Dr. Harpe standing at her office window saw the lovely Pearline Starr, curled and dressed at ten in the morning, trip down the street bearing a glass of buffalo berry jelly in her white-gloved hands, while Mrs. Percy Parrott sitting erect in the Parrotts' new, second-hand surrey, drove toward the hotel, carefully protecting from accident some prized package which she held in her lap. Mrs. Parrott was wearing her new ding-a-ling hat, grass-green in color, which, topping off the moss-colored serge which, closely fitting her attenuated figure, gave Mrs. Parrott a surprising resemblance to a katydid about to jump.

Dr. Harpe could not see Mrs. Abe Tutts walking gingerly across lots carrying a pot of baked beans and brown bread in her two hands, nor Mrs. Alva Jackson panting up another street with a Lady Baltimore cake in the hope of reaching the hotel before her dearest friend and enemy Mrs. Tutts, but Dr. Harpe knew from what she already had seen and from the curious glances cast at the windows of the Terriberry House, that the town was agog with Essie Tisdale's romantic story and her newly established relationship to the important looking stranger. Mrs. Terriberry could be trusted to attend to that and in her capable hands it was certain to lose nothing in the telling.

The story was simple enough in itself and had its counterpart in many towns throughout the West. Young Dick Kincaid had run away from his home on the bank of the Mississippi River to make his fortune in the mining camps of the far West. He did not write, because the fortune was always just a little farther on. The months slipped into years, and when he returned with the "stake" which was to be his peace offering, the name of Kincaid was but a memory in the community, and the restless Mississippi with its ever-changing channel flowed over the valuable tract of black-walnut timber which had constituted the financial resources of the Kincaids. The little sister had married a westerner as poor as he was picturesque, and against her parents' wishes. They had gone, never to be heard from again, disappeared mysteriously and completely, and Samuel Kincaid had died, he and his wife, as much of loneliness and longing as of age.

The triumphant return of his boyish dreams was, instead, an acute and haunting remorse. The success that had been his, the success that was to be his in the near-by city, never erased the bitter disappointment of that home-coming. He had searched in vain for some trace of the little sister whom he had loved. He had never given up hoping and that hope had had its weight in influencing him to make the tedious trip to Crowheart.

And then, as though the Fates had punished him enough for his filial neglect, his sister's eyes had looked out at him from the flower-like face at the funeral of old Edouard Dubois. He had followed up his impulse, and the rest is quickly told, for all Crowheart knew the story of Essie Tisdale's miraculous rescue and of the picture primer which had furnished the single clue to her identity.

With the news of Essie Tisdale's altered position—and Mrs. Terriberry missed no opportunity to convey the impression that Kincaid's resources were unlimited—the tide turned and the buffalo berry jelly, the Lady Baltimore cake, baked beans and Mrs. Parrott's tinned lobster salad, were the straws which in Crowheart always showed which way the wind was blowing. That the ladies bearing these toothsome offerings had not been speaking to Essie for some months past was a small matter which they deemed best to forget.

Not so Mrs. Terriberry.

Mrs. Terriberry not only had Essie Tisdale's score to pay off but her own as well, and who knows but that the latter was the sharper incentive? To have been obliged to watch through a crack in the curtain the fashionable world rustle by on its way to Mrs. Alva Jackson's euchre had occasioned a pang not easily forgotten. To have knowledge of the monthly meetings of Mrs. Parrott's Shadow Embroidery Class only through the Society Column of the Crowheart Courier and to be deprived of the privilege of hearing Mrs. Abe Tutts's paper upon Wagnerian music at the Culture Club were slights that rankled.

She was suspiciously close at hand when the ladies appeared in the office of the Terriberry House with their culinary successes; also she was wearing the red foulard which never went out of the closet except to funerals and important functions.

Although the most conspicuous thing about these early callers was the parcels they carried, Mrs. Terriberry chose to ignore them.

"Why, how do you do, Mrs. Parrott, and Miss Starr, too. It's a lovely day to be out, isn't it?" Her voice was distinctly patronizing and she extended a languid hand to Mrs. Jackson. "And usin' your brain like you do, Mrs. Tutts, writin' them pieces for the Culture Club, I suppose you have to git exercise."

"I've brought Essie some lobster salad from a receipt that mamma sent me," said Mrs. Parrott when she could get an opening, "and while it's canned lobster, it's really delicious!"

"The whites of sixteen aigs I put in this Lady Baltimore cake, and it's light as a feather."

Mrs. Terriberry made no offer to take the package which Mrs. Jackson extended.

"Just a little taste of buffalo berry jelly for Essie," said Miss Starr, with her most radiant smile. "Her uncle might enjoy it."

"I ain't forgot," said Mrs. Tutts, "how fond Ess is of brown bread, so I says to myself I'll just take some of my baked beans along, too. Tutts says I beat the world on baked beans. Where's Ess? I'd like to see her."

"Yes; tell her we're here," chorused the others.

Mrs. Terriberry's moment had come. She drew herself up in a pose of hauteur which a stout person can only achieve with practice.

"Miss Tisdale," she replied with glib gusto, "is engaged at present and begs to be excused. But," she added in words which were obviously her own, "you can put your junk in the closet over there with the rest that's come."

Dr. Harpe understood perfectly now the meaning of the Dago Duke's confident smile and the stranger's cold, searching look of enmity. He was no weakling, this new-found relative of Essie Tisdale's, and the Dago Duke's threats were no longer empty boastings.

If only she could sleep! Sleep? Was it days or weeks since she had slept? Forebodings, suspicions of those whom she had been forced to trust, Nell Beecroft, Lamb, and others, were spectres that frightened sleep from her strained eyes. A tight band seemed stretched across her forehead. She rubbed it hard, as though to lessen the tension. There was a dull ache at the base of her brain and she shook her head to free herself from it, but the jar hurt her.

Some one whistled in the corridor. She listened.

"Farewell, my own dear Napoli, Farewell to Thee, Farewell to Thee——" How she hated that song! The Dago Duke was coming for his answer.

He stood before her with his hat in his hand, the other hand resting on his hip smiling, confident, the one long, black lock of hair hanging nearly in his eyes. He made no comment, but she saw that he was noting the ravages which the intervening hours had left in her face. Beneath his smile there was something hard and pitiless—a look that the executioner of a de Medici might have worn—and for a moment it put her at a loss for words. Then with an attempt at her old-time camaraderie, she shoved a glass toward him—

His white teeth flashed in a fleeting smile—

"If you will join me—in my last drink?"

For answer she filled his glass and hers.

He raised it and looked at her.

"I give you—the sweetest thing in the world."

Her lip curled.

"Love?"

His black eyes glittered between their narrowed lids.

"The power to avenge the wrongs of the helpless."

He set down his empty glass and fumbled in his pocket for a paper which he handed her to read.

"It's always well to know what you're signing," he said, and he watched her face as her eyes followed the lines, with the intent yet impersonal scrutiny of a specialist studying his case.

She looked, as she read, like a corpse that has been propped to a sitting position, with nostrils sunken and lips of Parian marble. Her hand shook with a violence which recalled her to herself, and when she raised her eyes they looked as though the iris itself had faded. The Dago Duke seemed absorbed in the curious effect.

He could hear the dryness of her mouth when she asked at last—

"You expect me—to put my name—to this?"

He inclined his head.

"It is—impossible!"

He replied evenly:

"It is necessary."

"You are asking me to sign my own death warrant."

He lifted his shoulders.

"It is your reputation or Essie Tisdale's."

The name seemed to prick her like a goad. Her hands and body twitched nervously and then he saw swift decision arrive in her face.

"I'll not do it!"

As moved by a common impulse they arose.

"It's the lesser of two evils."

"I don't care!" She reiterated in a kind of hopeless desperation, "I don't care—I'll fight!"

He eyed her again with a recurrence of his impersonal professional scrutiny.

"You can't go through it, Doc; you haven't the stamina, any more. You don't know what you're up against, for I haven't half showed my hand. I have no personal grievance, as you know, but the wrongs of my countrymen are my wrongs, and for your brutality to them you shall answer to me. Fight if you will, but when you're done you'll not disgrace your profession again in this or any other State."

While this scene was occurring in Doctor Harpe's office, Andy P. Symes in his office was toying impatiently with an unopened letter from Mudge as Mr. Percy Parrott, hat in hand, stood before him.

"It's not that I'm worried at all, Mr. Symes"—every line of Parrott's face was deep-lined with anxiety as he spoke—"but, of course, I've made you these loans largely upon my own responsibility, I've exceeded my authority, in fact, and any failure on your part——" Mr. Parrott finding himself floundering under Symes's cold gaze blurted out desperately, "Well, 'twould break us!"

"Certainly, certainly, I know all that, but, really, these frequent duns—this Homeseekers' Excursion has put me behind with my work, but as soon as things are straightened out again——"

"Oh, of course. That's all right. I understand, but as soon as you conveniently can——"

Mr. Parrott's lengthened jaw rested between the "white wings" of his collar as he turned away. It might have reached his shirt-stud had he known the number of creditors that had preceded him.

Even Symes's confident assurances that the complete failure of the Homeseekers' Excursion was relatively a small matter, could not entirely eradicate from the minds of Crowheart's merchants the picture presented by the procession of excursionists returning with their satchels to the station, glowering at Crowheart's citizens as they passed and making loud charges of misrepresentation and fraud.

When the door closed behind him Symes dropped the catch that he might read Mudge's bulky letter undisturbed. Mudge's diction was ever open to criticism, but he had a faculty for conveying his meaning which genius well might envy.

The letter read:

Symes laid down the letter and smoothed it carefully, setting a small brass crocodile exactly in the centre. Wiping his clammy palms upon one of the handkerchiefs purchased on his wedding tour, the texture of which always gave him a pleasurable sense of refinement and well-being, he read again the line which showed below the paper-weight:

There's one thing sure—we're down and out.Symes's head sunk weakly forward. Down and out! Not even Mudge knew how far down and out!

Stripped of the hope of success, robbed of the position which he had made for himself, his self-esteem punctured, his home-life a mockery, no longer young—it was the combination which makes a man whose vanity is his strength, lose his grip. To be little where he had been big; to be the object of his ruined neighbors' scorn—men have blown their brains out in his mood, and for less.

What Mudge and the Company regarded as wilful misrepresentations had in the beginning been due to inexperience and ignorance of an undertaking which it required scientific knowledge to successfully carry out. When the truth had been gradually borne in upon him as the work progressed, he felt that it was too late to explain or retract if he would raise more money and keep his position. The real cost he believed would frighten possible investors and with the peculiar sanguineness of the short-sighted, he thought that it would work out somehow.

And all had gone well until Mudge's unheeded warning had come that some subtle but formidable influence was at work to their undoing.

The dull red of mortification crept slowly over Symes's face as he realized that Ogden Van Lennop, before whom he had boasted of his lineage, and patronized, was a conspicuous member of a family whose name was all but a household word throughout the land!

But why, Symes asked the question that Mudge had asked, why should Van Lennop thrust the knife between his short ribs—and turn it? It could not be because Van Lennop had resented his patronage and his vaporings to any such extent as this; he was not that kind. No; he had been touched deeper than his pride or any petty vanity.

Another question like an answer to his first flashed through his mind. Could it be—was it possible that his attentions to Essie Tisdale, the biscuit-shooter of the Terriberry House, had been sincere?

Symes rose in sudden excitement and paced the floor.

He believed it was! The belief grew to conviction and he dropped again into his chair. If this was it he need expect no quarter. As his thoughts flashed back over the past the fact began to stand out clearly that nearly every unfriendly act he had shown the girl had been instigated by Doctor Harpe and accomplished through Augusta.

"That woman!" The veins swelled in his temples. "Always that woman!" and as though in answer to her name he saw her pass the window and shake the latched door.

"Let me in!" It was a peremptory demand.

Symes threw the catch back hard.

"Yes, Dr. Harpe, I'll let you in. I've business with you. For the first time in my life I want to see you." His tone was brutal. "Sit down!" He laid his huge hand upon her shoulder and thrust her into a chair.

Towering above her in the red-faced, loud-voiced fury of a man who has lost his self-control, he shouted:

"I want you to get out! To quit! To leave this town! Twenty-four hours I'll give you to get your traps together. Do you hear? If you don't, so help me God, I'll put you where you belong! Don't speak," he raised his hand as though to forestall her, "lest I forget your sex." He went on, inarticulate with passion: "I've protected you as long as I can—as long as I'm going to. Do you understand? I'm done. I've got some little self-respect left; not much, but enough to see me through this. And you can tell Augusta Symes that if she wants to go, every door is open wide! Tell her—tell her that for me!"

He stopped, choked with the violence of his feelings, and in the pause which followed she sat looking up at him unmoved. The shock seemed to quiet her. Then, too, it was so like another scene indelibly engraved upon her memory that she wanted to laugh—actually to laugh. Yet Symes's violence cut her less than had the cool, impersonal voice of the coroner back there in that little Nebraska town. She found his blazing eyes far easier to meet than the cold unfriendliness in the gaze of the man who had delivered that other ultimatum. Perhaps it was because she believed she had less to fear. Symes dared not—dared not, she told herself—enforce his threats.

Symes read something of this thought in her face and it maddened him. Was it not possible to make her comprehend? Was she really so callous, so thick-skinned that she was immune from insult? His hand dropped once more upon her shoulder.

"I'm ruined—do you understand?" He shook her. "I'm down and out. I'm broke; and so is Crowheart!" She winced under his tightening grip. "The smash was due when Van Lennop said the word. He's said it." He felt her start at the name and there was something like fear in her face at last. "Van Lennop," he reiterated, "Van Lennop that you've made my enemy to gratify your personal spite and jealousy." He continued through clenched teeth:

"From the beginning you've used me to further your petty ends. It's plain enough to me now, for, with all your fancied cleverness, you're transparent as a window-pane when one understands your character. You've silenced me, I admit it, and blackmailed me through my pride and ambition, but you've reached the limit. You can't do it any more. I've none left.

"You expect to cling to my coat-tails to keep yourself up. You look to my position for shelter, but let me make it clear to you that you can't hide behind my prestige and my position any longer. You human sponge! You parasite! Do you think I'm blind because I've been dumb? Go! you—degenerate! By God! you go before I kill you!"

In his insane fury he pulled her to her feet by the shoulders of her loose-cut coat where she stood looking at him uncertainly, her faded eyes set in a gray mask.

"See here, Mr. Symes, see here——" she said in a kind of vague belligerence.

Symes pushed her toward the door as Adolph Kunkel passed.

"Will you go?" Symes shouted.

She turned on the sidewalk and faced him. The gray mask wore a sneer.

"Not alone."

"Hi, Doc!" Kunkel pointed to a straight, black pillar of smoke rising at the station, and yelled in local parlance: "Look there! Your beau's come! That's the Van Lennop Special!"