The cyclonic summer storm had blown itself out, and the clouds were beginning to break away in the west, when Griswold, obeying Margery's urging to go home and change his clothes, turned his back upon Mereside and his face toward a future of thickening doubts and unnerving possibilities.

Once more he found himself wrestling with the keeper of the gate, the angel of the flaming sword set to drive him forth among the outcasts. One by one the confidently imagined safeguards were crumbling. He had been traced to Wahaska—so much could be read between the lines of Charlotte Farnham's story; if Margery's newsboy protÉgÉ was to be believed, he was watched and followed. And now, after having successfully passed the ordeal of a face-to-face meeting and hand-shaking with Andrew Galbraith, chance or destiny or the powers of darkness had intervened, and a danger met and vanquished had been suddenly brought to life again, armed and menacing.

Griswold had not deceived himself, nor had he allowed Margery's apparent convincement to deceive him. The old man's mind had not been wandering in the eye-opening moment of consciousness regained. On the contrary, what he had failed to do under ordinary and conventional conditions had become instantly possible when the plunge into the dark shadow had brushed away all the artificial becloudings of the memory page. What action he would take when he should recover was as easy to prefigure as it was, for the present at least, a matter negligible. The dismaying thing was that the broad earth seemed too narrow to hide in; that invention itself became the clumsiest of blunderers when, it was given the simple task of losing a single individual among the millions of unrelated human atoms.

Thus the threat of the peril which might be called the physical. But beyond this there was another, and, for a man of temperament, a still more ominous foreshadowing of evil to come. Of some subtle, deep-seated change in himself he had long been conscious. Again and again it had manifested itself in those moments of craven fear and ruthless, murderous promptings, when kindliness, gratitude, love, all the humanizing motives, had turned suddenly to frenzied hatred, and the primitive savage had leaped up, fiercely raging with the blood-lust.

Here, again, he suffered loss, and was conscious of it. The point of view was changed, and still changing. Something, a thing indefinable, but none the less real, had gone out of him. Once, in the heart of a thick darkness of squalor and misery, he had seen a great light and the name of it was love for his kind. But now the light was waning, and in its room a bale-fire was beckoning. There be those, fat, well-nurtured, and complacent souls faring ever along the main-travelled roads of life, who need no guiding lamp and will never see the glimmer of the bale-fires. But the breaker of traditions was of those who, having once seen the light, must follow where it leads or violate a primal law of being. Some vague sense of this was stirring the dying embers for the proletary as he was climbing the hill to the street of quiet entrances; but he pushed the saving thought aside and chose to call it fanaticism. He had drawn the line and he would hew to it.

For a long time after he had reached his room, and had had his bath and change, Griswold sat at his writing-table with his head in his hands, thinking in monotonous circles. As in those other stressful moments, the importunate devil was at his ear; now mocking him for not having left the drowned enemy as he was; now whispering the dreadful hope that age and the shock and the drowning might still re-erect the barrier of safety. The eyes of the recusant grew hot and a loathsome fever ran sluggishly through his veins when he realized the depths to which he had descended; that he, once the brother-loving, could coldly weigh the chance of life and death for another and be unable to find in any corner of his heart the hope that life might prevail.

He was still sitting, miserably reflective, in the dark, when Mrs. Holcomb came up to call him to dinner. What excuse he made he could not remember two minutes after she had gone down. But to make a fourth with the motherly widow and her two bank clerks at the cheerful dinner-table was a thing beyond him. Somewhat later he heard the two young men come upstairs, and, still further along, go down again. They were social souls, his two fellow lodgers; kindly young fellows with boyish faces and honest eyes: Griswold wondered if they would still look up to him and defer to him as the older man of broader culture if they could know....

The tiny chiming clock on his dressing-case in the adjoining bedroom had tinkled forth its ten tapping hammer strokes when the man sitting in the dark heard the pounding of hoofs and the rattling of buggy wheels in the quiet street. He was absently awaking to the fact that the vehicle had stopped at his own door when he heard voices, the widow's and another, in the lower hall, and then a man's footsteps on the stair. To a hard-pressed breaker of the traditions at such a moment an unannounced visitor, coming up in the dark, could mean but one thing. Griswold silently opened a drawer in the writing-table and groped for the mate to the quick-firing pistol which, after the change of wet clothing, he had put aside to dry.

The visitor came heavily upstairs, and Griswold, swinging his chair to face the open door, saw the shadowy bulking of the man as he came through the upper hall. When the bulk filled the doorway it was covered by the pistol held low, and Griswold's finger was pressing the trigger.

"Asleep, old man?" said the intruder in Raymer's well-known voice.

There was a sound like a gasping sob, and another as of a drawer closing softly. Then Griswold said: "No; I'm not asleep. Come in. Shall I light the gas?"

"Not for me," returned the bedtime visitor, entering and groping for the chair at the desk-end, into which, when he had placed it, he dropped wearily. "I want to smoke," he went on. "Have you got a cigar—no, not the pipe; I want something that I can chew on."

A cigar was found, in the drawer which had so lately furnished the weapon, and by the flare of the match in Raymer's fingers Griswold saw a face haggard with anxiety. In the kindlier days it had been one of his redeeming characteristics that he could never dwell long upon his own harassments when another's troubles were brought to him.

"What is the matter, Edward?" he asked.

"A mix-up with the labor unions. It's been brewing for some little time, but I didn't want to worry you with it. Unless we announce a flat increase of twenty per cent in wages to-morrow morning, and declare for the closed shop, the men will go out on us at noon. I've seen it coming. It began with the enlarging of the plant and the taking on of the new men needed. We've always had the open shop, as you know, and it was all right so long as we were too small for the unions to scrap about. But now we get the Iron Workers' ultimatum: we can do as we please about the profit-sharing; but the flat increase must go on the pay-rolls, and the shop must be run as a closed shop."

If the god of mischance had chosen the moment it could not have been more opportune for the fire-lighting of malevolence. Griswold's swing-chair righted itself with a click, and Bainbridge's prophecy that a hot-hearted proletary was likely to become the hardest of masters became a prediction fulfilled.

"We'll see them in hell, first, Raymer! Isn't that the way you feel about it?"

"Partly," allowed the smoker. "But it can hardly be disposed of that easily, Kenneth. A good third of the men are our old standbys; men who were in the shops under my father. Some pretty powerful influence has been brought to bear upon them to swing them against us. I don't know what it is, but I do know this: every second man we have hired lately has turned out to be either a loud-mouthed agitator or a silent mixer of trouble medicine."

"Let the causes go for the present," said Griswold shortly. "We're talking about the men, now. The ungrateful beggars are merely proving that it isn't in human nature to meet justice and fairness and generous liberality half-way. If they want a fight, give it to them. Hit first and hit hard; that's the way to do. Shut up the plant and make it a lock-out."

"I was afraid you might say something like that in the first heat of it," said the young ironmaster. "It's a stout fighting word, and I guess, under the skin, you're a stout fighting man, Kenneth—which I'm not. Where are your convictions about the man-to-man obligations? We've got to take them into the account, haven't we?"

"Damn the convictions!" snapped Griswold viciously. "If I've been giving you the impression that I'm an impracticable theorist, forget it. These fellows want a fight: I say give them a fight—all they want of it and a little more for good measure."

Raymer did not reply at once. This latest Griswold was puzzling him, and with the puzzlement there went sorrowful regret; the regret that has been the recanter's portion in all the ages. When he spoke it was out of the heart of common sense and sanity.

"I know how you feel about it; I had a little attack of the same sort this afternoon when the grievance committee dropped down on me. But facts are pretty stubborn things, and they've got us foul. We have twenty thousand dollars' worth of work for the Pineboro road on the shop tracks, and the trouble-makers have picked their opportunity. If we can't turn out this work, we'll lose the Pineboro's business, which, as I have told you, is a pretty big slice of our business. Under such conditions I don't dare to pull down a fight which may not only shut us up for an indefinite time, but might even go far enough to smash us."

Griswold took his turn of silence, rocking gently in the tilting chair. When the delayed rejoinder came, the harshness had gone out of his voice, but there was a cynical hardness to take its place.

"It's your affair; not mine," he said. "If you've made up your mind not to fight, of course, that settles it. Now we can come down to the causes. You've been stabbed in the back. Do you know who's doing it?"

"The Federated Iron Workers, I suppose."

"Not in a thousand years! They are only the means to an end." The tilting chair squeaked again, and he went on: "If I'm going to show you how you can dodge this fight, I'll have to knock down a door or two first. If I blunder in where I'm not wanted, you can kick me out. There is one way in which you can cure all this trouble-sickness without resorting to surgery and blood-letting."

"Name it," said Raymer eagerly.

"I will; but first I'll have to break over into the personalities. Have you made up your mind that you are going to marry Margery Grierson?"

Raymer laughed silently, leaning his head back on the cushion of the lazy-chair until his cigar stood upright.

"That's a nice way to biff a man in the dark!" he chuckled. "But if you're in earnest I'll tell you the straightforward truth: I don't know."

"Why don't you know?" If there were a scowl to go with the query, Raymer could not see it.

"I'll be frank with you again, Kenneth. What little sentiment there is in me leans pretty heavily that way. You have been with her a good bit and you know her—know how she appeals to any man with a drop of red blood in him. But I'm twenty-eight years old and well past the time when the young man's fancy lightly turns—and all that. I can't ignore the—the—well, the proprieties, you might say, though that isn't exactly the word."

"You mean that Margery Grierson doesn't measure up to the requirements of the Wahaskan Four Hundred?" There was satirical scorn in the observation, but Raymer did not perceive it.

"Oh, I don't know as you would put it quite that baldly," he protested. "But you see, when it comes to marrying and settling down and raising a family, you have to look at all sides of the thing. The father, as we all know, is a cold-blooded old werewolf; the mother nobody knows anything about save that—happily, in all probability—she isn't living. And there you are. Yet I won't deny that there are times when I'm tempted to shut my eyes and take the high dive, anyway—at the risk of splashing a lot of good people who would doubtless be properly scandalized."

By this time Griswold was gripping the arms of his chair savagely and otherwise trying to hold himself down; but this, too, Raymer could not know.

"You have reason to believe that it rests wholly with you, I suppose?" came from the tilting chair after a little pause. "Miss Grierson is only waiting for you to speak?"

"That's a horrible question to ask a man, Kenneth—even in the dark. If I say yes to it, it can't sound any other way than boastful and—and caddish. Yet I honestly believe that— Oh, hang it all! can't you see how impossible you're making it, old man?"

"Not impossible; only a trifle difficult," was the qualifying rejoinder. "It is easier from this on. That is the peaceful way out of the shop trouble for you, Raymer. When you can go to Jasper Grierson and tell him you are going to marry his daughter, the trouble will be as good as cured."

For a little time Raymer was speechless. Then he burst out.

"Well, I'll be— Jove, Griswold, you don't lack much of being as cold-blooded as the old buccaneer himself! What makes you think he is stirring up the trouble?"

"It doesn't require any special thought. He wanted to freeze you out a little while back, and you balked him. Now he has come back at you another way."

"I wonder!" said the iron-founder musingly; and then: "I more than half believe you are right. But if you are, do you realize what you are proposing?"

"I am not proposing anything; I am merely suggesting. But you needn't put in the factor of doubt. This labor trouble that is threatening to smash you is Jasper Grierson's reply to the move you made when you let me in and choked him off. He is reaching for you."

Again Raymer held his peace and the atmosphere of the room grew pungent with tobacco smoke.

"I'm feeling a good bit like a yellow dog, Kenneth," he said, at length. "After what I've admitted and what you've said, I'm left in the position of the poor devil who would be damned if he did and be damned if he didn't. You have succeeded in fixing it so that I can't ask Margery Grierson to be my wife, however much I'd like to."

"That isn't the point," insisted Griswold half-savagely. "How you may feel about it, or what your people may say, is purely secondary. The thing to be considered is, what will happen to Miss Grierson?"

"Oh, the devil! if you put it that way——"

"I am putting it precisely that way."

"Why, see here, old man; if you were Madge's brother, you couldn't be putting the screws on any harder! What's got into you to-night?"

Griswold was inexorable.

"Miss Grierson hasn't any brother, and she might as well not have any father—better, perhaps. As God hears me, Raymer, I'm going to see to it that she gets a square deal."

"In other words, if she has made up her clever little mind that she wants to be Mrs. Ed. Raymer——"

"That is it, exactly."

"By George! I believe you are in love with her, yourself!"

"I am," was the cool reply.

"Well, of all the— Say, Griswold, you're a three-cornered puzzle to me yet. I don't know what the other three-fourths of the town is saying, but my fourth of it has it put up that you've everlastingly cooked my goose at Doctor Bertie's; that you and Charlotte are just about as good as engaged. Perhaps you'll tell me that it isn't true."

"It isn't—yet."

"But it may be, later on? Now you are getting over into my little garden-patch, Kenneth. If you think I'm going to stand still and see you put a wedding ring on Charlotte Farnham's finger when I know you'd like to be putting it on Madge Grierson's——"

Griswold's low laugh came as an easing of stresses.

"You can't very well marry both of them, yourself, you know," he suggested mildly. And then: "If you were not so badly torn up over this shop trouble, you'd see that I'm trying to give you the entire field. I shall probably leave town to-morrow, and I merely wanted to do you, or Miss Grierson, or both of you, a small kindness by way of leave-taking."

"Leave town?" echoed the iron-founder. "Where are you going?"

"I don't know yet."

"But you are coming back?"

"No."

Once more Raymer puffed at the shortened cigar until the end of it glowed like a small distress signal in the dark.

"Tell me," he broke out finally: "has Margery Grierson turned you down?"

"No."

"Then Charlotte has?"

"No."

"Confound it all! can't you say anything but 'No'? Do you mean to tell me that you are going away, leaving me bucked and gagged by this labor outfit to live or die as I may? Great Scott, man! if my money's gone, yours goes with it!"

"You are freely welcome to the money, Edward—if you can manage to hang on to it; and I have pointed out the easy way to salvage the industrial ship. Can't you give me your blessing and let me go in peace?"

The blessing was not withheld, but neither was it given.

"I came here with my own back-load of trouble, but it seems that I'm not the only camel in the caravan," said the young ironmaster, thoughtfully. "What is it, Kenneth? anything you can unload on me?"

"You wouldn't understand," was the gentle evasion. "I can only give you my word that neither Miss Margery nor Miss Charlotte are in any way concerned in it."

"And you don't want to draw your money out of the plant?"

"No. For your sake I wish I had more to put in."

Once again Raymer took refuge in silence. After a time he said: "You've been a brother to me, Griswold, and I shall never forget that. But if I needed your help in the money pinch, I'm needing it worse now. I'll do the right thing by Margery; I think I've been meaning to, all along; if I haven't, it's only because this whole town has been fixing up a match between Charlotte and me ever since we were school kids together—you know how a fellow gets into the way of taking a thing like that for granted merely because everybody else does?"

"Yes; I know."

"Well, I guess it isn't a heart-breaker on either side. If Charlotte cares, she doesn't take the trouble to show it. Just the same, on the other hand, I've got a shred or two of decency left, Kenneth. I'm not going to marry myself out of this fight with Jasper Grierson—not in a million years. Stay over and help me see it through; and when we win out, I promise you I'll do the square thing."

By no means could Edward Raymer know that he had set the whispering devil at work again at the ear of the man who was rocking gently in the desk-chair. But the demon was busily suggesting, and the man was listening. Was there not more than an even chance that Andrew Galbraith would die, after all? He was old, with the life-reserves spent and the weight of the years upon him. And if he should not die, there was still a chance that days might elapse before he would be able to gather himself sufficiently to remember and to raise the hue and cry. Griswold put a hot hand across the corner of the table and felt for Raymer's cool one.

"There's only one other way, Edward; and that is to fight like the devil," he said, speaking as one who has weighed and measured and decided. "What do you say?"

"If you will stay," Raymer began, hesitantly.

"I'll stay—as long as I can." Then, with the note of harshness returning: "We'll make the fight, and we'll give these muckers of yours all they are looking for. Shut the plant doors to-morrow morning and make it a lock-out. I'll be over bright and early and we'll place a bunch of wire orders in the cities for strike-breakers. That will bring them to time."

Raymer got up slowly and felt in the dark for his hat.

"Strike-breakers!" he groaned. "Griswold, it would make my father turn over in his coffin if he could know that we've come to that! But I guess you're right. Everybody says I'm too soft-hearted to be a master of men. Well, I must be getting home. To-morrow morning, at the plant? All right; good-night."

And he turned to grope his way to the door and through the dark upper hall and down the stair.