Raymer's prediction that the real trouble would begin when the attempt should be made to start the plant with imported workmen was amply fulfilled during the militant week which followed the opening of hostilities.

The appearance of the first detachment of strike-breakers, a trampish crew gathered up hastily by the employment agencies in the cities in response to Griswold's telegrams, was the signal for active resistance. Promptly the Iron Works plant and the approaches to it were picketed, and of the twenty-five or thirty men who came in on the first day's train only a badly frightened and cowed half-dozen won through the persuading, jeering, threatening picket line to the offices of the plant.

Other days followed in which the scenes of the first were repeated—with the difference that each succeeding day saw the inevitable increase of lawlessness. From taunts and abuse the insurrectionaries passed easily to violence. Street fights, when the trampish place-takers came in any considerable numbers, were of daily occurrence, and the tale of the wounded grew like the returns from a battle. By the middle of the week Raymer and Griswold were asking for a sheriff's posse to maintain peace in the neighborhood of the plant; and were getting their first definite hint that some one higher up was playing the game of politics against them.

"No, gentlemen; I've done all that the law requires and a little more," was the sheriff's response to the plea for better protection. Then came the hint. "You can take it as a word from a friend that this private scrap of yours with your men is making everybody pretty tired. First and last, it's only a question of whether you'll pay out a little more money, or a little less money, not to a lot of imported hoboes, but to certain citizens of Red Earth County,"—to which was added significantly—"citizens with votes."

"In other words, Mr. Bradford, you've got your orders from the men higher up, have you?" rasped Griswold, who was by this time lost to all sense of expediency.

"I don't have to reply to any such charge as that," said the chief peace officer, turning back to his desk; and so the brittle little conference ended.

"All of which means that we shall lose the plant guard of deputies that Bradford has been maintaining," commented Raymer, as they were descending the Court House stairs; and again his prediction came true. Later in the day the guard was withdrawn; and Griswold, savagely reluctant, was forced to make a concession repeatedly urged and argued for by the older men among the strikers, namely, that the guarding of the company's property be entrusted to a picked squad of the ex-employees themselves.

During these days of turmoil and rioting the transformed idealist passed through many stages of the journey down a certain dark and mephitic valley not of amelioration. With the bitter industrial conflict to feed it, a slow fire within him ate its way into all the foundations, and as the fair superstructure of character settled, the moral perpendiculars and planes of projection became more and more distorted. Fairness was gone, and in its place stood angry resentment, ready to rend and tear. Pity and ruth were going: the daily report from Margery told of the lessening chance of life for Andrew Galbraith, and the stirrings evoked were neither regretful nor compassionate. On the contrary, he knew very well that the news of Galbraith's death would be a relief for which, in his heart of hearts, he was secretly thirsting.

It was at the close of the week of tumult that the dreadful beckoning came. One of the two trained nurses installed at Mereside had been called away to the bedside of a sick father. Another had been wired for immediately, but between the going and the coming a night would intervene. So much Griswold got from Margery over the Iron Works telephone late in the afternoon of a day thickly besprinkled with the sidewalk waylayings and riotings. When he reached his Shawnee Street lodgings at nine o'clock that night he found Miss Grierson's phaeton standing at the curb.

"Get in," she said, briefly, making room for him in the basket seat. And when the mare had been given the word to go: "I hope you are not too tired to chaperon me. I've got to drive over to the college infirmary. We simply must have another nurse for to-night."

He denied the weariness—most untruthfully—and after that, she made him talk all the way across town to the college campus; compelled him, and found him absently irresponsive. Oh, yes; the fight was still going on: No, they would never give in to the demands of the strikers: Yes, he had seen Miss Farnham twice since the trouble began; she was frankly agreed with Raymer's mother and sister; they all wanted peace, and they were all against him. She led him on, and meanwhile they encountered one failure after another in the nurse-hunting. The town clock was striking the quarter-past ten when Miss Grierson confessed that she had exhausted the list of possibilities.

"I must go back at once," she declared. "Miss Davidson—the day nurse—has been on duty constantly since six this morning, and I'm not going to let her kill herself."

"But you haven't been able to find anybody. Who will relieve her?"

Then came the thunderbolt—and beyond it the beckoning. "You and I will," she said calmly. And then, as if to forestall the possible refusal: "It is merely to sit in the next room and to go in and give him his medicine at half-hour intervals. Either of us can do that much for a poor old man who is making his last stand in the fight for his life."

Three days earlier, nay, one day earlier, Griswold might have recoiled in horror from the suggestion that thrust itself into heart and brain. But now he merely pushed the unspeakable prompting into the background. Of course, he would go; and, equally of course, he would share the night watch with her. One question he permitted himself, and it was not asked until after they had reached the darkened mansion on the lake's edge and were mounting the stair to the sick-room. Was Mr. Galbraith conscious? Could he recognize any one?

"No," was the low-voiced response; and presently they had reached the outer room of shaded lights, and the sleepy day nurse had been released, and Margery was explaining the medicines to her watch sharer.

It was a simple matter, as she had said; the medicine from the larger bottle was to be given in tea-spoonful doses on the even hour, and that in the smaller, ten drops in a little water, on the alternating half-hours.

"It's his heart chiefly, now," she explained, "and this drop-medicine is for that. If you should forget to give it—but I know you won't forget. There are books in the hall case, and you can sit in here and read. When you are tired, come and tap at the door of my room and I'll take what you leave."

While she was speaking the softly chiming clock in the lower hall struck the half-hour. "I'll help you give him the first dose," she went on; and he stood by and watched her as she dropped the heart-stimulant into a spoon and diluted it with a little water. "Come," she said; and they went together into the adjoining room.

Griswold had been hardening himself deliberately to look unmoved upon what the shaded electric night-light in the farther room should reveal: it was nothing more terrible than the sight of a drawn face, half-hidden in the pillows; a face in which life and death still fought for the mastery as they had fought on that other day when life, unhelped, would have been the loser.

The small service was quickly rendered. Griswold lifted the sick man, and his companion, deft and steady-handed, administered the stimulant.

"Ten drops; no more and no less; exactly on the half-hour: those are Doctor Bertie's orders," she said, when they had withdrawn to the outer room. And then: "Good-night, for a little while. Don't hesitate to call me when you've had enough."

For so long as he could distinguish her light step in the corridor, Griswold stood motionless as she had left him. Then he flung himself into the nearest chair and covered his face with his hands.

The quarter-hour passed, and after the three mellow strokes had died away the silence grew slowly maddening. When inaction was no longer bearable, Griswold sprang up and went to stand at the open window. The summer night was hot and breathless. In the north-west a storm cloud was creeping up into the sky, and he watched its black shadow climbing like a terrifying threat of doom out of the illimitable and blotting out the stars one by one.... "For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain...." Out of a childhood which seemed very far away and unreal the words of the Psalmist came to ring in his ears like the muffled tolling of a passing-bell. So it must be soon for all the living; and whether a little sooner or a little later, what could it matter? A breath more or less to be drawn; a longer or shorter fluttering of the feeble heart; that was all.

The clock struck eleven, and mechanically he poured out the dose from the larger bottle and gave it to the sick man. When it was done he left the bedside and the inner room quickly and went back to the open window. The air was thick and stifling, and when he sat down in the deep window-seat he was gasping for breath. It was going to be harder than he had thought it would, though now that the time had come he realized that he had been subconsciously planning for it, preparing for it. And the means which had been thrust into his hands could scarcely have been simpler. He had only to sit still and do nothing—and no one would ever know. He took up the small phial and held it to the light: ten drops, or forty drops; they would neither be missed, nor counted if they should remain.

The single chiming stroke of the quarter-past struck while he was putting the bottle down, and he started as if the mellow cadence had been a pistol shot. For fifteen minutes longer he could live and breathe and be as other men are; and after that.... He saw himself looking back upon the normal world from the new view-point, as he fancied Cain might have looked back after the mark had been set upon his brow. Would it really make the hideous, monstrous difference that all men seemed to think it did? He would know, presently, when the revocable should have become the irrevocable. He heard the sick man stir feebly, and then the sound of his slow, labored breathing made itself felt, rather than heard, in the crushing, stifling silence. How the minutes dragged! He leaned his head against the window jamb and closed his eyes, striving fiercely to drive forth the thronging thoughts; to make his mind a blank. Gradually the effort succeeded. He was conscious of a dull, throbbing, soothing pulse beating slow measures in his temples, and a curious roaring as of distant cataracts in his ears; and after that, nothing.

A tempestuous thunder shower was lashing the trees on the lawn when he awoke with a start and found Margery bending over him to close the window. With every nerve a needle to prick him alive he dragged out his watch. It was a quarter-past two. Miserably, wretchedly he pulled himself together and stood up to face her, putting his hands on her shoulders to make her look up at him.

"Margery, girl; do you know what I have done?—Oh, my God! I am a murderer—a murderer at last!"

She turned her face away quickly.

"Oh, no, no, boy!—not meaning to be!" she murmured.

"What is the difference?" he demanded harshly. And then: "God knows—He knows whether I meant it or not."

She looked up again, and, as once or twice before in his knowing of her, he saw the dark eyes swimming.

"It was too hard; I shouldn't have asked it of you, Kenneth. I knew what a cruel strain you've been under all these bad days. And there was no harm done. I—I have been here a long time—ever since half-past eleven; and I've been giving Mr. Galbraith his medicine. Now go down-stairs and stretch out on the hall lounge. I'll run down and send you home as soon as it stops raining."