life and death to our town. I must see him.”

“A pardon case?” he asked.

“No.”

“If you will state your business, I will see what can be done. The Governor is very busy, of course, and cannot see everyone.”

“My business is private. I can tell it only to the Governor himself—and I must see him.... I must see him.”

His face was not unfriendly as he regarded her for an instant. “The Governor is not here. He has gone. However, if you will come back at—say—ten o’clock to-morrow, I will see that you get a minute with him.”

“I must see him now—to-night. To-morrow will not do.”

“I’m very sorry, but you can’t possibly see him. He is giving a dinner in the Executive Mansion, and a ball this evening. You can see for yourself.... He could not be disturbed. There are important guests. Our Senator is here.”

She could see. The Governor’s day’s work was ended. His social day—an important social day—was beginning, and in such circumstances it would be impossible to penetrate to him.... She twisted her hands together and bit her lip.... By this time Abner Fownes’s train would be arriving in the city. He, doubtless, would have access to the Governor at any time. Possibly he was to be a guest at the function.... If he were, if he found the Governor’s ear, her mission would come to nothing.

“Is there no way—no way?” she asked.

“None, I am afraid.... But at ten to-morrow....”

“Thank you,” she said, heavily. Then, “Is it a large party?”

“Not a public function. Not small, but very exclusive. Our senior Senator, you know, is very important socially.”

“I see,” said Carmel. “Thank you again.” She found herself again in the outer office, and then in the corridor, making her way toward the stairs. Near the door she saw again her guide, close to the copper receptacle which seemed to have won his affection.

“See him?” he asked.

“No.”

“Didn’t calc’late ye would,” he said. “Seen him go home an hour ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Been poorer by half a dollar if I had,” he said, succinctly.

She was driven to the hotel, where she registered and was shown to her room by a bell boy. No sooner had he closed the door and departed with her gratuity in his hand than she threw herself down on the bed in very girlish despair.... She had failed. Singularly enough, it was not the failure itself which stung her; it was the fact that Evan Bartholomew Pell would know of her failure.... She had failed him. This was an incomprehensible state of affairs, and when she discovered it she was shocked. What difference did it make what Evan Pell thought, or how he regarded her failure. It was none of his business, anyhow. The paper was hers, and he nothing but a poorly paid employee.... It was all very well to tell this to herself, but the fact remained. She could not go back to Gibeon and confess failure to Evan.

She sat erect, hands clenched. Her teeth pressed her lips. “A man would see the Governor. He would manage it. I’ve a right to see him. His business is with affairs like mine, and not with dances.... I will see him. I’ll make him see me!”

There was a way, because there is always a way to accomplish everything.... Her thoughts came in fragmentary form, chaotic. Abner Fownes was in the city, perhaps in this very hotel. She tried to reason about him. What if he were a guest at the dinner.... That was a possibility to consider, and she scrutinized it. No, she concluded, he was not to be a dinner guest. Being a dinner guest of the Governor’s was not a fact he could have kept secret. It would elevate him in Gibeon’s eyes. He would never keep to himself a fact like that. Gibeon would have been informed. It would have been informed days ago so that Abner could have basked in this new glory!... But would he be at the ball? That was not to be determined. In politics he was important, and, ball or no ball, if he demanded an interview, the Governor would grant it. And he would demand an interview. He had journeyed to the capital in haste. This meant he had immediate need for Jenney’s appointment as sheriff.... He would see the Governor to-night!

Carmel opened her bag and thanked God for the impulse which had included her evening gown in her equipment. She laid it out on the bed and smoothed it.... Presently she was taking a bath, refreshing herself, and feeling very adventurous and almost happy. With characteristic neglect of impediments and consequences, she had taken a resolution—to be an uninvited guest at the Governor’s ball.

She telephoned for something to eat—to be sent to her room, for she feared to go to the public dining room, lest she encounter Fownes. At all costs Abner must be kept unaware of her presence. She was as relieved as if full success were hers, and she dressed with animation and pleasure. When she looked in the glass she could not help reflecting that, if she were not an invited guest at the ball she would not be a discredit to it.

It was difficult to wait. She paced up and down the room, planning, discarding plans. She endeavored to foresee obstacles and to remove them. She imagined, and enjoyed the imagining, dramatizing the whole evening in advance. She endowed the Governor with the qualities history gave to Abraham Lincoln—more especially in those episodes where he is reported to have arisen from important affairs of state to listen to the story of some wife or daughter whose loved one was to be executed for sleeping on his post. Yet she did not even know what the Governor looked like. His photographs—yes. She had seen his face, but it was not familiar to her, nor whether he was tall or short, brawny or slender.... The picture she painted made him big, broad of shoulder, with a fine, high forehead, noble eyes, and a fatherly manner. Perhaps he would address her as child, and, with courtesy, lead her to some private spot where she would pour her story into his sympathetic ear. He would be amazed, startled, confounded at the news of such a state of affairs in the commonwealth he governed.... And he would act. He would send her away from him with the precious appointment in her hand ... and with lofty words of praise....

She watched the time. It seemed as if days passed instead of hours before she telephoned down for her car. But when she issued from her room to descend, her dreams melted into damp fog and she was terrified. She feared to encounter Fownes at every step. Her heart almost stopped beating as she imagined terrible incidents. Suppose she were stopped at the door! Suppose, once inside, credentials should be demanded of her! Suppose the Governor’s wife should approach with a horrible society air and eye her scornfully and demand by what right she was there! She might be the center of a scene, might be expelled from the place! Almost she repented. Almost she returned to her room. But something compelled her to go on.... The only courage is that which compels one in spite of his terror.

The car was waiting. “The Executive Mansion,” she said, and sank back in her place, quivering.

Presently, too soon, they drew up before the awning which stretched from the Governor’s door to the street. A servant opened the car door and she alighted. He bowed elaborately. Carmel took it for a good omen. There was no questioning her of her right to be present.... A certain security came of the knowledge that she looked as if she belonged in this world.

She mounted the steps and was bowed into the hall. No question was asked. Servants took charge of her and directed her. She mounted the stairs, found herself in a room with a number of women, who glanced at her indifferently. A maid took her wrap. In this security she lingered as long as she could find excuse—putting off the moment when she must descend.... An elderly woman was leaving the room, and Carmel, quick to grasp opportunity, left in her wake, keeping close to her on the stairs. Side by side they entered the ballroom—as if they were together. Carmel regarded the elderly dame as her ticket of admission.

The orchestra was playing a fox trot; the room was vivid with color.... She paused, searching for the man she had come to see, but could not discover him.... Summoning what assurance she could, she entered the room and skirted it, her eyes on the dancers. She paused, looking for a seat.

At the end, beyond the orchestra, was an alcove, and she moved toward it, entered it. Here was an observation post. She turned to find a chair from which she could watch the ballroom, and as she did so a man entered from a door at the left. Her hands flew to her breast and she choked back a scream.

She was face to face with Abner Fownes!

CHAPTER XIX

CARMEL was astonished at herself; she discovered herself to be cool and self-possessed; determined rather than frightened. Here was an emergency; her one thought was to prove adequate to it.... It was a thing to have been expected. Abner Fownes’s face reassured her—it informed her intuition rather than her intelligence. It wore an expression such as would have been more suitable to one in Carmel’s position—an interloper in danger of being detected and ejected from the house. His eyes were something more than startled or surprised. They were unbelieving. She saw it was hard for him to comprehend her presence; that, for some reason, it was inconceivable she could be there. She knew, through some psychic channel, that it was not the fact of her being at the Governor’s function which nonplused him, but rather the fact of her not being somewhere else—in some spot where he had expected confidently she would be.

His face mirrored the sensations of a man whose plans have gone wrong unbelievably. He was angry, almost frightened, at a loss. She took command of the situation before his moment of weakness passed.

“Good evening, Mr. Fownes!” she said.

“G-good evening!” he answered. “What—how——” Then he smirked and drew himself up to the full realization of his stature. He resumed character. “I did not know,” he said, pompously, “that you were an acquaintance of the Governor’s.”

“May it not be possible,” Carmel said, sweetly, “that there are a number of things you do not know?”

“Young woman, you are impertinent,” he said, drawing his shoulders upward and his neck inward very much like a corpulent turtle in a state of exasperation. He was laughable. Carmel smiled and he saw the derision in her eyes. It must have been maddening to a man accustomed for years to deference and to adulation—maddening and not to be understood. “I have warned you,” he said. “My patience nears the breaking point.”

“And then?” Carmel asked.

For the first time she saw the man, the real Abner Fownes. Lines, cultivated by years of play-acting in a character part, disappeared from his face. His chins seemed to decrease in number; his cheeks to become less pudgy; his eyes less staring and fatuous. His jaw showed strong and ruthless; his eyes turned cold and deadly and intelligent. She saw in him a man capable of planning, of directing, of commanding other men—a man who would pause before no obstacle, a man whose absurd body was but a convenient disguise for a powerful, sinister personality. He was no longer ridiculous; he was dangerous, impressive.

“Miss Lee,” he said, “for reasons of your own you have gone out of your way to antagonize me.... I was attracted to you. I would have been your friend. I credited you with brains and ability. I would even have made you Mrs. Fownes.... You would have been a credit to me as my wife—I believed. But you are not intelligent. You are very foolish.”

There was no threat, no rancor. There was even a certain courtesy and dignity in his manner, but it frightened her more than rage and bluster could have done. It was the manner of one who has made up his mind. His eyes held her eyes, and a feeling of helplessness spread over her like some damp, cold wrapping.

“If you do not return to Gibeon,” he said, “I will forget your antagonism.”

“What are you saying?”

“Your presence in Gibeon has become an annoyance. If you do not return—it will be wise.”

“Not return!... To Gibeon, and to the Free Press! You are absurd.”

“In a few days there will be no Free Press,” he said.

“There will be a Free Press in Gibeon,” she answered, “long after the bankruptcy courts have settled the affairs of Abner Fownes.”

As she spoke she knew she had been again the victim of impulse; she had betrayed knowledge which she should not have betrayed. Fownes was expressionless, but his eyes glowed like sun upon sullied ice.

“I have no more to say to you,” he said, and there was a finality in his words which conveyed more than the sense of the words themselves. It was as if he had spoken a death sentence.

He turned to the door and walked away from her with that pompous waddle which was not so absurd when one realized how invaluable it was to the man and how painstakingly he must have cultivated it.... A servant peered into the alcove and entered with a yellow envelope in his hand.

“Mr. Fownes?” he said.

“Yes.”

“A telegram, sir. The Governor said he saw you come in here, sir.”

“Thank you,” Fownes said and tore open the envelope. He read the message slowly, then stood staring at it thoughtfully while Carmel held her breath. She sensed a menace in the telegram, something which threatened her and her enterprises.

He turned and peered at her, and there was something saturnine in his eyes, almost mocking.

“I imagine this concerns you,” he said. “It is from Deputy Jenney. It may interest you.” He read, “‘Whitefield out for sheriff. Miss Lee left town in his automobile.’” He shrugged his shoulders. “I wondered how you got here,” he said after a moment. Then, “How did you get in here?”

“That is the Governor’s affair, not yours,” she said.

“True,” he answered. “Suppose we leave it with him.”

He turned to the waiting servant. “Ask the Governor to step here, please. Tell him it is important.” Then to Carmel. “It will not be embarrassing for you to see the Governor?”

“I came to see him.”

“Uninvited.”

She made no answer. She was frightened, quivering. What could she say? What could she do? When the Governor appeared and she was denounced to him as an intruder, as a woman who forced her way into a private entertainment, how could she reach his ear with her petition?... Would not the fact of her being an intruder make her case hopeless? She set her teeth. At any rate she would make a fight for it, and at worst there could be nothing but ignominious expulsion at the hands of some servant. The thought of that was unbearable. She was a woman, with a woman’s social consciousness and a woman’s delicacy. It seemed more terrible to her to be detected in such a breach of society’s laws than it would have been to be detected in a crime.... For a moment she was unnerved.

She thought of her mission; of the public importance of what she was doing and the excellence of the motives which had brought her to do the thing she had done. This availed little. The humiliation, the public humiliation, would be as terrible. She meditated flight.... But then there arose in her a stubbornness, a resolution. Back of it was this thought—“He is depending on me. He sent me to do this. He looks to me to succeed.” The he was emphasized. It did not occur to her to wonder how Evan Bartholomew Pell came to be of such importance to her in this moment, or why the fact that he was relying upon her should sustain her in this crisis. Nevertheless, it was so. She felt she would possess his approval, no matter what came, if she persisted, if she did not give up so long as there was the shadow of a chance of success. She felt, she knew, he would consider as negligible any sneer of society, any personal humiliation sustained. She knew he would persist, and from this she drew strength....

She saw a tall, handsome man approach the alcove. From dimly remembered lithographs she knew him to be the Governor, and as he approached in his dignified way, she studied him. He looked like a Governor. He was smooth-shaven, appearing younger than his years. He carried a look of authority, the presence of a personage. It was a fine presence, indeed, and one of incalculable value to him. It had been his chief asset in reaching the height to which he had climbed.... Her scrutiny told her nothing more than this. The man who approached might be a great man, a statesman, a man of tremendous depth and character—or he might be nothing but an appearance. She hoped he was a man.

He entered and extended his hand to Fownes. “Glad you ran up,” he said, cordially. “I saw you come in, but couldn’t break away. How is Gibeon?”

“Gibeon,” said Abner, “is flourishing.”

The Governor turned his eyes from Fownes to Carmel, and they lighted an instant in tribute to her loveliness.

“Your daughter?” he asked.

“You don’t know the young woman?” Fownes said.

“It is my misfortune,” said the Governor.

“Um!... Possibly. Then, as I supposed, she is not here at your invitation?”

The Governor looked from one to the other of them, and seemed distressed, embarrassed. He sensed a tenseness, a situation, and, of all things, he hated to face situations.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

Carmel stepped closer. “Governor,” she said, “I am not a guest. I came to see you to-day on an important matter—a matter of life and death. I went to your office, but you had gone. It was necessary to see you to-night.... So I came. I am an intruder—but I will go as quickly as I can.... After I have spoken with you.”

Fownes shrugged his shoulders and laughed.

“The young woman deserves to get ahead,” he said, “if effrontery can win success.... But, unfortunately, I know her, Governor. She owns a bankrupt, blackmailing rag in Gibeon.... That is unimportant, but, otherwise, I am sure your wife would not care to have her rubbing elbows with her guests.... In Gibeon——” he paused to allow the innuendo to take effect. “To prevent unpleasantness, or any chance of her recognition here, the best thing will be to call a servant and show her quietly to the street.”

Carmel knew such hot rage as she had never known before. She could have struck Fownes. Hot words sprang to her lips, but she suppressed them, fought for self-control. She laid a tiny hand on the Governor’s arm.

“Sir,” she said, “you occupy a great position this state. Thousands of people look up to you for the qualities you must possess.... Fairness must be among them. I insist that you listen to me now.... Abner Fownes, you have lied, deliberately and maliciously. You know there is no reason why I should not be here, no reason why any man or woman should object to my presence. It was a cowardly lie—told because you were afraid.”

“Shall I call a servant—to prevent a scene? Your guests may overhear.... It wouldn’t read well in the papers.”

The Governor hesitated, for he was a vacillating man, timorous, a mirror reflecting stronger images than his own.

“I—— Possibly you had better go quietly,” he said.

“I shall not go,” Carmel said. “You shall hear me. I will not leave except by force—and then you will have your scene.... It is too late for me to care what happens now. If you dare to eject me I promise you a scene....”

“But—er—young woman——”

“My name is Miss Lee, and you will address me so,” she said. “If you will listen to me five minutes, I will go.”

“Nonsense!” said Fownes.

“Why did she come? What is it all about? This is most unpleasant,” said the Governor.

“Why did I come? What is it about.... It is about murder!”

“Murder!... What—murder?”

“The murder of Sheriff Churchill of Gibeon.”

“But he was not murdered. He ran away, absconded.”

Fownes laughed. “You have all the facts in that matter, Governor.”

“I think so....”

“You have no facts.” Carmel clutched his sleeve. “This man, if he has given you the facts you have, has lied to you.... Sheriff Churchill is dead. He did not abscond. He was killed doing his duty by men who feared detection.”

“What are you saying? What is this, Fownes? What does she mean?”

“Politics,” said Fownes, in a voice he tried to keep steady.

“It is not politics. Sheriff Churchill was lured from his home and killed. I know. By the crowd of men in Gibeon who are making themselves rich by smuggling whisky over the border.... There is a wholesale traffic, Governor. I have seen it. I, myself, discovered a cache of hundreds of bottles in the woods.... It is no petty bootlegging, but a great, wholesale traffic....”

“Nonsense!” said Fownes.

“The headquarters of it is the Lakeside Hotel. That is the point of distribution.... Deputy Sheriff Jenney, whom this man has come to ask you to appoint sheriff in Mr. Churchill’s place, is a crony of the proprietor. He is in it, as I shall prove. But he is not the head of it.... These men, because I printed in my paper what I discovered, came to wreck my plant. I believe they are ready to do with me as they did with Sheriff Churchill.... So I have come, I have forced my way to you, to beg you not to make that appointment. It gives these lawbreakers, these murderers, control of the legal machinery of the county. Governor, do you know Jared Whitefield?”

“I—do,” said the Governor.

“He is a good man, a capable man, an honest man, and he has agreed to accept the appointment as sheriff and to clean out this association of lawbreakers. That is my purpose in coming here—to ask his appointment of you.”

“Whitefield!—Whitefield!... What’s this? What’s this about Whitefield, Fownes?” The Governor was bewildered. Whitefield’s name completed his consternation. He despised conflict of any sort and political conflict most of all. When influential men fell out it agitated him, especially if he were asked to take sides. He had gone forward in the world by keeping in mid-channel, making no contacts with either shore. He had done extraordinarily well by never making up his mind and by availing himself of the opportunities other people dropped.... If there was trouble between Whitefield and Fownes it would mean taking sides.... Whitefield! He knew what Whitefield was capable of, and Fownes—Fownes was supposed to control his county. He quite lost sight of the specific matter in hand in his agitation over distant political aspects.

“Whitefield’s out of politics. This woman’s just raked up his name. He’s dead.... She lies.”

“But—he’s got a following. Not only in his county. There was talk of his running for Governor once.”

“There would be again if you gave him this appointment,” said Fownes, adroitly. “Now Jenney deserves the place. He knows the machinery of the office—and I want him to have the job.”

“Jenney’s a brute and a criminal. If you appoint him you’ll outrage the decent people of the whole county—and I’ll take care they know how and why you appointed him,” said Carmel. Her courage was in its place again. She was not afraid, but she was desperate. “I’ll tell the people how the Governor of this state rewards a man for being a party to the murder of a public official. It won’t sound well.”

“But Churchill wasn’t murdered. He—he absconded,” said the Governor.

“He was murdered. That man knows it.” Carmel cast off all discretion. “I believe he ordered the murder. I know he is the head and brains of this liquor-smuggling conspiracy.... I suspect he’s plotting to put me out of the way.... He’s bankrupt. Do you know that, Governor. He’s fighting off his creditors, keeping his head above the surface with money he gets from smuggling and selling whisky.... That’s Abner Fownes. That’s the man who asked you to appoint his Man Friday sheriff.... You dare not do it, Governor.... You’ll be a party to murder if you do.... Oh, Governor, please, please see this thing as it is. It’s an opportunity.... We can break this thing up; we can destroy this traffic going on under the surface of Gibeon, turning decent people into lawbreakers.... I tell you”—her voice lifted as she spoke—“I tell you Abner Fownes is as guilty of Sheriff Churchill’s murder as if he did it with his own hand.”

Fownes shrugged his shoulders and forced a laugh.

“I told you it was a blackmailing sheet,” he said.

“I know.... But Whitefield. That’s what worries me. I don’t want a war on my hands.”

“Governor, have you listened to me?” Carmel said, fiercely. “Have you heard what I have told you—and, hearing it, are you worrying about petty political squabbles.... We are talking about murder.”

“I—I must go back to my guests. I’ll take this matter under advisement.... I’ll have it investigated. Fownes, why did you get me in this mess?”

“Governor,” said Fownes, “I’m going away from here with Jenney’s appointment as sheriff in my pocket.... Think back. It was my county put you where you are. I swung it for you. I can just as well swing it against you—and election isn’t far off.... My county can keep you out of the Senate.... If you listen to a fool girl who is trying to blackmail me into marrying her—why, that’s your lookout, but you’re a dead chicken in this state.... Either I get Jenney or I throw every dollar I own and every ounce of my influence against you. You’re none too strong.... You shilly-shally. You’ve listened to a pack of lies, and you know they are lies. Who is Whitefield, to disturb you?”

“But if there was a murder?”

“Fiddlesticks!... Do I get Jenney or not? Fish, Governor, or cut bait.”

The Governor looked appealingly at Carmel, turned his eyes to Abner Fownes. He was an exceedingly unhappy man.

“You—you have no evidence,” he said. “You make grave charges, and on nothing but your unsupported word.... I—in fairness—I do not see how I can consider them. Charges against a man of Fownes’s standing.”

Carmel knew she was defeated. Her mission had been in vain. Such a man as the Governor was to be reached only by underground channels, by the political alleys and blind byways so well known to him.... He was spineless, a figurehead, nothing.... Fownes would get his man, Jenney would become sheriff, and Gibeon would be abandoned into the arms of the liquor smugglers.... To her personally it meant more than this. It meant imminent danger.... With the machinery for detecting and apprehending criminals in his hands, Fownes would find little difficulty in disposing of herself.... She made one more desperate effort, pleading, cajoling, arguing—but in vain.

“Shall I call the servant?” Fownes said, with his cold eyes upon Carmel. “I think we have had enough of this.”

“No scene. We must have no scene. Will you go quietly, Miss Lee.”

“I will go,” she said, “and Heaven help a state with such a man at its head....”

She went out of the alcove, ascended the stairs, and found her wrap. Her automobile drew up as its number was called, and she entered.

“The telegraph office, quickly,” she said.

At the office she sent two messages—one to Evan Pell, the other to Jared Whitefield himself. They announced her failure.

“Can you—will you drive me back to Gibeon to-night?” she asked the chauffeur.

“Mr. Whitefield said I was to do whatever you wanted.”

“The hotel, then, until I get my bag.”

In twenty minutes she was in the car again, speeding over the dark roads toward home, heavy of heart, depressed, weighed down with foreboding.... It was nearly eleven o’clock. She felt as if she could not reach Gibeon soon enough, and repeatedly begged her driver for more speed....

CHAPTER XX

THE east was glowing dully with approaching dawn when Carmel alighted from the car at the hotel in Gibeon and hurried through the deserted office and up the scantily illuminated stairs to her room. She was weary, not in body alone, but with that sharper, more gnawing weariness of the spirit. She had failed, and the heaviness of failure sat upon her.... She could not think. It was only with an effort she was able to force herself to undress and to crawl into her bed.... Then, because she was young and healthy, because she had not yet reached an age and experience at which troubles of the mind can stay the recuperative urge of the body, she slept.

It was nine o’clock when she awakened, and with a feeling of guilt she dressed hurriedly, snatched a cup of coffee, and hastened to the office. She dreaded to meet Evan Pell, to confess her inadequacy.... There was another reason, deeper than this, instinctive, why she hesitated to meet him. It was a sort of embarrassment, an excited desire to see him fighting with reluctance. She did not analyze it.... But she was spared the ordeal. Evan Pell was not in his place.

There was petty business to attend to, and an hour passed. Such hours may pass even when one is in the midst of such affairs as surround Carmel.... Her last night’s adventure seemed unreal, dreamlike. Gibeon, going about its concerns outside her window, seemed very real.... She looked out at Gibeon and her mind refused to admit the fact that it could continue normally to plod and buy and sell and gossip as she saw it doing, if there were anything beneath its surface. Crime, plotting, trickery, sinister threat—these could not exist while Gibeon looked and labored as it looked and labored this morning. The town should have lagged and whispered; apprehension should have slowed its steps and stilled its voice; a shadow of impending catastrophe should have darkened the streets.... But the streets were bright with sunlight.

She saw women marketing with baskets on their arms; she saw farmers passing in automobiles and wagons; she heard children shouting and laughing.... It was Gibeon—a normal, unexcited, placid Gibeon. And yet, murder, or worse than murder, poised over the village on its black wings, poisoning the air its people breathed!... The whole thing was absurd.

“Where is Mr. Pell?” she asked Simmy, who came in to lay a galley proof on her desk.

“Hain’t been in this mornin’,” Simmy told her. “Say, George Bogardus’s been in twict to see you.”

Carmel smiled. She knew why George had called. It was the Handsomest-Man contest.... She considered that farce, for it was a farce—a makeshift to gain circulation, a trick played by herself with her tongue in her cheek.... It had quickened the interest of Gibeon, however. Gibeon could be made excited over an absurd voting to decide upon its handsomest man! It could discuss the thing, gossip about it, lay small wagers. More than one wife, feeling bound by self-esteem, had entered her husband and deposited votes in his name. This, Carmel judged, was an effort on the part of these women to vindicate their own judgment; to elevate themselves in their own esteem; to cry up their own possessions. Some there were, of course, who laughed, who saw the absurdity of it, but more remained to take it with utmost sincerity, and of these George Bogardus, undertaker de luxe, was perhaps the most sincere. George neglected his business to pursue votes. But then, so did Lancelot Bangs!... Single men both, the mainstay of local haberdashers! The contest had now arrived at a point where even admiring wives were discouraged and hoped only to have a husband who ran third—for Bogardus and Bangs seemed sure to outdistance the field.

Not only did these young men vie with each other in the pursuit of votes, but in the purchase of apparel. If Bogardus imported a yellow silk necktie made more beautiful by inch-broad polka dots of green, Bangs answered the challenge with patent-leather shoes with gray cloth tops cross-hatched with mauve.... Each spent his substance in riotous garments, and neither neglected, at the busy hour in the post office, to take up his station before the door, full in the public eye, to enable the populace to scrutinize and to admire. It was a campaign such as no political election ever had brought to Gibeon.

Yesterday, Carmel learned from Tubal, it had come to personal conflict. As the pair of candidates occupied their stations, each on his side of the post-office door, Bogardus had spoken in a manner highly derogatory of a new hat displayed by his rival for the first time. It was a hat of Leghorn straw, wide and floppy of brim. The under side of this brim was lined with green cloth, either for decorative purposes or to soften the light reflected to the eyes. About the crown was folded a scarf, and the colors in this scarf were such as to detain the eye even as the sound of an ambulance gong takes possession of the ear. It was a master stroke. It quite upset Bogardus to the extent that he forgot the amenities and, sotto voce, asked the world to tell him where Lancelot Bangs got hold of the merry-go-round he was wearing on his head. “All it needs, by Jove!” said George in his best British manner, “to make a feller know it’s a merry-go-round is to have Lance’s brain start playin’ a hurdy-gurdy tune. Eh? What?”

Battle ensued, and spectators estimated that no less than forty dollars’ worth of haberdashery was destroyed by the fury of it. The gladiators were torn apart—but not until Gibeon had enjoyed the spectacle to the full. But the spark was lighted. Rivalry had grown to jealousy; now jealousy had become hatred. In the hearts of each of these Beau Brummels burned a fire of malice.... Each was now determined, in some manner or another, to eliminate his rival.

Presently George Bogardus peered through the office door and, seeing Carmel, entered, bringing with him a sartorial effulgence overpowering. He rested his malacca cane against the rail, pulled down his lavender waistcoat, straightened his tie, lifted his hat, and bowed from the waist.

“Miss Lee,” he said, “aw—I say, now—d’you mind if I have a bit of a word with you. Eh? What?”

“Certainly, Mr. Bogardus. What can I do for you?”

“It’s private. I—aw—fawncy you wouldn’t wish to be overheard. Not by a darn sight you wouldn’t.”

“Come in, then, and sit here. No one will overhear us.”

He passed the gate and took the indicated chair, leaning his elbow on Carmel’s desk and pointing the tip of his long and almost prehensile nose at her most convenient ear.

“Nothin’ was said in the rules of this here contest,” said he, “aw—about the character of the—aw—contestants.”

“No.”

“But suthin’ must ’a’ been intended. You wouldn’t want no crim’nal, nor no wife-beater, nor no—aw—person addicted to intoxicants to enter, now would you. Eh?... What?”

“Naturally not.”

“If a contestant was sich, what would happen?”

“It would be necessary to eliminate him.”

“Cheerio! What price the elimination!”

“What do you mean, Mr. Bogardus?”

“I mean,” said he, “there’s a feller goin’ to be eliminated doggone quick. An’ mebby go to jail to boot.”

“This is rather a serious thing to say.”

“Meant serious. Nobody kin claw me and git away with it. Nobody kin set up to be better dressed ’n I be, by Jove!—aw—and git away with it. I been watchin’, I have, and what I suspected I found out. And I’ll swear to it. Eh? What say? Now what, Lancelot, old dear?”

“You are talking about Mr. Bangs!”

“Lancelot Bangs—that’s him.”

“What has he done?”

“Him? What ho! Oh, I say! Blime if the bloody blighter hain’t a bootlegger!” Here George became a trifle confused in his British, but what does Gibeon know of distinctions between Whitechapel and the Hotel Cecil?

Carmel was alert at once. This touched the business in hand. “A bootlegger. You mean he is selling whisky?”

“Is and has been.... Hain’t bothered much with photographs for a long spell back. Makes his livin’ that way. It’s how he can afford them handsome cravats from the city.”

“You’re sure?”

“Take my oath to it in court. I’ve heard and saw. I’ve tasted out of a bottle.”

Here was something tangible at last, a hand on a minor tentacle of the affair, but, if clung to and followed diligently, it must lead sometime to the octopus head.

“Where does he get it?” Carmel asked.

Bogardus shook his head. “That’s all I know. He gits it and sells it. Makes him a criminal, don’t it? Eh? What?”

“It would seem to....”

“Disqualifies him, don’t it?”

“If I can verify what you have told me.”

“Calc’late I kin fetch you proof,” said George.

“Very well. Do that and he shall be disqualified.”

George arose, bowed, took his cane, and moved with stateliness to the door. There he paused, turned, and smirked.

“Cheerio!” he said.

Here was something tangible, a commencement, a man who had seen and heard and would take his oath! It had not come in an admirable way, but it had come—had come as a direct result of the things she had printed in the paper. The end of a thread which would pass through many snarls before she could arrive at the spool, but it would arrive.... If George Bogardus knew so much, other people knew more. In Gibeon were men willing to talk if she could attract them to her. But this was slow. She felt time would not be given her laboriously to follow clues. She must overleap spaces; must arrive at something bigger then a petty bootlegger. Already, as she knew, Gibeon was aware that Deputy Jenney was deputy no longer, but sheriff, full fledged and unassailable.... She must act, and act quickly—or action would be made impossible for her.

Bogardus would fetch her proof. She would not wait for Bogardus.... Impulse sat in the driver’s seat again. Lancelot Bangs was no strong man; he would not be difficult to handle. Impulse urged her to the attack. She did not stop to reason, for when one feels something must be done, it is so easy to seize upon the first matter which offers action. She was on her feet.

“I’ll be back in an hour,” she called to Tubal, and stepped out upon the street.

Her heart beat a trifle more quickly as she climbed the stairs to Lancelot Bangs’ photographic parlors—and as she climbed, she remembered that other visit, that mysterious conversation in the back room, overheard by her but not comprehended.... She comprehended it now.

As she opened the door a bell rang somewhere in the mysterious depths of those rooms where Lancelot carried on the rites of photography, and the young man appeared, a wet print in his fingers.

“Ah, Miss Lee,” he said, and preened himself. It is difficult to preen oneself with a black alpaca apron on which reaches from chest to knees, but Lancelot was conscious his shoes and necktie were visible. It gave him assurance.

“I want to talk to you, Mr. Bangs,” she said.

“Certainly! Certainly! Time’s your’n. Hain’t many visitors like you comes here.... Hain’t never had the pleasure of makin’ your portrait.”

“I didn’t come,” said Carmel, with that disconcerting directness of which she was mistress, “to talk about photographs. I came to talk about whisky.”

Lancelot reared back upon his heels and his Adam’s apple took a mighty heave upward.

“Whisky?”

“Exactly. I am going to print in the Free Press the story of how you sell whisky in your back room. I shall tell whom you have sold whisky to, how much you have sold, give the dates.” Carmel was pretending to more knowledge than she possessed, which, of course, is the first rule in the game.

“I—You—’Tain’t so. I never sold a drop. Mebby I give a friend a drink—jest sociable like. But I hain’t sold.”

“Don’t lie to me, Mr. Bangs. I know.” She allowed her voice to become less cold. “I don’t want to be hard on you, but it looks as if I would have to.... There’s just one way you can save yourself from going to jail.” She dropped that and let it lay while he looked it over.

“Jail!” he said, feebly.

“Exactly.... If you will make a clean breast of the whole thing to me, tell me where you get the liquor, who smuggles it in, all about it, I will give you forty-eight hours to get away.... I’m not after you, Mr. Bangs—but I may have to take you—if you aren’t reasonable.”

“I tell you I never——”

Carmel stood up and turned to the door. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve given you your chance.... Good-by.”

He clutched her arm. “Hey!—wait! Where you going?”

“To lay my information before the authorities.”

“They—they said the authorities was fixed.”

Carmel laughed. “That’s better,” she said. “Who said the authorities were fixed?”

“I—I didn’t say that—I didn’t——” He sank on a red-plush sofa and covered his face.

“Now, Mr. Bangs, just tell what you know. You don’t want to go to jail. In forty-eight hours you can be a long ways from here—and nobody will bother about you—if they get hold of somebody more important.... It’s your last chance. Will you talk or not?” Her hand was on the doorknob again.

“I—I——”

“Yes?”

“They’ll kill me.”

“Like they did Sheriff Churchill,” she said.

He stared at her goggle-eyed. “Did they do that?” he asked, in sudden terror. “They didn’t do that. I didn’t know nothin’ about it. I thought he run off. I——”

“They won’t kill you if you get away,” she said. “Now tell me what you know. Quickly!” she snapped out the last word of command as a school-teacher might speak to a refractory child.

“I—I been sellin’.... Not much. Jest a few cases—once in a while—when I could git it.”

“How much?”

“I—I don’t know exactly. Sometimes I’d git a dozen cases. Sometimes less.”

“Made quite a nice living for you?”

“I didn’t git it all. I jest got my commission.... I had to pay back most of the profit.”

“How did you get the whisky?”

“A feller would come and tell me the’ was a shipment comin’. Then I’d git in my car and go out to git what was assigned to me.”

“Who would tell you?”

“Sometimes one man, sometimes another.”

“Who?” her voice was inexorable.

“Peewee—mostly.”

“Peewee Bangs—your cousin, is he?”

“That’s him.”

“So he would tell you, and you would go to get it? Where?”

“Out to his place.”

“The Lakeside Hotel?”

“Yes.”

“That was headquarters?”

“Yes.”

“Other folks went there to get whisky?”

“I calc’late so. There’d be a lot of cases. I’d run my car into the shed, and go in, and when I come back she’d be packed.”

“What others went there?”

“Different ones. Folks buyin’ private. Peewee he’d telephone folks he knowed was buyin’ and they’d drive out and leave their cars a-standin’. When they come ag’in, there’d be the whisky. They wouldn’t never see who put it there.”

“Who did you sell to?”

“I don’t want to tell.”

“You’ve got to tell.”

He moaned, and then, surrendering utterly, gave her a list of his customers.

“Who did you pay money to?” she asked.

“Peewee.”

“Anybody else?”

“Jest him.”

“Who else did you see at the Lakeside Hotel when you went to get whisky—who else was selling besides Peewee?”

“I never saw anybody.”

“Did you ever see Deputy Jenney there?”

Lancelot’s face turned more ashen. “I never see him. I dunno nothin’ about him.”

“You’ve heard he was in it?”

“Jest whispers. But nothin’ I can say.”

“When was the last time you got whisky?”

He gave her the date, which coincided with her finding of the cache in the woods.

“When do you expect to go again?”

He hesitated. “I—— A feller come to-day. Said I could run out to-night. Said the’ was a special-sized shipment comin’....”

“To-night?”

“To-night.”

“Is that all you know?”

“Every last thing.”

“Very well, then. Come with me.”

“Where?... You promised——”

“I’ll keep my promise. Just to my office. Please hurry.”

He followed her with docility, sat by while she put his confession into type, signed it, and accompanied her to a notary, where he took his oath to the truth of the statements therein contained.

“Now,” said Carmel, “I guess you’d better be moving along toward the distance.”

Lancelot, in abject terror, started for the door, but Carmel arrested him. “Wait,” she said, and from its hiding place in her desk she took the match box made from a brass shell which she had found beside the whisky cache. She held it before Lancelot’s eyes.

“Whose is this?” she asked.

“B’longs to Deputy Jenney,” he said. “Ol’ Slim Toomey made it fer him out of a shell.”

CHAPTER XXI

“HASN’T Mr. Pell come in yet?” Carmel called to Tubal.

“Hain’t seen hide nor hair of him since last night.”

“Did he say anything about staying away?”

“Not a word. Mos’ likely he’s all het up learnin’ the Chinee language backward, or suthin’, and clean forgot the’ was sich a thing as a paper.”

She thought it queer, but, so occupied was her mind with the disclosures of Lancelot Bangs and with the events of last night, that the fact of Evan Pell’s unexplained absence did not present itself to her as a thing demanding immediate investigation.... She was wondering what to do with the evidence in hand. Where to go for more was a question easy to answer. She possessed a list of names, any one of whom could be forced to testify, and nobody could tell which one of them might assay some pure gold of fact which would lead her to her destination. She had reached Deputy Jenney. The match box was damning, yet it must be corroborated by other evidence.... Past Jenney the trail did not lead. So far it was a blind alley, blocked by the bulk of the newly appointed sheriff. In some manner she must go around or through him to reach Abner Fownes.

But Abner Fownes was not a man to permit himself to be reached. The county was his own now, held in the hollow of his hand. Its law-enforcing machinery was his private property to turn on or to turn off as his needs required. Suppose she did find evidence which would touch him with the pitch of this affair? Who would make use of the evidence? Who make the arrest?

Could she get to the sheriff’s office to lay before Jenney information which would result in his imprisonment and in Abner Fownes’s destruction? Suppose she went, as she must go, to the prosecuting attorney. Suppose warrants were issued? What then? Jenney’s office must make the service and the arrests.... It was more thinkable that the sun would start suddenly to travel from west to east than that such warrants should become efficacious.

She called Jared Whitefield on the telephone, desirous of his advice and assistance in this emergency, but Jared, she was informed, had gone away from town. He left suddenly after midnight, and had stated no destination.... Carmel felt terribly alone. She felt a need for Evan Pell—some one upon whom she could depend, some one to talk with, to discuss this thing with. Whitefield was gone.... Perhaps Evan had accompanied him. But why? She had a feeling Jared’s going away was in some manner connected with the telegram she sent him from the capital. But why had he taken Evan, and why had Evan left no word for her.... Her sensation was of one suddenly deserted by all the world. She felt young, inadequate, frightened.

If pride had not held back her tears she would have cried. It would be a wonderful comfort to cry—but a young woman engaged on a perilous enterprise such as hers could not afford the weakness of tears.... If only Evan Pell were there!

She was arrested by that thought, by the sharpness of her desire for Evan’s presence. For the first time she perceived how important was the position he had assumed in her affairs. She reviewed their association from its inception, recalled how she had patronized him, almost despised him. She had pitied him for his inadequacy, for his dry pedantry.... Step by step she reviewed the changes which had taken place in him, dating these changes from that brutal scene before her door, when Jenney had beaten him to insensibility.... Her sympathy had commenced there; admiration had dawned, for it had been given her to see that a man who could conduct himself as Evan Pell conducted himself on that day contained in himself the elements which made up a man. Submerged they might have been, but they were present—and not too deep below the surface. She saw again that unequal fight; perceived the dauntlessness of the young man; the oaken heart of him which would fight until it died, fearless, struggling with its last throb to reach and tear down its enemy.

She saw now how he had struggled to perceive; how, led by her acid tongue, he had perceived the futility of his life, and how he had sought to alter it. His manner, his very appearance, had changed.... And he loved her! Never before had she given more than reluctant, pitying thought to his love for her, but now it assumed other proportions.... She was aware of wanting him—not as he wanted her—but of wanting him near her, to lean upon, to feel the strength of him....

Until he returned she could do nothing!... It was strange that she, who always had been so self-reliant, so sure, so ready to act by herself, should require the upholding of another. She could not understand it, fancied she had grown weak. She rather despised herself.... Yet it was a fact. She did not strive to overthrow it. It was not to be assailed. She could not go on until Evan Pell returned to help her!

It was an uneasy, unhappy day, crowded with apprehensions and questionings.... With events impending, with peril darkening the immediate future, she could do nothing but putter with detail. Yet she welcomed the detail—it took her mind off herself and her problems.

Noon came, and then suppertime.... It was not her usual custom to return to the office after supper, but to-night she did return—to wait for Evan, though she did not admit it. He might come back, and she wanted to be there to receive him.

To occupy her mind she took out the books of her concern and opened them to study progress. The circulation book came first, and she opened it at the last entried page. As she spread it before her an envelope lay under her eyes, and upon its face, in Evan Pell’s handwriting, was her name.

Miss Carmel Lee!

It was the first time she had ever seen her name in his handwriting, and she gazed at it with a strange, stifled feeling in her breast.... A letter to her from Evan Pell, left in this place where she must find it! She lifted it and held it in her fingers.... Why had he written? Why left his message in this place? She drew a sudden breath of fright. Could it be he had deserted her? Could it be he had found his position unbearable and, ashamed to face her, had taken this means of telling her?... She was overmastered by foreboding, feared to open the letter.

“I must open it,” she said to herself. “I must.”

She compelled her fingers to tear the flap and to withdraw the letter—even to unfold it so that its contents were visible. Her eyes saw Evan’s neat, flawless handwriting, but her mind seemed suddenly numb, unable to make sense of the symbols set down upon the paper. She shook her head as if to clear it of something damp and heavy and obscuring, and forced herself to read.

“My Dear:” (The letter began, and she read over and over those two intimate words)—“My dear: If you find this letter—if I have not returned to take it from the place in which I have hidden it for you, I am quite sure I shall not see you again. In view of this possibility I am presuming to say good-by.” Even now, she saw, something of his pedantic precision must creep in. It would not have crept in, she felt sure, had he not been under some strong emotion, had he not felt the necessity for concealing his emotion. “I have told you before,” the letter continued, “that I love you. I have not told you how I have come willingly, eagerly to love you. You, and you alone—the fact of your existence, your loveliness—have made what I fancy are notable changes in me. I even go so far as to imagine I might, with time and persistence, become the sort of man who would be entitled to your friendship, if nothing more. But, if this letter reaches your eyes, that is, I fear, no longer possible. I think I have done as I should, although I have practiced deception. When you remember I did this because I loved you, I trust you will find it in your heart to forgive me.

“To-day there came a note to you which I intercepted. It purported to come from some disgruntled man, telling you how you could obtain evidence against these liquor smugglers by going to the Lakeside Hotel. I rather fancied it was not genuine, and was meant rather to induce your presence than to betray confederates. On the other hand, it might be authentic. I therefore urged you to make the journey upon which you have just been engaged, and, because it seemed right to do so, I am going to-night to test the authenticity of the letter.”

She saw, she understood!

“If it prove to be a lure, such as was used to the undoing of Sheriff Churchill, there is some small chance I shall not return. Naturally I shall observe every caution. But if precautions fail and I do not return, you will find in a box in my room such evidence and information as I have collected. It does not reach the man we wish to reach, but it moves toward him. I hope you will be able to make use of it.”

He could write so stiltedly of making use of his work when he was, open-eyed, going out to walk into the trap prepared for her!

“Therefore,” the letter concluded, “good-by. My going will mean little to you; it means little to me, except the parting from you. If you find time to think of me at all, I hope you will think of me as continuing always to love you wherever it may be I have journeyed. Good-by.”

At the end he had signed his name.

She sat for a moment as though turned to stone. Her heart was dead, her faculties benumbed.... He was dead! She had found and read the letter, so he must be dead—vanished as Sheriff Churchill had vanished, never to be seen again by mortal eye.... And for her! He had gone out calmly, serenely, to face whatever might beset his path—for her. He had given his life for her, to preserve her life!

She sat very still. Her cheeks were white and she was cold, cold as death. No sound came from her compressed lips. Dead!... Evan Pell was dead!

Then something not of her own consciousness, something deep within the machinery of her soul, moved and controlled her. She acted, but not as one acts of his own volition, rather as one acts in a mesmeric trance.... Her impulse was to go to find him—to find him, to weep over him ... to avenge him!

She snatched the receiver from its hook and telephoned Jared Whitefield again. He would help. He would know what to do. But Jared Whitefield had not returned.... She must act alone.

Calmly, like an automaton, she put on her hat, extinguished the lights, locked the door, and walked up the street. The direction she took was toward the Lakeside Hotel. She reached the fringe of the village which bordered upon the black woods, but did not pause. Steadily, urged on by some inexorable force, she continued down that gloomy avenue, between woodland banks of inky blackness.... She neither hesitated nor paused nor looked behind her.

Had she looked behind it may have been she would have seen the shadowy figures of two men who followed, followed stealthily keeping always a stated distance, drawing no nearer, flitting at the edge of the blackness.

CHAPTER XXII

ABNER FOWNES was apprehensive. Notwithstanding his success in obtaining the appointment of Deputy Jenney as sheriff and the utter discomfiture of Carmel Lee, uneasiness possessed him. He felt driven, pursued. Events marshaled their forces against him with a sort of sinister inexorability. Being a man of superior intelligence, he was able to see the intricacies and dangers of his position more surely than a lesser man could have done; and as he sat in the train on his return to Gibeon he took stock of himself, reviewed the past, and prepared himself for the future.

To see Carmel Lee in the capital was a shock. He had not expected to see her, but, on the contrary, was awaiting reports on the success of his plan to eliminate her.... It was his first piece of bad luck; the first time things had worked out crookedly for him, and it alarmed him. Every successful man believes in his luck, and now Fownes was apprehensive lest luck had deserted him.

That Carmel had accused him of crimes in the Governor’s presence did not alarm him especially—except for this: that anybody would dare to speak such words concerning him. It was not the thing uttered, the person who listened, but that fact of the utterance. Hitherto people had been afraid of him, but this girl was unafraid.... It must mean something, some turning of the tide. He felt a trembling of his foundations.

It is at such a moment that a man of Fownes’s type is most to be feared. He was vain; his position in the world meant more to him than any other consideration. To have that position assailed, to face the possibility of being thrust from his eminence in ignominy, was an eventuality he would avert by any means within reach of his hand. Indeed, he had already reached for the weapon—but luck had intervened.

He felt stifled by adversities. Never before had he doubted his ability to come through this emergency with satisfaction to himself. He had believed in himself. Even when he had been forced outside the law to protect his position, he regarded it only as a makeshift, undesirable, perhaps, but necessary to him, and therefore permissible. It had been his intention to stabilize his business again, and then to withdraw to lawful practices and a life of conscious rectitude.... But adversities, of late, erected themselves with such rapidity! Money was required of him when he had hoped promises to pay would have sufficed; he was rushed into expedients endangering the whole edifice of his life. So far there had been no slip, but he was intelligent enough to perceive there might be a slip....

A slip would not be so dangerous if it were not that Carmel Lee were standing, watching always, ready to pounce upon any mishap. She and that professor fellow!... Evan Pell, with a natural adaptability for snooping. Fownes had him dismissed from the schools because he snooped into his affairs.... It was therefore essential that both these individuals should be rendered no longer a menace.

There was Sheriff Churchill.... Well, there was something which could never be brought home to him. It had been well and successfully managed.... But he wanted no more of that—unless absolute necessity demanded.

If he could have married the girl! That would have shut her mouth and at the same time have given him a desirable wife—one whom he would have taken pride in introducing into such functions as that which he had attended at the capital.... But he could not marry her.... She could be made to disappear as Churchill had disappeared—but three disappearances would be rather too many. If three persons vanished, folks would regard it as rather more than a coincidence. Therefore Carmel and Pell would not vanish unless all other expedients failed.

If, however, he could keep his word to her; if he could smash her life, place her in a position which would overwhelm her, destroy her self-respect, send her crashing down in some infamous way—that would serve so much better.... He had found the way to do it, but luck intervened. Instead of being where he intended she should be, Carmel appeared safely in the capital—and multiplied the danger she represented.

He wondered if the whole scheme had gone awry. There was no word from Jenney. Nothing as to the whereabouts of Evan Pell. Pell was of importance in Fownes’s plan—indispensable to it. Deputy Jenney was indispensable to it, as were Peewee Bangs and his Lakeside Hotel.... The plan had been so simple and would have been so effective.

If Carmel had not gone to the capital, but, instead, had adventured to the Lakeside Hotel to investigate the mysterious note—the rest was simple. She would have been followed; Pell would have been followed. To seize and imprison the pair in a room in the unsavory Lakeside Hotel would have been a mere matter of a couple of strong arms.... To imprison them in the same room! Following that, the room being set according to the demands of the occasion, the hotel would have been raided. Deputy Jenney, that public-spirited official, would have conducted the raid.... The posse would have found Carmel and Pell in their room, surrounded by evidences of such orgies as the Lakeside was famous for. They would have been arrested together, taken to the jail.... That was all, but it would have sufficed. Never again could Carmel hold up her head; she would be destroyed utterly, driven out of Gibeon, made forever ineffective. It was really better than killing her outright....

Abner alighted at Gibeon’s depot and was driven to his office. He summoned Jenney, who came with alacrity.

“Well, Sheriff?” said Abner, jocularly.

“Much obleeged,” said Jenney.

“What happened?”

“The girl went off some’eres in Whitefield’s auto. Didn’t git back till some time in the mornin’.... But we got him.”

“Eh?”

“We got him—the perfessor.”

Fownes considered that. They had the professor—but he was worse than useless alone, he was a menace. So long as Carmel Lee was at liberty, Evan Pell, as a prisoner, was a constant danger. No telling what the girl would do. Besides, she was allied with Jared Whitefield—and Whitefield was no man to overlook. Abner scowled.

“Where is he?”

“Out to Peewee’s.”

“He went out there?”

“Came spyin’ around. Kind of clever about it, too. We almost missed him.... But we didn’t?”

“Is he hurt?”

“Mussed up some. No hurt to speak of.”

“And to-night the big shipment comes in.”

“Your orders.”

“We’ve got to get the girl,” Abner said. “Have her watched every instant. Have everything in readiness. If she puts her foot in a spot where you and your men can take her, don’t lose a minute.” His voice lifted with excitement. “Get her. Do you hear?... Get her!”

“Where’s Whitefield?” Jenney said.

“How should I know?”

“I want to know.... You can’t handle him like you can this girl. He’s gone some’eres, and I want to know where and why.”

Fownes scowled, but made no rejoinder.

“I don’t like the way things is goin’,” Jenney said, sulkily. “I feel like I was gittin’ cornered.”

“You’re sheriff, aren’t you? Who’ll corner you. You’re frightened, Jenney. Men who get frightened aren’t useful to me. Now, get out of here. You know what you’ve got to do. Do it.”

“Town meetin’ to-morrer. I got to be there.”

“You’ll be some place beside at a town meeting, Sheriff, if that girl is allowed to run around another twenty-four hours.... Git!”

Jenney went out slowly, much perturbed. He was a man of consequence to-day. Yesterday he had been nobody but Deputy Jenney, a political henchman, a nobody. To-day his life’s ambition was realized; he bestrode the pinnacle of his hopes. He had achieved the position toward which he had labored and schemed for a dozen years. What happened to Deputy Jenney was more or less inconsequential. As Deputy Jenney he dared take chances—for money or for advancement. But as Sheriff Jenney!... That was a different matter. Very gladly, now, would he have extricated himself from his entanglements and conducted himself as, according to his system of ethics, a man of mark should do. Why, he was the biggest man in the county—with a salary and fees and patronage!... Well, he was in it and he must protect himself.... Damn Fownes, anyhow.

He did not pause to consider that without Fownes and his connection with the whisky-smuggling industry he would never have become sheriff.... That was forgotten. Like many men, he ignored the ladder by which he had climbed. In this case, however, the ladder declined to ignore him. If Jenney had ever heard the word sardonic he would have made telling use of it now.... How many men are trammeled by inadequate vocabularies!

His first step was cautiously to call Peewee Bangs by telephone, and in his conversation Jenney disclosed a kind of apt and helpful humor of which few would have accused him.

“Hello, Peewee!” he said. “That you?”

“It’s me, Sheriff.”

“H’m!... Got that bundle of school books safe?” Jenney chuckled a little at this. He considered it very acute indeed—to describe Evan Pell as a bundle of school books.

“Got ’em tight,” said Peewee. “And the bookcase door’s locked. Was jest lookin’ ’em over. Gittin’ me an eddication, so to say.”

“Was the bindin’s injured much?”

“Not to speak of. One of the covers was tore off, but it kin be patched on ag’in with glue, seems as though. Hain’t no pages tore.”

“It’s too bad we got to keep ’em alone,” said Jenney. “I’m figgerin’ on addin’ to the lib’rary.... Durin’ the day or night. You be ready to take care of another volume. ’Tain’t so educational as the other figgers to be, but it’s put up in a dum sight pertier cover.”

“I git you,” said Peewee. “The librarian’ll be on the job. Got any idee what hour you’ll deliver?”

“May be any hour. Sit tight, and don’t on no account lose what we got. What we want, Peewee, is a nice, complete eddication, and we can’t git it ’less we have both them books to study side by side.”

“Uh huh.... An’ say, Sheriff, the pantry’s all ready fer that shipment of catchup. Quite a consignment, eh? Never had so much catchup in the house before.”

“Too doggone much. I was ag’in it.... But it’s comin’, and we got to look out f’r it.”

“Five loads,” said Peewee.

“Comin’ different roads.”

“Mebby ye kin dispose of some of it if the order’s too big fer your own use.”

“I kind of arranged to,” said Peewee. “Everythin’s all right this end.”

“For Gawd’s sake,” said Jenney, betraying for a moment his anxiety, “don’t let nothin’ slip.”

“I’ll tend to my end if you tend to your’n,” snapped Mr. Bangs.

Directly following this conversation, Jenney detailed two trustworthy gentlemen to keep an eye on Carmel Lee. It was pointed out to them to be their duty not to lose sight of her an instant, and, on pain of certain severe penalties, to let no opportunity slip to induce her to join Evan Pell at the Lakeside Hotel.... It was these two gentlemen who, gratefully, saw her take her way out of town in the late evening, following the very road they would have chosen for her. They made sure she was alone, that no one was coming after her, and then took to themselves the office of escort. Quite gleefully they followed her, as she, unconscious of their presence, trudged toward the hotel. She was so thoughtful as to save them even the small trouble of transporting her.

“Like the feller that let the bear chase him into camp so’s he could shoot his meat nigh home,” whispered one of the gentlemen.

Carmel proceeded rapidly; too rapidly for such precautions as she should have observed. She was without plan; her mind was in such chaos as to render planning futile. Instinct alone was not inactive.... No matter how shaken the objective faculties may be, those superior subjective intuitions and inhibitions and urgings never sleep. Their business is so largely with the preservation of the body which they inhabit that they dare not sleep.

Quite without thinking; without a clear idea why she did so, Carmel turned off the road and took to the woods. Self-preservation was at work. Instinct was in control.... The gentlemen behind quickened their pace, disgruntled at this lack of consideration on the part of their quarry.... It was with some difficulty they found the place where she entered the woods.... Carmel herself had vanished utterly. In that black maze, a tangle of slashings, a huddle of close-growing young spruce, it was impossible to descry her, to tell in which direction she had turned. Nor did they dare make use of a flashlight in an effort to follow her trail. However, they must needs do something, so, keeping the general direction of the hotel, paralleling the road, they proceeded slowly, baffled, but hopeful....

CHAPTER XXIII

IT is not easy for one unaccustomed to the woods to remain undeviatingly upon his course even in the daytime; at night it can be accomplished only by a miracle. Carmel, in a state of agitation which was not distant from hysteria, had paused neither to consider nor to take her bearings. Of herself she was utterly careless. The only thought in her mind was to reach, and in some manner to give aid to, Evan Pell if he remained alive. Instinct alone moved her to turn off the road and seek the protection of the forest. Once engulfed in its blackness she stumbled alone, tripping, falling, turning, twisting—hurrying, always hurrying.... The physical exertion cleared her brain, reduced her to something like rationality.

She paused, leaned panting against the bole of a great beech ... and discovered she was lost.

The evening had been cloudy, but now the clouds were being dissipated by an easterly breeze—a chilly breeze—and from time to time the moon peered through to turn the blackness of the woods into a cavern, dim-lit, filled with moving, grotesque alarming shadows. The shape of fear lurks always in the forest. It hides behind every tree, crouches in every thicket, ready to leap out upon the back of him who shall for an instant lay aside the protective armor of his presence of mind. The weapon of fear is panic.... Fear perches upon the shoulder, whispering: “You are lost. You know not which way to go.... You have lost your way.” Then there arises in the heart and brain of the victim a sensation so horrible that words cannot describe it; it can be realized only by those who have experienced it. It is a combination of emotions and fears, comparable to nothing.... It is a living, clutching, torturing horror. First comes apprehension, then bewilderment. A frenzied effort to discover some landmark, to tear from the forest the secret of the points of the compass. One determines to sit calmly and reflect; to proceed coolly.... The thing is impossible. One sits while the watch ticks fifty times, and is sure he has rested for hours. He arises, takes two steps with studied deliberation, and finds he is running, bursting through slashings and underbrush in unreasoning frenzy. And frenzy thrives upon itself. One wishes to shout, to scream.... Fear chokes him, engulfs him. Reason deserts utterly, and there remains nothing but horror, panic....

Carmel experienced this and more. Throbbing, rending terror was hers, yet, even at the height of her panic, there lay beneath it, making it more horrible, her fear for Evan Pell. She uttered his name. Sobbing, she called to him—and always, always she struggled forward under the urge of panic. Even the little nickel-plated electric flash in her pocket was forgotten. That would have been something—light! It would have been a comfort, a hope.... How long she ran and fell, picked herself up to stagger onward to another fall, she did not know. For minutes the woods were an impenetrable gulf of blackness; then the moon would emerge to permit its eerie light to trickle through the interlacing foliage, and to paint grotesque patterns upon the ground beneath her feet. Threatening caverns loomed; mysterious sounds assailed her.... She was sobbing, crying Evan Pell’s name. And then—with startling suddenness—the woods ceased to be, and light was.... The heavens were clean swept of clouds, and the moon, round and full, poured down the soft silver of its radiance—a radiance reflected, mirrored, turned to brighter silver by the rippled waters of the lake.... Carmel sank in a pitiful little heap and cried—they were tears of relief. She had reached the lake.

It was possible to reason now. She had turned from the road to the right. The Lakeside Hotel was to the left of the road, and, therefore, she had but to skirt the shore of the lake, traveling to leftward, and she must reach her destination.

She arose, composed herself, and, womanlike, arranged her hat and hair. Then, keeping close to the water for fear she might again become bewildered and so lose this sure guide, she started again toward her objective.

As she turned a jutting point of land she saw, a quarter of a mile distant, the not numerous lights which indicated the presence of Bangs’s ill-reputed hostelry. This sure realization of the nearness of danger awakened caution. It awakened, too, a sense of her futility. Now that she was where something must be done, what was there possible for her to do? What did she mean to do?... She could not answer, but, being an opportunist, she told herself that events should mold her actions; that some course would open before her when need for it became imminent.

Small things she noted—inconsequential things. The lake had fallen during the dry weather. She noted that. It had receded to leave at its edge a ribbon of mud, sometimes two feet, sometimes six feet wide.... This was one of those inconsequential, extraneous facts which appear so sharply and demand attention when the mind is otherwise vitally occupied.... She noted the thick-growing pickerel grass growing straight and slender and thrusting its spears upward through the scarcely agitated water. It was lovely in the moonlight.... She noted the paths upon the water, paths which began without reason and wound off to no destination.... Her eyes were busy, strangely busy, photographically occupied. No detail of that nocturne but would be printed indelibly upon the retina of her brain so long as she should live.... Details, details, details!

Then she stopped! Her hand flew to her breast with sudden gesture and clutched the bosom of her waist. She started back, trembling.... Was that a log lying half upon the muddy ribbon, half submerged in the receded waters of the lake? She hoped it was a log, but there was something—something which arrested her, compelled her.... If it were a log it was such a log as she never had seen before.... It had not a look of hard solidity, but rather of awful limpness, of softness. It sprawled grotesquely. It was still, frightfully still.... She gathered her courage to approach; stood upon the grassy shelf above this shape which might have been a log but seemed not to be a log, and bent to peer downward upon it....

She thought she screamed, but she did not. No sound issued from her throat, although her lips opened.... She fell back, covering her face.... The log was no log; it was no twisted, grotesque drift wood.... It was the body of a man, the limbs of a man fearfully extended....

Carmel felt ill, dizzy. She struggled against faintness. Then the searing, unbearable thought—was it Evan?... She must know, she must determine....

Alone with the thing beneath her, with the fearsome woods behind her, with the lonely, coldly glittering lake before her, it was almost beyond belief that she should find the courage to determine.... Something within her, something stronger than horror, than terror, laid its hand upon her and compelled her. She could not, dared not, believe it was Evan Pell.

From her pocket she drew the little, nickel-plated flashlight and pressed its button. Then, covering her eyes, she forced herself inch by inch to approach the lip of the grassy shelf.... She could not look, but she must look.... First she pointed the beam of the light downward, her eyes tight-closed. Clenching her fist, biting her lips, she put every atom of strength in her body to the task of forcing the lids of her eyes to open—and she looked, looked full upon the awful thing at her feet.

For an instant sickness, frightful repulsion, horror, was held at bay by relief.... It was not Evan. Those soggy garments were not his; that bulk was not his.... She dared to look again, and let none decry the courage required to perform this act.... It was a terrible thing to see.... Her eyes dared not remain upon the awful, bearded face. They swept downward to where the coat, lying open, disclosed the shirt.... Upon the left bosom of the shirt was a metal shape. Carmel stared at it—and stared.... It was a star, no longer bright and glittering, but unmistakably a star....

Then, instantly, Carmel Lee knew what had become of Sheriff Churchill....

It was enough; she was required to look no more.... The spot was accursed, unendurable, and she fled from it; fled toward the lights of the Lakeside Hotel.... That they were lights of which she could not beg shelter she did not think; that she was safer with the thing which the lake had given up she did not consider. That the living to whom she fled were more frightful than the dead whom she deserted was not for her to believe in that moment. She must have light; she must feel the presence of human beings, hear human voices—it mattered not whose they were.

Presently, forcing her way through a last obstruction of baby spruces, she reached the thoroughfare, and there, hidden by the undergrowth, she stood, looking for the first time upon this group of buildings so notorious in the county, so important in her own affairs. The hotel itself, a structure of frame and shingles, stretched along the lake—a long, low, squatting, sinister building. A broad piazza stretched from end to end, and from its steps a walk led down to a wharf jutting into the water. To the rear were barns and sheds and an inclosure hidden from the eye by a high lattice—a typical roadhouse of the least desirable class.... She searched such of its windows as were lighted. Human figures moved to and fro in the room which must have been the dining room. An orchestra played....

She had been on the spot but a moment when she heard the approaching engine of some motor vehicle. She waited. A huge truck, loaded high and covered with a tarpaulin, drew up to the gate at the rear of the hotel. Its horn demanded admittance, the gate opened and it rolled in.... She waited, uncertain. Another truck appeared—high loaded as the first—and was admitted.... Then, in quick succession, three others.... Five trucks loaded to capacity—and Carmel knew well what was their load!... Contraband!... Its value to be counted not by thousands of dollars, but by tens of thousands!

The facts were hers now, but what was she to do with them? To whom report them?... And there was Evan. What mattered contraband whisky when his fate was in doubt? Evan Pell came first—she realized now that he came first, before everything, before herself!... She asked no questions, but accepted the fact.

Keeping to the roadside in the shadows, she picked her way along for a couple of hundred feet, meaning to cross the road and to make her way to the rear of the hotel’s inclosure. There must be some opening through which she might observe what passed and so make some discovery which might be of use to her in her need.... She paused, undecided, determined a sudden, quick crossing would be safest, and, lifting her skirts, ran out upon the roadway....

There was a shout, a rush of feet. She felt ungentle hands, and, dropping such inhibitions as generations of civilization had imposed upon her, Carmel fought like a wildcat, twisting, scratching, tearing.... She was crushed, smothered. Her arms were twisted behind her, a cloth jerked roughly over her face, and she felt herself lifted in powerful arms.... They carried her to some door, for she heard them rap for admission.

“Who’s there?” said a voice.

“Fetch Peewee,” said one of her captors. “Quick.” Then came a short wait, and she heard Peewee Bangs’s nasal voice. “What’s up?” he demanded.

“We got her. What’ll we do with her?”

“Fetch her in,” said Peewee. “Up the back stairs. I’ll show ye the way.”

Carmel, not struggling now, was carried up a narrow flight of steps; she heard a key turn in a lock. Then she was thrust into a room, pushed so that she stumbled and went to her knees. The door slammed behind her and was locked again.... She got to her feet, trembling, wavering, snatched the cloth from her face, and looked before her.... There, in the dim light, she saw a man. He stood startled, staring with unbelieving eyes.

“Evan!...” she cried. “Evan!... Thank God you’re alive.”

CHAPTER XXIV

HE did not come toward her; did not move from his place, and then she saw that he stood only by clinging to the back of a chair.... He leaned forward and stared at her through eyes drawn by pain.

“You’re hurt!... They’ve hurt you!” she cried.

“My ankle only,” he said. “Sprained, I fancy.” Then, “What are you doing here?” He spoke almost petulantly as one would speak to a naughty child who turns up in some embarrassing spot.

“I—I found your letter,” she said.

“My letter?... Ah yes, my letter.... Then I—I brought you into this trap.”

“No.... Evan, it was a fine thing you did. For me. You—have come to this for me.”

“It was an exceedingly unintelligent thing—writing that letter.”

“Listen, Evan.... As long as I live I shall be glad you wrote it. I am glad, glad ... to know there is a man capable of—of sacrificing and—maybe dying for——”

“Nonsense!” said Evan. “It was a trap, of course. And I thought my mental caliber was rather larger than that of these people. Very humiliating.” He frowned at her. “Why did you have to come?”

“You ask that?”

“I most certainly do ask it. You had no business to come. Wasn’t my failure to return a sufficient warning?... Why did you take this foolish risk?”

“You don’t know?”

“I want to know,” he said with the severity of a schoolmaster cross-questioning a refractory pupil.

“Must I tell?”

“You must.” Carmel was almost able to see the humor of it. A pathetic shadow of a smile lighted her face.

“I didn’t want to—to tell it this way,” she said. “I——”

“Will you be so good as to give me a direct answer? Why did you come rushing here—headlong—when you knew perfectly well——” He paused and his severe eyes accused her.

She moved a step closer; her hands fluttered up from her side and dropped again; she bit her lip. “Because,” she said, in the lowest of voices, “I love you—and—and where you were I—wanted to be.”

The chair which supported Evan tipped forward and clattered again into place. He stared at her as if she were some very strange laboratory specimen indeed, and then said in his most insistently didactic voice, punctuating his words with a waggling forefinger, “You don’t mean to stand there—and to tell me—that you love me!”

Carmel gave a little laugh.

“Don’t you want me to?”

“That,” he said, “is beside the question.... You ... you ... love me?”

She nodded.

“I don’t believe you,” he said. “You couldn’t. Nobody could.... I’ve been studying this—er—matter of love, and I am assured of my complete unfitness to arouse such an emotion.”

Her heart misgave her. “Evan—you—you love me?”

“I do,” he said, emphatically. “Most assuredly I do, but——”

“Then it’s all right,” she said.

“It’s not all right.... I don’t in the least believe you—er—reciprocate my feeling for you.... You are—er—deceiving me for some reason.”

“Evan—please—oh——” Her lips quivered and her voice became tearful. “You—you’re making it—terribly hard. Girls don’t usually have to—to argue with men to—to make them believe they love them.... You—you’re hurting me.”

“I—er—have no intention of doing so. In fact I—I would not hurt you for—anything in the world.... As a matter of—of fact, I want to—prevent you from being hurt....” At this point he bogged down, the wheels of his conversation mired, and progress ceased.

“Then,” demanded Carmel, “why do you make me do it?”

“Do what?”

“Propose to you, Evan Pell. It’s not my place. I have to do all the courting.... If you—you want me, why don’t you say so—and—and ask me to marry you?”

“You—you’d marry me?”

“I don’t know.... Not—I won’t say another word until you’ve asked me—as—as a man should.”

He drew a deep breath and, bending forward, searched her face with hungry eyes. What he saw must have satisfied him, given him confidence, for he threw back his shoulders. “I can’t come to you,” he said, gently. “I want to come to you. I want to be close to you, and to tell you how I love you—how my love for you has changed my life.... I—my manner—it was because I couldn’t believe—because the idea that you—you could ever see anything in me to—to admire—was so new. I never believed you—could.... I—was satisfied to love you. But—Carmel—if you can—if some miracle has made you care for a poor creature like me—I shall—Oh, my dear!—it will make a new world, a wonderful and beautiful world.... I—I can’t come to you. Will you—come to me?”

She drew closer slowly, almost reluctantly, and stood before him. His grave, starving eyes looked long into hers.

“My—my dear!” he said, huskily, and kneeling upon the chair with his sound leg—in order to release his arms for more essential purposes, he held them out to her....

“Your arms are strong,” she said presently. “I had no idea.... You are very strong.”

“I—exercise with a rowing machine,” he said.... And then: “Now we must think.... I didn’t much care—before. Now I have something to live for.”

His words brought Carmel back to the realities, to the prison room in which they were locked, and to the men below stairs who had made them prisoners for their sinister purposes.

“I have found Sheriff Churchill,” she said.

“His body?”

She nodded. “And this house is full of contraband liquor. Five big trucks—loaded....”

“All of which is useless information to us here.”

“What—do you think they will do with us?”

Evan turned away his head and made no answer.

Carmel clutched his arm. “Oh, they wouldn’t.... They couldn’t.... Not now. Nothing can happen to us now.”

“At any rate,” he said, gravely, “we have this. It is something.”

“But I want more. I want happiness—alive with you.... Oh, we must do something—something.”

“Sit down,” he said. “Please—er—be calm. I will see what is to be done.”

He sank into the chair, and she sat close beside him, clinging to his hand. Neither spoke.... At the sound of footsteps in the hall outside their heads lifted and their eyes fastened upon the door. A key grated in the lock and the door swung inward, permitting Peewee Bangs to enter. He stood grinning at them—the grin distorting his pinched, hunchback’s face.

“Well,” he said, “here you be—both of ye. How d’ye like the accommodations?”

Peewee evidently came to talk, not to be talked to, for he did not wait for an answer.

“Folks that go meddlin’ in other folkses’ business ought to be more careful,” he said. “But numbers hain’t.... Now you was gittin’ to be a dummed nuisance. We’ve talked about you consid’able.... And say, we fixed it so’s you hain’t goin’ to be missed for a day or so. Uh huh. Had a feller telephone from the capital sayin’ you was back there on business.”

“What—are you going to do with us?” Carmel asked.

“Nothin’ painful—quite likely. If you was to turn up missin’ that ’u’d make too many missin’ folks.... So you hain’t a-goin’ to. Nope. We calc’late on havin’ you found—public like. Sure thing. Sheriff’s goin’ to find ye.”

“Sheriff Jenney?”

“That’s him.... We’re goin’ to kind of arrange this room a little—like you ’n’ that teacher feller’d been havin’ a nice leetle party here. Understand?... Plenty to drink and sich.” He drew his head back upon his distorted shoulders and looked up at them with eyes in which burned the fire of pure malice. Carmel turned away from him to determine from Evan’s face if he understood Bangs’s meaning. It was clear he did not.

“Don’t git the idea, eh?” Peewee asked, with evident enjoyment. “Wa-al, since we got a good sheriff and one that kin be depended on, things is different here. He’s all for upholdin’ the law, and he aims to make an example out of me.”

“Sheriff Jenney make an example of you!” Carmel exclaimed.

“Funny, hain’t it? But that’s the notion. You bet you.... Goin’ to kind of raid my hotel, like you might say, and git evidence ag’in’ me. Dunno’s he’ll find much. More’n likely he won’t.... But he’ll find you two folks—he’ll come rampagin’ in here and find you together as cozy as bugs in a rug.” Peewee stopped to laugh with keen enjoyment of the humorous situation he described. “He’ll find you folks here, and he’ll find how you been together to-night and all day to-morrer.... And plenty of refreshments a-layin’ around handy. Reg’lar party.”

“You mean Sheriff Jenney will come to this hotel—officially—and find Mr. Pell and myself in this room?”

“That’s the ticket.”

“Why—why—he’d have to let us go.”

“Sooner or later,” said Peewee. “Fust he’d take you to the jail and lock you up—disorderly persons or some sich charge. Drinkin’ and carousin’ in my hotel!... Course he’ll have to let you go—sometime. Maybe after the jedge gives you thirty days in the calaboose.”

“Um!... I think I comprehend,” said Evan, slowly. “I—In fact, I am sure I comprehend.... Sheriff Jenney did not originate this plan, I am sure.... Nor yourself. It required a certain modicum of intelligence.”

“’Tain’t no matter who thought it up—it’s thought,” said Peewee, “and when the town of Gibeon comes to know all the facts—why, I don’t figger you two’ll be in a position to do nobody much harm.... Folks hain’t apt to believe you like you was the Bible. Kind of hidebound, them Gibeon people. Sh’u’dn’t be s’prised if they give you a ride out of town on a rail.”

“Nobody would believe it. We would tell everyone how we came to be here.” This from Carmel.

“We’re willin’ to take that chance,” grinned Peewee. “Seems like a certain party’s got a grudge ag’in’ you, miss, and he allus pays off his grudges.”

“As he paid off Sheriff Churchill,” said Carmel.

“Killin’,” said Peewee, sententiously, “is quick. This here’ll last you a lifetime. You’ll allus be knowed as the gal that was arrested with a man in the Lakeside Hotel....”

He turned on his heel and walked to the door; there he paused to grin at them maliciously before he disappeared, locking the door after him with elaborate care.

“They—nobody would believe,” said Carmel.

“I am afraid, indeed, I may say I am certain, everybody would believe,” said Evan. “I have seen the reactions of Gibeon to affairs of this sort. Gibeon loves to believe the worst.”

“Then——”

“We would have to go away,” said Evan, gravely.

“But—but the story would follow us.”

“Such stories always follow.”

Carmel studied his face. It was Evan Pell’s face, but for the first time she saw how different it was from the pedant’s face, the schoolmaster’s face, he had worn when first she met him. The spectacles were gone; the dissatisfied, supercilious expression was gone, and, in its place, she perceived something stronger, infinitely more desirable. She saw strength, courage, sympathy, understanding. She saw what gave her hope even in this, her blackest hour. If the worst came to the worst she had found a man upon whom to rely, a man who would stand by her to the end and uphold her and protect her and love her.

Yet—she closed her eyes to shut out the imagined scenes—to be branded as a woman who could accompany a man to such a resort as the Lakeside, and to remain with him there for days and nights—carousing!... She knew how she regarded women who were guilty of such sordid affairs. Other women would look at her as she looked at them, would draw away their skirts when she passed, would peer at her with hard, hostile, sneering eyes.... That would be her life thenceforward—the life of an outcast, of a woman detected in sin.... It would be horrible, unspeakably horrible—unbearable. She had valued herself so highly, had, without giving it conscious thought, felt herself to be so removed from such affairs as quite to dwell upon a planet where they could not exist. She had been proud without knowing she was proud.... It had not been so much a sensation of purity, a consciousness of purity, as a sureness in herself, a certainty that evil could not approach her.... And now....

“Evan—Evan—I am frightened,” she said.

“If only you had not come,” he answered.

“But I am here—I am glad I am here—with you.”

He stretched out his hand toward her and she laid her hand in the clasp of his fingers.

“We have until to-morrow night,” he said. “Twenty-four hours.”

“But——”

“Empires have fallen in twenty-four hours.”

“Maybe—some one will come to look for us.”

He shook his head. “They will have taken care of that.”

“Then you—think there is no chance.”

“I—— Carmel dear, the chance is slight. I must admit the chance is slight. But with twenty-four hours.... If——” His eyes traveled about the skimpily furnished room, searching for something, searching for it vainly. “If I could walk,” he said. “I’m—almost helpless.”

She went to him, trembling, the horror of the future eating into her as if it were an acid-coated mantle. “I—I won’t be able to live,” she said.

He did not answer, for his eyes were fixed on the door which led, not into the hall, but into an adjoining bedroom. They rested upon its white doorknob as if hypnotized.

“Will you help me to that door?” he asked. “I’ll push the chair along. You—can you keep me from falling?”

Slowly, not without twinges of hot pain in his injured ankle, they reached the door. Evan felt in his pocket for his penknife, and with it set about loosening the screw which held the knob in place. Twice he broke the blade of his knife, but at last he managed the thing. The white doorknob rested in his hand.

“There,” he said, “that is something.”

“What?... I don’t understand.”

He sat in the chair, removed the shoe from his sound foot and then the sock. He did this slowly, methodically, and as methodically replaced the shoe on his sockless foot. Then he lifted from the floor the stocking and dropped into it the doorknob. It fitted snugly into the toe.

“Er—I have read of such things,” he said. He grasped the sock by the top and whirled it about his head. “Mechanics,” said he, “teach us that a blow delivered with such an implement is many times more efficacious than a blow delivered with the—er—solid object held directly in the hand....”

CHAPTER XXV

“I HAVE come to the conclusion,” said Evan Pell, “that every man, no matter what his vocation, should be a man of action. That is to say, he should devote some attention and practice to those muscular and mental activities which will serve him should some unexpected emergency arise.”

“Yes,” said Carmel.... “Yes.”

“I find myself with little or no equipment for strenuous adventure. This, we must admit, proves itself to be a serious oversight.”

“Do you know how long we have been shut in this room?” Carmel demanded.

“I do. You were—er—propelled into this place at approximately ten-thirty last night. It is now five o’clock to-day. Eighteen hours and a half.”

“Nothing has happened—nothing!... We’ve been fed like animals in a zoo.... I dozed fitfully during the night. We’ve talked and talked, and waited—waited.... This waiting! Evan, I—it’s the waiting which is so terrible.”

“There are,” said Evan, with self-accusation in his voice, “men who would escape from this place. They would do it with seeming ease. Undoubtedly there is a certain technique, but I do not possess it. I—er—on an occasion I attended a showing of motion pictures. There was an individual who—without the least apparent difficulty, accomplished things to which escape from this room would be mere child’s play.”

“To-night,” said Carmel, “the sheriff will come to this hotel, and find us here.”

“What must you think of me?” Evan said, desperately. He turned in his chair and stared through the window toward the woods which surrounded the hotel upon three sides, his shoulders drooping with humiliation. Carmel was at his side in an instant, her hands upon his shoulders.

“Evan!... Evan! You must not accuse yourself. No man could do anything. You have done all—more than all—any man could do.... We—whatever comes, we shall face it together.... I—I shall always be proud of you.”

“I—I want you to be proud of me. I—the man will be here with our food in half an hour.... Would you mind standing at some distance?”

She withdrew, puzzled. Evan drew from his pocket the stocking with the doorknob in its toe and studied it severely. “This,” said he, “is our sole reliance. It has a most unpromising look. I have never seen an implement less calculated to arouse hope.”

He edged his chair closer to the bed, grasped the top of the sock, and scowled at a spot on the coverlid. He shook his head, reached for his handkerchief, and, folding it neatly, laid it upon the spot at which he had scowled.

“A—er—target,” he explained.

Then, drawing back his arm, he brought down the improvised slung-shot with a thud upon the bed.

“Did I hit it?” he asked.

“I—I don’t think so.”

“I knew it.... It is an art requiring practice.”

Again and again he belabored the bed with his weapon, asking after each blow if he had struck the mark. “I fancy,” he said, “I am becoming more accomplished. I—er—am pretending it is a human head. I am endeavoring to visualize it as the head of an individual obnoxious to me.”

“But why? What are you about?”

“I have heard it said that desperate situations demand desperate remedies. I am about to become desperate. Do I look desperate?” He turned to her hopefully.

“I—you look very determined.”

“It is, perhaps, the same thing. I am very determined. I am inexorable.... Please listen at the door. If he comes upon us before I have time to make essential preparations, my desperation will be of no avail.”

Carmel went to the door and listened while Evan continued to belabor the bed. “Decidedly,” he panted, “I am becoming proficient. I hit it ten times hand-running.”

“But——”

“Please, listen.... You see how impossible it is for me to escape. I am unable to walk, much less to make satisfactory speed.... You, however, are intact. Also, if one of us is found to be absent, this unspeakable plan must fail. I am working upon a plan—a desperate plan—to make possible the absence of one of us—namely, yourself.”

“Silly!... Do you think I would leave you here—for them to—to do what they wanted to?”

“If you escape they will dare do nothing to me. That is clear. Undoubtedly they will be chagrined, and at least one of their number will be—in a position to require medical attention. I trust this will be so. I should like to feel I have injured somebody. A latent savagery is coming to the surface in me.”

“But what are you going to do?”

“I think I had best assume the position necessary to my plan,” he said. “Would you mind helping me to the door?”

He hitched his chair along until it stood close to the wall at the side of the door opposite from its hinges. Evan flattened himself against the wall where it would be impossible for one entering the door to see him until well within the room.

“There,” he said. “You, also, have your part.”

“What—what must I do?”

“He will be carrying a tray of dishes. If—events should so shape themselves that he should drop this, a tremendous and alarming crash would result. It would spell disaster. You, therefore, will be at the door when the man opens it, and will reach for the tray. Be sure you have it grasped firmly—and on no account—it matters not how startled you may be at what follows—are you to drop it. Everything depends upon that.”

“And then——”

“A great deal depends upon yourself. The unexpectedness of our attempt will militate in our favor. Should matters eventuate as I expect, you will be able to leave this room. From that instant I cannot help you.... But, an attempt on our part not being expected, I rather imagine you will be able to make your way downstairs and out of doors.... It is only a chance, of course. It may fail, in which event we will be no worse off than we are at present.... You will then hasten to Gibeon and take such measures as you conceive to be adequate.”

“I shan’t leave you.... I shan’t, I shan’t, I shan’t.”

His lips compressed and an expression appeared upon his face which she had never seen there before. It was masterful, an expression of conscious force. It was the real man peering through its disguise. His hand clenched into a fist.

“By Heavens!” he said, “you’ll do as you’re told.”

“Evan!”

“Precisely,” he said. “Now make ready.”

They waited, wordless. It was five minutes perhaps before heavy feet ascended the stairs, and they heard the rattle of dishes as the man set down his tray to unlock the door. He thrust it open with his foot, picked up the tray and stepped through the opening. Carmel stood before him. She stretched out her hands for the tray and grasped it.... As she did so, Evan Pell, standing poised over his chair, swung forward his homely weapon.... His practice had made for efficiency. The doorknob thudded sickeningly upon the man’s bald head; he stood swaying an instant, then his knees declined further to sustain his weight, and he folded up into a limp heap on the floor.

“Pull him inside and shut the door,” Evan snapped. “I—er—find in myself a certain adaptability.... Put on your wrap and hat. Hurry.... The front way. Keep out of sight. Can you drive a car?”

“Yes.”

“If one is standing in front—steal it.”

“Yes.”

“Now—go.”

“I—Oh, Evan.”

She was in his arms, and her lips to his. “I—If they kill you I shall die, too.”

He opened the door and stared into the dimly lighted hall. “It is clear. Go.”

“Good-by.”

“Go. You’re wasting time.” He pushed her through the door. “Our best hope is that they—to my surprise—have underestimated me.... Good-by.... I—er—seem to have underestimated myself.... I seem to have been—exceptionally inefficient in a field quite foreign to my previous activities. Hasten.”

He shut the door and Carmel stood alone, dependent upon herself, without other hope or reliance than in her own expedients. She moved softly down the hall, reached the top of the stairs which led downward to another hall and the front door. She listened. There was no alarming sound.... She descended halfway and stopped again. The lower hall, apparently, was in the middle of the house. To the left was the room which had been the bar in the days when liquor might be sold openly; at the right was the dining room. The door to the dining room was closed; that into the bar stood open—and there was her danger. She must pass that door without being seen. Once outside, the danger decreased almost to a minimum. Could she reach the shelter of the woods, she felt she would be safe.

She crept downward; reached the ground floor and flattened herself against the wall. What if the front door should open and somebody should enter?... She hesitated, then peered cautiously through the door and into the bar.... As she did so she heard an automobile drive up in front and stop.... In the bar she saw Peewee Bangs sitting, his feet on a table, reading a newspaper.

Feet ascended the steps outside, and she cowered. A hand rattled the knob, and she heard Bangs drop his feet to the floor, with the scrape of his chair as he turned.... The door opened. Something, not conscious volition, moved Carmel. As the door opened and a man stepped in, she sprang forward, brushed past him, and ran down the steps. Behind her she heard a shout—the squeaky voice of Peewee Bangs.... Before her stood a Ford, its engine agitating the whole car, and she ran toward it and threw herself into the seat. In an instant she had grasped the wheel and adjusted her foot to the clutch.... Then she was conscious of a jar, and out of the corner of her eye saw Bangs’s face, distorted with rage, saw his hand reaching for her arm.... She screamed. Then her hand, chance led, fell upon the seat, encountered a heavy wrench.... She lifted it, dashed it with all her strength into that inhuman face.... It vanished.... The next thing of which she became clearly conscious was of speed, of a rocking, bounding car.... She was free, had escaped her pursuer, and was rushing with every ounce of power the little car possessed toward Gibeon....

Was there a car to follow her? A larger, more powerful, faster car?... She did not know. She glanced behind. There was nothing yet, no pursuing headlight. Carmel gripped the wheel and threw down the gas lever to its final notch.... Around corners, through puddles, over patches rutted by heavy wheels, she forced the little car. It rocked, skidded, threatened, but always righted itself and kept on its way.... She looked behind again.... Headlights!... By this time she must be half a mile or more from the hotel. It would be a good car which could make up that lead in the short distance to Gibeon.... Yet, as she looked back from time to time, the headlights drew closer and closer.... She could see straggling lights now—the fringe of the village.... Would they dare follow her into the town itself? She fancied not.... The bridge lay before her—and the pursuing car roared not a hundred yards behind. She swept across the river and sped down Main Street at a rate never witnessed before by that drowsy thoroughfare.... She was safe.... Before her was the Town Hall—lighted brightly.... She looked back. The pursuing car was not to be seen.

The town meeting! The citizens of Gibeon were there upon the town’s business. She brought the car to a stop before the door, leaped out, and ran up the stairs. The hall was crowded. On the platform stood the chairman of the town board.... Carmel was conscious of no embarrassment, only of the need for haste, of the necessity for finding help. She entered the room and made her way up the aisle to the platform. Without hesitating she mounted the steps, unconscious of the craning of necks, the whisperings, the curiosity her arrival was causing.

The chairman halted in his remarks. Carmel, in her excitement, ignored him, almost shouldered him aside.

“Men—men of Gibeon,” she said, “crime is being committed, perhaps murder is being done, at this minute.... What are you going to do?”

CHAPTER XXVI

THE hall was still. It was as if, by some necromancy of words, Carmel had turned to stone the town meeting of Gibeon. She looked down into faces which seemed to her white and strained. The faces waited. She had caught them by her words; gripped them. Something was about to happen. Every man in the room felt the imminence of grave events. The very air tingled with it as if waves of some vital force agitated the air and discharged themselves with such force as to be felt by physical touch.... It was Carmel Lee’s first public appearance, yet she was not frightened. Rather she was eager; words jostled with one another for the privilege of being uttered first. She paused, staring down into those faces.

“Men of Gibeon,” she said, and her little fist, clenched with knuckles showing white, lifted from her side and extended itself toward them, “Men of Gibeon, I have found the body of Sheriff Churchill.... He was murdered!...”

The faces seemed to move in unison as if they were painted upon a single canvas and the canvas had been suddenly jerked by an unseen hand. They became audible by an intake of the breath.

“I found him,” Carmel said, “close by the Lakeside Hotel.... Since yesterday I have been a prisoner in the Lakeside Hotel, I and Evan Pell.... I went to find him. I found Sheriff Churchill; I saw five great trucks unload in the hotel yard, and those trucks were carrying whisky from the other side of the border.... It was whisky, men of Gibeon, which killed Sheriff Churchill. It was the men who are trafficking in liquor who murdered him.... I know their names. I have seen them and been their prisoner.... At this moment Evan Pell, locked in a room of that unspeakable place, is in danger of his life. He is injured, cannot escape nor defend himself. Yet he made it possible for me to escape and to come to you for help....” Again she paused.

“I could not go to the law because the law does not belong to the people of Gibeon. It has been bought and paid for. It is owned by criminals and by murderers.... We have a new sheriff.... That man’s hands are red with the blood of the man whose place he fills.... So I have come to you, for there is no other law in Gibeon to-night than yourselves.”

There had been no movement, no sound, only that tense, fateful silence.

“Will you permit this thing? Will you continue to allow your town and your county to rest under this dreadful thing? You can stop it to-night. You can wipe it out forever.... Let me tell you what I know.”

She spoke rapidly, eloquently. In that moment she was no longer a young woman, but a leader, a prophet, one sent to deliver a message, and she delivered it fittingly. Her words descended upon those upturned faces, compelling belief. There could be no doubt.... She described the plot against herself as Bangs had recited it tauntingly—how she was to have been made a thing to scorn and to turn aside from; how that part of her which was more valuable to her than life itself was to have been murdered. At the recital the faces moved again, became audible again in a murmur which held kinship with a snarl.... Gibeon was awakening.

Point by point, fact by fact, she drove home to them the conditions among which they had been living, but one name she withheld until the moment should come for its utterance.... She described the activities of the whisky smugglers, the workings of their organization, its power—the intelligence which directed it.

“Will you endure this, men of Gibeon?... No time may be lost. At this instant a man stands under the shadow of death! What are you going to do? Will you let him die?”

In the hall a man arose. “What is the name of this man—the man who is to blame for all this?” he demanded.

“His name,” said Carmel, “is Abner Fownes!”

It was as if they had expected it; there was no demonstration, no confusion. The men of Gibeon were strangely unmoved, strangely silent, strangely stern. It was as if they were moved by a common impulse, a common determination. They were not many individuals, but a single entity.... They had been molded into solidity—and that solidity was Gibeon.

The faces were faces no longer, but human beings, men standing erect as if waiting for a signal.... Among them Carmel saw Jared Whitefield. His eyes encountered hers, and he nodded....

“Will you come with me?” she cried. “Will you follow me?... Those who will follow—come!...”

She descended from the platform and a lane opened before her; she reached the door and turned.... The men of Gibeon were behind her, and as if they were a company marching behind its commander they followed her down the stairs. There was no shouting, no confusion, no unsightly mob spirit.... Along the street stood waiting cars, the cars of the farmers of the town, and men crowded into them beyond their capacity.... It was a crusade, the crusade of Gibeon, and Carmel had preached it.

They started quietly, grimly, an orderly procession. It moved through the streets, across the bridge, and out the road toward the Lakeside Hotel.... A hundred men bent upon purging their community of a thing which had debauched it.... On and on, urgent, inexorable, moved the line of cars.... Then a sudden stop. The road was barricaded, and men with rifles stood behind to block the way.

“What’s this here?” bellowed a voice out of the darkness. “What kind of goin’s on is this here?” It was Sheriff Jenney.

There was no answer. “I order ye to disperse and git to your homes quietly,” he said. “We hain’t goin’ to have no mobbin’ in Gibeon.”

The cars emptied and men crowded forward. “Out of the way, Jenney,” a voice commanded. “We’re in no humor to be meddled with to-night.”

“Don’t go resistin’ an officer,” Jenney roared. “Disperse like I told ye.”

Then Jared Whitefield forced his way to the front, and on either side of him were strangers to Gibeon. They leaped the barricade before Jenney, taken by surprise, could move his hand. Whitefield dropped a heavy hand on Jenney’s shoulder.

“Jenney,” he said, “drop that gun. You’re under arrest.”

“Arrest!... Me? Who kin arrest the sheriff of a county.” He laughed loudly.

“I can,” said Whitefield. “Drop that gun.”

Jenney twisted in Whitefield’s grip, but the huge man held him as in a vise.

“You’ve gone ag’in’ somethin’ bigger than a township or a county, Jenney, or even a state.... It’s the United States of America that’s puttin’ you under arrest, Jenney, through me, its duly appointed marshal.... Drop that gun!”

The United States of America! The Federal authorities had taken a hand. That explained Whitefield’s absence.... The United States!... Carmel sobbed. In this thing she had the might of America behind her! The authority of a nation!

“Put him in a car,” Whitefield directed his companions; and it was done.

“Whitefield,” called a voice, “you hain’t goin’ to interfere? You hain’t goin’ to stop us?”

“I got nothin’ to do with you,” Whitefield said. “I got what I come for.”

The cars filled again, the obstruction was removed, and once again the men of Gibeon moved toward their objective. They reached it, surrounded it, men burst in its doors and laid hands upon whomever they found.... Carmel, well escorted, ran up the stairs.

“That’s the door,” she cried, and powerful shoulders thrust it from its hinges.

“Evan!...” she cried. “Evan!...”

He lay upon the floor, motionless. Carmel knelt beside him, frantic at the sight of his motionlessness. She lifted his head to her lap, peered into his white face, stared at his closed eyes.

“They’ve killed him,” she said, in a dull, dead voice. “We’ve come too late.”

Mr. Hopper, of the Gibeon bank, thrust his hand inside Evan’s shirt to feel for the beating of his heart.... It was distinguishable, faint but distinguishable.

“He’s not dead,” said Hopper, “but somebody’s beat hell out of him.”

They lifted him gently and carried him down the stairs. Carmel walked by his side, silent, stunned.... He was not dead, but he was horribly injured. He would die.... She knew she would never again see his eyes looking into hers. They placed him in a car, and she sat, supporting his weight, her arm about him, his head heavy upon her breast....

“Everybody out?” roared a voice.

“Everybody’s out!”

Carmel saw a light appear inside the hotel, a light cast by no lamp or lantern.... It increased, leaped, flamed. Room after room was touched by the illumination. It climbed the stairs, roared outward through windows, spreading, crackling, hissing, devouring.... In a dozen minutes the Lakeside Hotel was wrapped in flame—a beacon light in Gibeon’s history. High and higher mounted the flames until the countryside for miles about was lighted by it, notified by it that a thing was happening, that Gibeon was being purified by fire.

“Is there no doctor here?” Carmel cried.

“Doc Stewart’s some’eres.... I’ll git him.”

The doctor was found and came. He examined Evan as best he could. “Better get him to town. Can’t tell much now.... Depends on whether there’s concussion.... I’ll go along with you.”

“Before you go, Miss Lee—where—is the sheriff? Sheriff Churchill?”

“Follow the shore—that way. You’ll find him—on the edge.”

“We got Peewee Bangs—he was hidin’ in a boat-house.”

“I—I’m glad,” said Carmel.

The car moved away, bearing Carmel, Evan, and the doctor. Somehow it seemed like the end of the world to her—a definite stopping place of things. The lurid flames making a ghastly forest, black figures flitting about from shadow to shadow, the confusion of her thoughts, the piling up for days of event upon event and emotion upon emotion—all this seemed to be a climax—a finality. There was an unreality about it all, an unnatural crowding of events, a hustling and jostling, as if she were in an overwrought throng of occurrences, adventures, events, crises which pushed and shoved and harried her, striving ever to thrust her out of their way that they might march unimpeded. There rested upon her now a curious listlessness, a lifelessness, as if they had succeeded, as if they had elbowed her off the road of life, upon which she could never regain a footing.

Gibeon was aroused; Gibeon was crusading! The thought awakened no thrill. She was safe; never again would she be threatened by the forces which she had challenged. She was free to pursue her way—but the knowledge came as dead knowledge. She did not care. She cared for nothing—because she knew, she was positive, Evan Pell had gone from her forever....

The car stopped before the doctor’s house and Evan was carried up to a bedroom, unconscious still.... Doctor Stewart tried to exclude her from the room, but she would not be excluded. This was all she had left; all life held for her—that faint, irregular beating of Evan Pell’s heart.... She knew those heartbeats were her own, would be her own so long as they persisted.... She would remain would sit by him watching, watching, waiting. This scarcely perceptible life was all she would ever have of him, and she dared lose no instant of it.

Doctor Stewart worked over the bed. Carmel thought him calm, terribly indifferent, businesslike. He was a tradesman working at a trade when she would have had him a god performing a miracle.... After a time he turned to her.

“I cannot tell,” he said. “Some concussion is present. There seems to be no fracture of the skull.... What internal injuries he may have suffered—it is impossible to say.... In the morning....”

“He will be dead,” said Carmel.

The doctor shook his head. “I do not think so. I hope—in such cases one cannot be sure—but——”

“He will be dead,” said Carmel.

“It is in God’s hand,” said the doctor.

“They have killed him—because he was brave, because he loved me—because—— Oh, Doctor, that is the awful thought—he is dead for me. He gave his life for me.”

His hand rested upon her shoulder with the gentle touch which some men learn by a life of service—and Doctor Stewart, country physician, unrecognized, unsung, had lived such a life. “My dear,” he said, “how better could a man die?”

“He killed him—Abner Fownes killed him.”

“Abner Fownes has run his course,” said the doctor.

“It is not enough—not enough. The law can do nothing to him which will make him pay.”

“The punishment of the law,” said the doctor, “is a puny thing beside the punishment of God.”

Carmel stood up; she bent over the bed and kissed Evan upon the cold lips.... Something possessed her, controlled her, a power stronger than herself, an impulse more urgent than she had ever known. It moved her as if she were an automaton, a puppet ordered and regulated by strings in the hands of its fabricator. She moved toward the door.

“Where are you going?” asked the doctor.

“I have a thing to do,” she said.

He peered into her face and saw there that which shocked him, startled him. He would have stayed her. “Wait——” he commanded. She eluded his outstretched hand and hurried down the stairs. There was no indecision in her step or in her manner. There was no indecision in her soul. She knew where she was going, and why she was going.... She was on her way to find Abner Fownes!

CHAPTER XXVII

ABNER FOWNES was sitting in his library waiting for word from Sheriff Jenney. If matters went to-night as he felt certain they must go, he could live again in security, untroubled by conscience, with no apprehensions, and with his financial worries removed. Five truckloads of liquor had been discharged at the Lakeside Hotel. He knew that. The importation had been successful, without a hitch. Within a week the whisky would be distributed and the cash in hand.... It would be sufficient to clear his most troublesome obligations and to put him on his feet again. He considered this with a glow of satisfaction....

Carmel Lee had constituted a threat, but she was powerless to threaten now. At any moment word would arrive that she was in Jenney’s hands, her reputation in Gibeon would be destroyed, and she would be powerless. Public opinion would drive her from the place.

Abner sat back comfortably in his chair and looked forward to a life of quiet and importance. He would continue to live in security as Gibeon’s first citizen. He might even seek political preferment. In a year there would be a senatorial election. Why should he not stand for the position. To be Senator from his state—that was something, indeed. And why not? His reflections carried him to Washington. He saw himself in the Senate Chamber, listened to his voice rolling forth sonorous periods, heard with infinite satisfaction the applause of his fellow Senators....

The telephone rang and he was guilty of unseemly haste to reach the instrument.

“Hello!... Hello!... Who is it? Is it Jenney?”

“No,” said a voice, “it’s Deputy Jackson.... Look out for yourself.... There’s hell——”

“What’s that?”

“The whole town meetin’s rushin’ off to Peewee’s place. Reg’lar mob.... Jenney he set out to stop ’em, but he’s arrested.”

“Jenney arrested!”

“Federal authorities. Him and two others is pinched. Better look out for yourself. I’m goin’ to.”

The receiver banged on its hook at the other end of the line. He was alone. Washington vanished, glowing dreams of the future gave place to the grim reality of the present. The Federal authorities!... He had considered them negligible. Somehow one lost sight of the Federal government in that remote region; they were unfamiliar; it seemed a spot to which their writ did not run.

He tried to consider the fact coolly and calmly, but his brain refused to function in such a manner. He was confused; the suddenness, the unexpectedness of the blow from such a source shook him from his foundations. What did it mean? How had it come about.... Clearly, if Jenney was under arrest, he could not complete his raid on the Lakeside Hotel and so abolish Carmel Lee.... That was that.... But how did it affect him? How did it affect the thousands of dollars’ worth of liquor so necessary to his financial rehabilitation?...

The big question—was he threatened personally?—was one he could not answer. There had been no sign of threat. Jenney was arrested. Perhaps they did not mean to arrest him, had no evidence against him.... But could Jenney be depended upon to keep his mouth shut?... Jenney, he confessed to himself, did not seem a man capable of great loyalty, nor possessed of high courage. He would weaken. Under pressure he would tell all he knew.... The advice of the voice over the telephone was good. He would look out for himself....

He rushed up the stairs to make ready for flight. It would be a good idea to absent himself, no matter what happened. If worst came to worst—why, he would be out of reach of the law. If matters turned out otherwise it would be easy to return from a hurried business trip.... He began packing frantically. Having packed, he went to the safe in his library and transferred sufficient funds to his pocketbook. Then, as a precautionary measure, he carefully destroyed certain private papers.... This consumed time.

The telephone rang again, and Abner answered in no little trepidation.

“Mr. Fownes?” asked a voice.

“Yes. Who is it?”

“Tucker.... Say, the mob’s burned Lakeside Hotel. They’ve got Peewee.... Burned her up slick and clean—and everythin’ in it. The whole shipment’s gone....”

Fownes dropped the receiver and sank nerveless into a chair. At any rate, he was ruined. That much was certain. Nothing remained to fight for now but his personal security, his liberty. He snatched up his bag and moved toward the door.... His plan was not clear—only the first step of it. He would rent an automobile and drive out of town with what speed was possible.... As he reached the door he realized with a sudden sharp pang that he was leaving his house for good, leaving Gibeon forever. He, Abner Fownes, first citizen, man of substance, was fleeing from his native place like the commonest criminal.

Dazedly he wondered how it had come about ... somehow, he felt, that girl was at the bottom of the thing. His misfortunes were due to her meddling. He wished he could get his fingers upon her throat.

He descended the steps and walked toward the street. The night was dark, dark enough to conceal his movements, perhaps to avert recognition.... A certain confidence came to him. He would get away; he would possess liberty and his intelligence which had served him so well.... There were other places—and he was not old. Perhaps....

As he turned out upon the street a figure confronted him. He halted, drew back.

“Abner Fownes,” said a voice, “where are you going?”

“You!... You!...” he said, hoarsely. His fingers twitched, fury burned in his heart, and the desire to slay. He looked about him. All was blackness.... Here she was, this girl who was sending him crashing down in ruin....

“He is dead,” said Carmel. “You are a murderer again. Abner Fownes.... You’re running away.”

“Out of my way, you—you——”

“You’ve killed him,” she said. “You must be punished for that.... You must not go away. You must wait until they come.”

“You—you’ve done this—you——” He was working himself into a rage. He was not the man to do a violence in cold blood.

“I have done it.... But to what good? He is dead—is dying.... Nothing can pay for that. He will go away from me forever.... Abner Fownes, you are a murderer, and you must pay for it.... Oh, if I could make you pay a thousand, thousand times.... And you shall pay!”

He dropped his bag and reached for her throat with clutching fingers. She stepped back, avoiding him.

“They are coming now,” she said. “See.... There are their lights.... Wait, Abner Fownes. You cannot get away. If you try to go I shall hold you.”

He turned. Up the road approached a multitude of automobile lights. Gibeon was returning from its crusade!... He uttered a shrill, unnatural cry and made as if to rush past her, but Carmel grasped his arm. “Wait,” she said.

He waited. A feeling of powerlessness swept over him. A sense of impotence and defeat and despair.... He could not force himself to raise his hand against this girl. He was afraid. He was afraid of her.

She remained standing in the middle of the walk, blocking his way, but it was unnecessary to block his way. He could not have moved.... A cold, clinging dread was upon him. He was afraid of the night, of the darkness. He dared not be alone with the night.... If Carmel had gone Abner Fownes would have followed her, would have called her back, begged her to stay with him....

The lights of the first car rested upon them, illuminating the spot.... Carmel stepped forward and signaled. The car stopped, halting the procession.... Men got down and surrounded him....

“Where,” said Carmel, “is Sheriff Churchill?”

“There,” said a man.

“Carry him here,” she ordered, and it was done.

Wrapped in blankets, the thing that had been Sheriff Churchill was laid on the sidewalk at Abner Fownes’s feet.

“Uncover his face. Let this man look at him,” Carmel said. “Make him look.... Make him look....”

Fownes covered his face, staggered back. “No.... No.... Take—take it away.”

“Uncover his face,” said Carmel. “Take this man’s hands from his eyes.... Make him look....”

They obeyed. Fownes stood quivering, eyes tightly shut.

“Look,” said Carmel. “Look!”

She overmastered him. He opened his eyes and looked at the dreadful sight. He stared, bent forward. His hands stretched out, clawlike, as he stared at the horror. Then he threw back his head and laughed, and the laughter ended in a shriek.... He swayed, half turned, and fell back into the arms of the men of Gibeon....

Jared Whitefield forced his way to Fownes’s side. “I will take charge of him,” he said. “Will some one take care of this girl.... She hain’t herself.... Take her back to Doc Stewart’s....”

Morning penetrated the room where Carmel sat, entering gently, gently pushing back the night. Carmel sat wide-eyed, waiting, waiting. She had not slept, had not closed her eyes. From time to time she had climbed the stairs to look upon Evan Pell’s face, to be told that he lived, that his condition was unchanged.... She was worn, weary. Nothing mattered now. She was at the end of things, wishing for death.

Doctor Stewart came to the door.

“Can you step upstairs, Miss Lee?”

“Is—is he——”

The doctor shook his head.

Carmel followed. Doubtless he was sinking, and she was summoned to be present at the end.... She entered the room. Her heart was cold, heavy, dead. As she approached the beside she could not lift her eyes to Evan’s face.

“Carmel—dear....” said a voice.

Her heart came to life; it warmed, leaped in her bosom. She dared to look. His eyes were open, conscious, intelligent.

“Evan!... Evan!...” she cried and sank on her knees beside him. Her eyes devoured his face, and he smiled.

“Doctor—Doctor,” she cried, “is he—will he——”

“I think,” said the doctor, “we can have him on his feet in a week, slightly damaged, of course.”

“And I thought—I thought you would die,” she said.

“Die!” Evan Pell’s voice, weak and faint, nevertheless carried a note of surprise. “Er—of course not. I had not the slightest intention—of dying.” He fumbled for her hand. “Why my dear—I have—just come to—life.”

“You would have given your life for me!... Oh, Evan, I love you! ... and I’m so—so proud of you.”

“Er—very gratifying,” said Evan. Then, for a moment he was silent, reflecting.

“It is—very satisfying to—be in love,” he said. “I—like it.” Then. “I want you to—be proud—of me.” He smiled. “There’s just—one thing—I am proud of.”

“What is that, sweetheart?”

“The—er—way I—handled that doorknob—with so little practice,” he said. “It was—er—so foreign to my training.... It—showed adaptability....”

THE END

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Table of Contents

- CONTRABAND
- CHAPTER I
- CHAPTER II
- CHAPTER III
- CHAPTER IV
- CHAPTER V
- CHAPTER VI
- CHAPTER VII
- CHAPTER VIII
- CHAPTER IX
- CHAPTER X
- CHAPTER XI
- CHAPTER XII
- CHAPTER XIII
- CHAPTER XIV
- CHAPTER XV
- CHAPTER XVI
- CHAPTER XVII
- CHAPTER XVIII
- CHAPTER XIX
- CHAPTER XX
- CHAPTER XXI
- CHAPTER XXII
- CHAPTER XXIII
- CHAPTER XXIV
- CHAPTER XXV
- CHAPTER XXVI
- CHAPTER XXVII
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE