A “LARGE” dinner at Antoine's that night (Webster had heard of Antoine's dinners, both large and small and was resolved not to leave New Orleans until he had visited the famous restaurant) and a stroll through the picturesque old French quarter and along the levee next day, helped to render his enforced stay in New Orleans delightful, interesting, and instructive. Webster was one of those distinctful individual types to whom a chamber of horrors would be productive of more enjoyment than the usual round of “points of interest.” Experience had demonstrated to him that such points usually are uninteresting and wearing on the imagination, for the reason that the tourist trappers and proprietors of automobile 'buses, who map out the tours have no imagination themselves. Consequently, Webster preferred to prowl around quietly on little tours of discovery, personally conducted by himself. The search for obscure restaurants of unquestioned merit was with him almost a mania, and since in quaint New Orleans the food and drink specialist finds his highest heaven, no cloud marked the serenity of his delightful peregrinations.

The next day would be Sunday, and Webster planned an early morning visit to the old French market, around which still lingers much of the picturesque charm and colourful romance of a day that is done—that echo of yesterday, as it were, which has left upon New Orleans an individuality as distinct as that which the olden, golden, godless days have left upon San Francisco.

He rose before six o'clock, therefore; found a taxi, with the driver sound asleep inside, at the curb in front of the hotel; gave the latter his instructions, and climbed in.

It being Sunday morning New Orleans slept late. Save for the few early morning worshippers hurrying to mass—mostly servants in a hurry to return to their kitchens and cook breakfast—the streets were deserted. The languorous air of dawn was redolent of the perfume of orange, rose, and sweet olive; from the four comers of the old town the mellow chimes of the Catholic church bells pealed their sweet, insistent call to the faithful; an atmosphere of subtle peace and sanctity pervaded the silent streets and awoke in John Stuart Webster's heart a vague nostalgia.

Perhaps it was because so much of his life had been spent in lonely mountain or desert camps, or perhaps it was because this taxi ride through the pleasant southern dawn was so typical of the swift passing of the youth which had gone from him before he had had an opportunity to taste, even moderately, of its joys and allurements. He sighed—a little regretful sigh.

“That's you, Johnny Webster,” he told himself, “breezing along through life like a tin-canned dog; f passing the sweet and the beautiful and battling with the harsh and unlovely; here to-day and gone to-morrow, a poor harried devil with your trunk on your back, a slave to the call of gold; restless, in a great hurry to get there and an equal hurry to leave for the new diggings, and all the time Life passes you by and you don't grab so much as a tail feather! On such a morn as this Eve entered the Garden of Eden, while I, consummate idiot, shut myself up in a taxi to watch a bill of expense run up on the clock, while sniffing myrrh and incense through this confounded window. I'll get out and walk!”

He was opposite Jackson Square and the cloying sweetness of palmetto, palm, and fig burdened the air. Above the rumble of the taxi he could hear the distant babel of voices in the French market across the square, so he halted the taxicab, alighted, and handed the driver a bill.

“I want to explore this square,” he said. He had recognized it by the heroic statue of General Jackson peeping through the trees. “I'll walk through the square Up the market, and you may proceed to the market and meet me there. Later we will return to the hotel.”

The chauffeur nodded, and Webster, every fibre of his alert, healthy body once more tingling with the sheer joy of living, entered the square, found a path that wound its way through the shrubbery, and came out at length in the main pathway, close to the Jackson memorial statue.

A Creole girl—starry-eyed, beautiful, rich with the glorious colouring of her race—passed him bound for the cathedral across the square, as Webster thought, for she carried a large prayer book on her arm. To Webster she seemed to fit perfectly into her surroundings, to lend to them the last, final touch of beauty, the apotheosis of peace, and again the nostalgic fever submerged the quiet joy with which he had approached his journey through the square. His glance followed the girl down the walk.

Presently she halted. A young man rose from a bench where evidently he had been waiting for her, and bowed low, his hat clasped to his breast, as only a Frenchman or a Spanish grandee can bow. Webster saw the Creole girl turn to him with a little gesture of pleasure. She extended her hand and the young man kissed it with old-fashioned courtesy.

John Stuart Webster knew now what was missing in his scheme of things, as with reverent and wistful eyes he watched their meeting.

“Forty years old,” he thought, “and I haven't spoken to a dozen women that caused me a second thought, or who weren't postmistresses or biscuit shooters! Forty years old and I've never been in love! Spring time down that little path and Indian summer in my old fool heart. Why, I ought to be arrested for failure to live!”

The lovers were walking slowly, arm in arm, back along the path by which the girl had come, so with a courtesy and gentleness that were innate in him, Webster stepped out of sight behind the statue of Old Hickory; for he did not desire, by his mere presence, to intrude a discordant note in the perfect harmony of those two human hearts. He knew they desired that sylvan path to themselves; that evidently they had sought their early morning tryst in the knowledge that the square was likely to be deserted at this hour. Therefore, to provoke selfconsciousness in them now savoured to John Stuart Webster of a high crime and misdemeanour, for which reason he was careful to keep General Jackson between himself and the lovers until they had gone by.

The young man was speaking as they passed; his voice was rich, pleasant, vibrant with the earnestness of what he had to say: with a pretty little silver-mounted walking stick he slashed at spears of grass alongside the path; the girl was crying a little. Neither of them had seen him, so he entered a path that led from them at right angles.

He had proceeded but a few feet along this trail when, through a break in the shrubbery ahead of him, he saw two men. They were crossing Webster's path and following a course paralleling that of the lovers in the broad main walk. Brief as was his glimpse of them, however, Webster instantly recognized the two Central Americans he had seen in the steamship ticket office two days previous.

They were not walking as walk two men abroad at this hour for a constitutional. Neither did they walk as walk men churchward bound. A slight, skulking air marked their progress, and caused Webster to wonder idly what they were stalking.

He turned into the path down which the two men had passed, not with the slightest idea of shadowing them, but because his destination lay in that direction. The Central Americans were approximately fifty yards in advance of him as he turned in their wake, and at sight of them his suspicion that they were stalking something was quickened into belief.

Both men had forsaken the gravelled path and were walking on the soft velvet of blue grass lawn that fringed it!

“Perhaps I'd better deaden my hoof beats also,” John Stuart Webster soliloquized, and followed suit immediately.

He had scarcely done so when the men ahead of him paused abruptly. Webster did likewise, and responding—subconsciously, perhaps, to the remembrance of the menace in the glance of the man with the puckered eye—he stepped out of sight behind a broad oak tree. Through the trees and shrubbery he could still see the lovers, who had halted and evidently were about to part.

Webster saw the young man glance warily about; then, apparently satisfied there was none to spy upon them, he drew the girl gently toward him. She clung to him for nearly a minute, sobbing; then he raised her face tenderly, kissed her, pressed her from him, and walked swiftly away without looking back.

It was a sweet and rather touching little tableau; to John Stuart Webster, imaginative and possessed of a romantic streak in his nature, it was more than a tableau. It was a moving picture!

“I suppose her old man objects to the young fellow,” he muttered to himself sympathetically, “and he can't come near the house. They've met here for the fond farewell, and now the young fellow's going out West to make his fortune, so he can come back and claim the girl. Huh! If he wants her, why the devil doesn't he take her? I'd tell her old man I'd picked on him for my father-in-law, and then if he didn't like me I'd let the old fellow rave; and see how much good it would do him. But the French are different; they always let the old folks step in and rock the boat——- Hello! By Judas priest! Now I know what those two paraqueets are up to. One of them is the father of that girl. They've been spying on the lovers, and now they're going to corner the young fellow and shingle him for his nerve.”

The girl had stood for a moment, gazing after her companion, before she turned with her handkerchief to her eyes, and continued on her way to the cathedral. Webster had observed that the two men ahead of him paid no attention to her, but pressed eagerly forward after the man.

Webster could look across about thirty yards of low shrubbery at the girl as she passed. He heard her sobbing as she stumbled blindly by, and he was distressed about her, for all the world loves a lover and John Stuart Webster was no exception to this universal rule.

“By George, this is pretty tough,” he reflected. “That young fellow treated that girl with as much gentleness and courtesy as any gentleman should, and I'm for him and against this idea of corporal punishment. Don't you worry, Tillie, my dear. I'm going to horn into this game myself if it goes too far.”

The two dusky skulkers ahead of him, having come to another crosspath, turned into it and came out on the main path in the rear of the young man. Webster noticed that they were walking twice as fast as when he had first observed them, and more than ever convinced that presently there might be work for a strong man and true, he hastened after them.

As he came out into the main walk again, he noticed that the pair were still walking on the grass. He padded gently along behind them.

The four were now rapidly approaching the old French market, and the steadily rising babel of voices speaking in French, Italian, Spanish, Creole patois and Choctaw, was sufficient to have drowned the slight noise of the pursuit, even had the young man's mind not been upon other things, and the interest of the two Central Americans centred upon their quarry, to the exclusion, of any thought of possible interruption.

Webster felt instinctively that the two men would rush and make a concerted attack from the rear. He smiled.

“I'll just fool you two hombres a whole lot,” he thought, and stooping, picked up a small stone. On the instant the two men, having approached within thirty feet of their quarry, made a rush for him.

Their charge was swift, but swift though it was, the little stone which John Stuart Webster hurled was swifter. It struck the young man fairly between the shoulderblades with a force sufficient to bring him out of his sentimental reverie with a jerk, as it were. He whirled, saw the danger that threatened him, and—sprang to meet it.

“Bravo!” yelled Webster, and ran to his aid, for he had seen now that it was to be knife work. Tragedy instead of melodrama.

The man with the puckered eye closed in with such eagerness it was apparent to Webster that here was work to his liking. The young man raised his light cane, but Pucker-eye did not hesitate. He merely threw up his left forearm to meet the expected blow aimed at his head, lunged forward and slashed viciously at the young man's abdomen. The latter drew back a step, doubled like a jack-knife, and brought his cane down viciously across the knuckles of his assailant's right hand.

“So it is thou, son of a pig,” he called pleasantly in Spanish. “I fooled you that time, didn't I?” he added in English. “Thought I would aim for your head, didn't you?”

The blow temporarily paralyzed the assassin's hand; he dropped the knife, and as he stooped to recover it with his left hand, the young man, before retreating from Pop-eye, kicked Pucker-eye in the face and quite upset him.

“Stop it!” shouted Webster.

Pop-eye turned his head at the outcry. The man he was attacking fell into the position of a swordsman en garde, and thrust viciously with the ferule at the face of the pop-eyed man, who, disregarding Webster's approach, seized the cane in his left hand and with a quick, powerful tug actually drew his victim toward him a foot before the latter let go the stick.

Before he could give ground again Pop-eye was upon him. He grasped the young man by the latter's left arm and held him, while he drew back for the awful disembowelling stroke; as his long arm sped forward the hook of John Stuart Webster's heavy cane descended upon that flexed arm in the brook of the elbow, snagging it cleverly.

The knife never reached its destination!

“You would, would you?” said Webster reproachfully, and jerked the fellow violently around. The man he had rescued promptly struck Pop-eye a terrible blow in the face with his left hand and broke loose from the grip that had so nearly been his undoing; whereupon Webster tapped the assassin a meditative tap or two on the top of his sinful head for good measure and to awaken in him some sense of the impropriety and futility of resistance, after which Webster turned to discuss a similar question of ethics with Pucker-eye.

The scar-cheeked man was on his knees, groping groggily for his knife, for he had received a severe kick under the chin, and for the nonce was far from dangerous. Stooping, Webster picked up the knife; then with knife and cane grasped in his left hand he seized Pucker-eye by the nape with his right and jerked him to his feet. The assassin stood glowering at him in a perfect frenzy of brutish, inarticulate fury.

“Take the knife away from the other fellow before he gets active again,” Webster called over his shoulder. “I'll manage this rascal. We'll march them over to the market and turn them over to the police.” He spoke in Spanish.

“Thanks, ever so much, for my life,” the young man answered lightly, and in English, “but where I come from it is not the fashion to settle these arguments in a court of law. To call an officer is considered unclublike; to shoot a prisoner in this country is considered murder, and consequently I have but one alternative and I advise you, my good friend, to have a little of the same. I'm going to run like the devil.”

And he did. He was in full flight before Webster could glance around, and in an instant he was lost to sight among the trees.

“That advice sounds eminently fair and reasonable,” Webster yelled after him, and was about to follow when he observed that the young man had abandoned his pretty little silver-chased walking stick.

“That's too nice a little stick to leave to these brigands,” he thought, and forthwith possessed himself of it and the pop-eyed man's knife, after which he tarried not upon the order of his going but went, departing at top speed.

The young man he had saved from being butchered was right. An entangling alliance with the police was, decidedly, not to John Stuart Webster's liking, for should, he, unfortunately, form such an alliance, he would be haled into court as a witness and perhaps miss the steamer to San Buenaventura.

“Drat it,” he soliloquized, as he emerged from the square and observed his taxi parked at the entrance to the market, “I came through that square so fast I haven't the slightest idea what the last half of it looks like. That's what I get for mixing in a little Donnybrook that's none of my business.”

He had planned to spend an hour in the market, drink a cup of cafÉ noir, smoke a cigarette, and return to his hotel in time for a leisurely breakfast, but his recent bout with grim reality had blunted the edge of romance. He ordered his driver to take him back to the hotel, sprang inside and congratulated himself on his lucky escape.