THERE surely is a lot in this conscious-virtue notion! I had plenty of the quality next morning.

Things seemed brighter. I felt like myself once more. It was inconceivable that the horrible misunderstanding between Celene Kingsley and myself could continue very long; I was ready to make confession as to my temporary lunacy in the city, and my new optimism encouraged me to believe that she would find excuse for me. At any rate, I was soon assured that whatever she had learned from that detective, whoever he was, she had kept it to herself. From that reticence I drew excellent augury that she was not out to ruin me. If she had opened her mouth about my past I would have known it the moment I stepped out on the street in Levant. But every person I met ducked polite salute, and I met many persons because the village was full on account; of the town meeting.

At ten o’clock the town hall was crowded and in a short time the cut-and-dried preliminaries were over.

My uncle was with his associates on the platform, and the stare he gave me when he caught my eyes was so demoniac that I was careful not to look his way again for some time.

There was evidence of strained anticipation everywhere in the gathering. I heard voters whispering that Deck Sidney proposed to spring something. But nobody, according to what I could hear, presumed to put in words what they guessed.

My uncle was mashing his personal batteries, I saw.

An unemotional lawyer explained the purpose of the meeting, and then the moderator called on Judge Kingsley, as town treasurer, to give the financial standing of the town.

Uncle Deck fairly bored the judge with his gaze when the old man walked to the platform and I was as intent with my scrutiny, for I was wondering how Kingsley would get through with it. He was white and somewhat shaky, but he was the same old cold proposition when he faced the voters.

“I hope you will pardon a word on a personal matter,” he said, as he unfolded his papers; “but I have returned from a business trip and find serious illness in my family. I have been keeping watch at the bedside of my dear wife and my thoughts are not clear enough to enable me to make the little address I had contemplated for to-day. I will only say that the movement to clear the town of its debt is very praiseworthy and my report will show that the thing may be done with a little extra effort. Our only considerable indebtedness consists of town bonds amounting to eight thousand dollars and current items as follows.” Then he went on to give the list of unpaid town orders, of which only a few were extant. “I see here representatives of the bondholders,” he added, “who will check my figures if such assurance is required by any voter—and probably most of the parties who hold town orders are in the meeting. I hope the town orders will be presented for payment at once so that there may be no floating indebtedness.” He folded up his papers.

My uncle got up and stamped down his trousers legs.

“Now, you voters,” he called, “ask your questions!”

But not a voice was raised.

“I’m no lawyer and I’m making no threats,” my uncle went on. “But after the way this meeting has been advertised, and after the call that has been made, I reckon that the men who have been holding out claims against this town and who haven’t presented them will be left to whistle for their money. I propose to have action taken that will outlaw those claims.”

Judge Kingsley turned slowly on my uncle and stood as stiff as a stake.

“To what claims do you refer, Selectman Sidney? Do you question the accuracy of my report?”

“Come out of your holes, you old woodchucks!” shouted Uncle Deck, looking past the judge at the voters. Men scowled at him and grumbled.

The judge walked toward the First Selectman and shook his papers.

“You must talk to me, sir! I am the treasurer of this town and have been for a good many years. Here before the voters I demand that you specify claims.”

“I’ll specify, then! How about the town notes that are out with your name on them?”

A murmur ran through the assemblage.

“Just one moment, sir! Weigh your words,” warned the judge. “You are attacking my financial reputation; there is a law for slanderers and I have many witnesses here. Do you say there is one single town note extant with my name on it?”

“I say there are a lot of ’em!”

This time many voters raised voices of protest and there were hisses.

“That’s the thanks a straight man gets for trying to protect his town against a thief, eh?” raged my uncle, his ready temper bursting loose.

“If the judge don’t collect fifty thousand dollars damages for this, then I’m no guesser,” declared Dodovah Vose, who sat beside me.

Uncle Deck tramped to the edge of the platform and with wagging finger selected a man in the throng; the man was Farmer Bailey.

“Bailey, you hold a town note with Kingsley’s name on it! You know you do! Are you going to sit there and see it canceled as no good by the vote of this town?”

Bailey rose slowly and everybody listened in deep silence.

“I hold no note of any kind with Judge Kingsley’s name on it.”

“Yah-h-h! You have told me that before. But you don’t dare to stand here in town meeting and say it under oath.”

“Send down that Bible on the stand and I’ll take oath and kiss the Book,” offered Bailey. There was applause and the judge quieted it by raising his hand.

“I will pay double for any note with my name on it as treasurer, and I will turn the money over to the town as a gift,” he said.

I despised him when he made that bluff, though of course he had to do it. Really, in spite of his devilish temper and his spirit of revenge my uncle was twice the man Judge Kingsley was in that moment. I wasn’t trying to figure out the righteousness of the thing on either side; the judge was fighting for his very life, as well as his standing, and my uncle, though he was working for the good of the town according to his lights, was satisfying his old grudge—the real passion of his life.

A voter rose and bellowed until he secured silence; they were giving the judge an ovation.

“I want to put in a word here, fellow-townsmen! Money has been borrowed on town notes. A certain eminent man you all know tried to borrow from me and said I could escape taxation. And now he is backed by the liars—”

“And barked at by the liars, too,” yelled another man.

“I stand up here for Selectman Sidney, who has given his time and effort to help this town out of the clutches—”

They howled him down. But by this time the defenders of my uncle were howling, too.

“This meeting is going to break up in a free fight if a stop isn’t put to this jawing,” said Dodovah Vose. He jumped up on the settee and made himself heard. “I move we adjourn!”

The apprehensive moderator put the motion, the judge’s friends carried it, and the meeting was dissolved.

My uncle leaped off the platform and came raging at me through the crowd.

“It’s you—you damnation imp of Gehenna! Racing and chasing over this town yesterday! I had a line on you. Saving that old whelp from what was coming to him!” He put his hands over his head and wriggled his fingers. “God! I don’t know what you have done—you got that money by robbing a bank, probably. But you have done it—you have jumped up and down on your family! You have got to answer to me!”

Men pushed away in panic and left us in a ring. But I had no notion of entertaining the old goggle-eyes of Levant by fisticuffs with my uncle. I folded my arms.

“According to your reckoning, Uncle Deck, I have owed you something for a long time. I want to stand square with you! Go ahead and collect!”

He did not seem to understand at once.

“Go ahead and beat me up! I won’t raise a finger.” Yes, I would have taken the beating—I knew inside of me that I did owe my uncle something of the sort.

“Not by a dam-site, he sha’n’t beat you up,” declared Dodovah Vose. “I saved you from him once,” he said, careless of revelations, “and I’ll save you again.”

So, after waiting a minute and enduring my uncle’s tongue instead of his fists, I went away with Landlord Vose.

I was not in the mood for any further paltering or palavering in regard to my personal and private standing with the Kingsley family. I had a collection to make and I proposed to go and make it. I ought to have known better than to force the issue at that time. But youth is headstrong, the sense of my injuries was hot, and I felt that if ever the judge might be willing to show his gratitude that would be the time.

He was crossing the square on his way home and I left Mr. Vose and hurried after. I caught up with him at the front door.

“I want to come in and have a word with you and with your daughter,” I told him.

“Impossible,” he said, curtly. “I’m afraid my wife is at death’s door. And my daughter—she is very bitter!”

“I propose to have you explain enough so that she will not be bitter, sir. It’s my due. You know what kind of a service I have rendered. I have made an enemy of my uncle—ruined all my prospects to help you. There are things you can tell your daughter to—”

“How does my daughter enter into any affairs between you and myself? You must let me alone in my sorrow. Later I will pay you for your services. I am grateful. If I were not in such distress I would explain how grateful I am. I will pray that I may be spared till I can pay back to you what I owe.”

“Good CÆsar! I don’t want your money, Judge Kingsley. I’ll work and earn more to help you out of your difficulties. I only ask you to be a man and make your daughter understand—”

“My daughter again! You don’t presume—”

“I do presume, sir. She was kind to me until this horrible misunderstanding came up. I expect you to tell her that I am your best friend. It’s my right!”

I’ll never forget the look he gave me. I’ll wager a good bit that the idea of such enormity on my part never came into his Kingsley consciousness till that moment. Even then he did not seem to be just sure that he understood.

“I don’t expect anything definite from you or her, Judge Kingsley, until I have made good in the world. But I do look to you to give me a square deal. That’s only what you owe to me, man to man.”

“I owe you money and I will pay it. There is no other sort of bargain between us.”

He stepped into his house and shut the door in my face.

In that damnable situation I was minded to follow him and have it out, even if I were obliged to expose him. However, if death were hovering over that house it was a sanctuary I could not invade. But bitter thoughts raged in me when I turned away; I only asked to be set right with Celene.

I understand that this part of my confession will elicit little sympathy for me from the casual reader who takes the comfortable view that the world is full of girls and if one does not swing low enough on the bough there’s always another within reach. But mine was the exceptional case where the first love had become an obsession and all my spirit of persistency was flaming in me. I have not figured out as yet whether the troubles into which my general persistency in all matters has slammed me overbalance the fruits it has brought to me—but I reckon, after all, I’ll have to take my hat off to my persistency. If I had been a quitter I would not have played the biggest game in my life—and I’m coming to that right soon.

Once more circumstances were forcing me, though I needed mighty little forcing, to leave Levant at that juncture in my affairs.

“Damn ’em!” I blazed out to Dodovah Vose when I stamped into the tavern, “I’ve got to show ’em! I’ll show ’em I can make good.”

He blinked at me.

“But you have shown ’em already,” he said. He thought, of course, that I was speaking about the general public in Levant. “And if I was in your place I wouldn’t give a dam what your uncle says to you.”

Less than two hours later Landlord Vose revised that advice. He rushed up to my room where I was sorting some papers, having resolved to travel light when I did go.

“Get under—get under, young Sidney,” he gasped.

“Under what?”

“I reckon I mean get out. It’s your uncle Deck! Bailey and some other of them yawp-mouths in this place have been twitting and tormenting him and dropping hints, and he’s worse than a sore-eared bulldog after a scruffing. He’s coming with a double-barreled shot-gun. He is! He’s drunk, son, and there’s no dealing with him. He lays it all to you!”

“I won’t run.”

“But he isn’t responsible, son. To say nothing of what will happen to you, it means that he’ll go to State prison. You’re sane and sober and you ought to be willing to save him from himself.”

Right then Mr. Vose said something which appealed to me. I had stepped outside my family—I had conspired against my uncle—I had blocked his dearest ambition, iniquitous though it was. By hanging around and allowing him to take pot-shots at me I would be aggravating his troubles and bringing more serious afflictions upon him. A dead nephew, shot-riddled, would be a damning exhibit A in his trial for murder!

I picked up my few belongings and escaped from the back door of the tavern, hid in a cross-road till Dodovah Vose’s stableman came with a hitch, and I caught a train at a station down the line; hustling out of my native town on the run, by dint of practice, was getting to be one of the best performances in my list of tricks.

I counted my money when I was on my way to the city. I had not been keeping any strict account between the judge and myself; from the common stock I had been paying expenses and spending as loose as peas in order to hasten our journey back East. I found around two hundred and fifty dollars in my pockets, and I reflected, with a sort of grim zest in the humor of the thing, that I could fairly claim most of this money as my own—the tainted cash from my poker profits.

I went straight to Jodrey Vose when I arrived in the metropolis and he looked neither surprised nor overjoyed.

“Where have you been?” he inquired.

“Oh, sort of loafing around up-country—killing time!”

He squinted at me sourly.

“I can’t say that you’re doing any great credit to my training, young Sidney!”

“You are right, Captain Vose, but I’m turning over a new leaf and I’m out to make good. I am hoping that I can do something in the case of Anson C. Doughty so that I can get back into the diving business and keep on the job hereafter.”

“Then you’ll go back to diving and keep out from under plug-hats, will you?”

“Yes, sir!”

He looked at me for a long time and then he pulled out a letter.

“This here,” he said, tapping it, “is something more about that Golden Gate treasure. There’s a new crowd on the rampage about it. From somebody in the old crowd they have got hold of my name. I came nigh trying it on once, as I have told you. But it’s a gamble; I am old and I don’t want it. You are young and there’s nothing as yet for you on the Atlantic coast, and you might grab in on this. They want an Eastern diver because the divers out there are tied up with the big concerns and can’t be depended on to keep their mouths shut—so this letter says.”

“Probably it’s a pretty uncertain proposition, sir.”

“Well, you don’t expect to fall into anything very certain, do you, a diver blacklisted from Kittery to the Keys?” he demanded, tartly.

“No, sir.”

“I know nothing about these people, their plans, or anything. But I’ll do this for you, if you want me to. I’ll wire this party and tell him I am sending you on. After you are started you can post him from some place as to when you’ll arrive. Better give him a wire from time to time to keep his interest up. How’s your wallet?”

“I think it’s all right, sir.”

“If you’re lying to me that’s your own lookout. Haven’t sold your diving-dress, have you?”

“I have it safe in storage, sir.”

“Well, I’m glad you kept remembering that you’re a diver—and the best one I ever turned out!” That was the first word of high praise he had given me. He got up and shook my hand. “Now go dive, son, and after you raise that four million from the wreck of the Golden Gate come back and tell me all about it.”

I did not linger in the city; there were too many possibilities in the way of Dawlins and Doughtys.

Two hours later I was headed across the continent with my diving-dress in its canvas bag and the address of one Captain Rask Holstrom written in my note-book. I was pretty dizzy with the haste of it all and felt like the human shuttle between oceans—but I possessed considerable more serenity than I did when I began that lunatic lope with Judge Kingsley.

I had framed a motto and hung it in my soul—“I’ll show ’em!”