To a man seeking only to escape from himself, all roads are equal and all destinations likely to prove uniformly disappointing. Turning his back upon the Iron Works in the day of defeat, with no very clear idea of what he should do or where he should go, Griswold pushed through the strikers' picket lines, and, avoiding the militant suburb, drifted by way of sundry outlying residence streets and a country road to the high ground back of the city.

In deserting Raymer he was actuated by no motive of disloyalty. On the contrary, so much of the motive as had any bearing upon his relations with the young iron-founder sprang from a generous impulse to free Raymer from an incubus. If it were the curse of the Midas-touch to turn all things to gold, it seemed to be his own peculiar curse to turn the gold to dross; to leave behind him a train of disaster, defeat, and tragic depravity. The plunge into the labor conflict had merely served to afford another striking example of his inability to break the evil spell, and Raymer could well spare him.

On the long tramp to the hills the events of the past few months marshalled themselves in accusing review. No human being, save one, of all those with whom he had come in contact since the day of dragon-bearding in the New Orleans bank had escaped the contaminating touch, and each in turn had suffered loss. The man Gavitt had given his name and identity; the mate of the Belle Julie had sacrificed what little respect he may have had for law and order by becoming, potentially, at least, a criminal accessory. The little Irish cab-driver had sold himself for a price; and the negro deck-hand had earned his mess of fried fish. The single exception was Charlotte Farnham, and he told himself that she had escaped only because she had done her duty as she saw it.

And as the bedeviling thing had begun, so it had continued, losing none of its potency for evil. In the little world of Wahaska, which was to have been the theatre of Utopian demonstration, the curse had persisted. The money, used with the loftiest intentions, had served only as a means to an end, and the end had proved to be the rearing of an apparently impassable wall of bitter antagonism between master and men. And the secret of the money's origin and acquisition, which was to have been so easily cast aside and ignored, had become a soul-sickness incurable and even contagious. Griswold was beginning to suspect that it had attacked Margery Grierson; that it had subconsciously, if not otherwise, thrust itself into Charlotte Farnham's life; and the night of horror so lately past had shown him into what depths it could plunge its wretched guardian and slave.

Now that the plunge had been taken and he had been made to understand that he must henceforth reckon with a base and cowardly under-self which would not stop short of the most heinous crime, he told himself that he must have time to think—to plan.

Caring nothing for its roughness, and scarcely noting the direction in which it was leading him, he followed the country road in its winding descent into a valley forest of oaks. After an hour of aimless tramping he began to have occasional near-hand glimpses of the lake; and a little farther along he came out upon the main-travelled road leading to the summer-resort hotel at the head of De Soto Bay.

Still without any definite purpose in mind he pushed on, and upon reaching the hotel he went in and registered for a room. The luncheon hour was past, but not even the long tramp had given him an appetite. Choosing the quietest corner of the lake-facing veranda he tried to smoke; but the tobacco had lost its flavor, and a longing for completer solitude drove him to his room. Here he drew the window shades and lay down, deliberately wishing that he might fall asleep and wake in some less poignant world; and since the week of strife had been cutting deeply into the nights, the first half of the wish presently came true. While the poignancies were still asserting themselves acutely, sleep stole upon him, and when he awoke it was evening and a cheerful clamor in the dining-room beneath told him that it was dinner-time.

It is a trite saying that many a gulf, seemingly impassable, has been safely bridged in sleep. Bathed, refreshed and with the tramping stains removed, Griswold went down to dinner with the lost appetite regained. A leisurely hour spent in the restorative atmosphere of the well-filled dining-room added its uplift, and at the end of it the troublesome perplexities and paradoxes had withdrawn—at least far enough so that they could be held in the artistic perspective. Afterward, during the cigar-smoking on the cool veranda, he struck out his plan. In the morning he would send in town to Mrs. Holcomb for a few necessaries, and telephone to Raymer. After which, he would try what a fallow day or two would do for him; an interval in which he could weigh and measure and think, and possibly recover the lost sense of proportion.

As the plan was conceived, so it was carried out. Early on the following day he sent a note to Mrs. Holcomb by one of the Inn employees; but the copy of the Daily Wahaskan laid beside his breakfast plate made it unnecessary to telephone Raymer. The paper had a full account of the sudden ending of the lock-out and the resumption of work in the Raymer plant, and he read it with a curious stirring of self-compassion. As he had reasoned it out, there was only one way in which the result could have been attained so quickly. Had Raymer taken that way, in spite of his wrathful rejection of the suggestion? Doubtless he had; and on the heels of that conclusion came a sense of deprivation that was fairly appalling, and the healthy breakfast appetite vanished. Griswold knew what it meant, or he thought he did. Margery Grierson was gone out of his life—gone beyond recall.

After that, there was all the better reason why he should grapple with himself in the fallow interval; and for two complete days he was lost, even to the small world of the summer resort, tramping for hours in the lake shore forests or drifting about in one of the hotel skiffs, and returning to the Inn only to eat and sleep when hunger or weariness constrained him. On the whole, the discipline was good. He flattered himself that the sense of proportion was returning slowly, and with it some saner impulses. Truly, it had been his misfortune to be obliged to compromise with evil to some extent, and to involve others, but was not that rather due to the ineradicable faults of an imperfect social system than to any basic defect in his own theories? And was not the same imperfect social system partly responsible for the quasi-criminal attitude which had been forced upon him? He was willing to believe it; willing, also, to believe that he could rise above the constraining forces and be the man he wished to be. That he could so rise was proved, he decided, on the morning of the third day, when he chanced to overhear the hotel clerk telling the man whose room was across the corridor from his own that Andrew Galbraith still had a fighting chance for life. In the pleasant glow of the high resolve the news awakened none of the murderous promptings, but rather the generous hope that it might be true.

It was late in the afternoon of this third day, upon his return from a long pull in the borrowed skiff around the group of islands in the upper and unfrequented part of the lake, that he found a note awaiting him. It was from Miss Farnham, and its brevity, no less than its urgency, stirred him apprehensively, bringing a suggestive return of the furtive fierceness which he promptly fought down. "I must see you before eight o'clock this evening. It is of the last importance," was the wording of the note; and the heavy underscoring of the "last," and a certain tremulous characteristic in the handwriting, stressed the urgency.

Griswold thrust the note into his pocket and made his preparations to go to town, still fighting down the furtive malevolence which was unnerving him; fighting also an unshakable premonition that his hour had come. Once, before the Inn brake was ready to make its evening trip to Wahaska and the railway station, the premonition gripped him so benumbingly that he was sorely tempted. There was another railroad fourteen miles to the westward; a line running a fast day-train to the north with connections for Winnipeg. One of the Inn guests was driving over to catch this fast train at a country crossing, and there was a spare seat in the hired carry-all. Griswold considered the alternative for the length of time it took the hotel porter to put the departing guest's luggage into the waiting vehicle. Then he turned his back and let the chance escape. The issue was fairly defined. To become a fugitive now was to plead guilty as charged—to open the door to chaos.

It was still quite early in the evening when the Inn conveyance set him down at the door of his lodgings in upper Shawnee Street. To the care-taking widow, who would have prepared a late dinner for him, he explained that he was going out again almost at once; and taking time only for a bath and a change, he set forth on the cross-town walk. It lacked something less than a half-hour of the time limit set in Miss Farnham's note, but he attached no special importance to that. He knew that the doctor's dinner-hour was early, and that in any event he could choose his own time for an evening call.

It nettled him angrily to find that the premonition of coming disaster was still with him when he crossed the Court House square and came into the main street a few doors from the Winnebago entrance. Attacking from a fresh vantage-ground it was warning him that the town hotel was the stopping-place of the man Broffin, and that he was taking an unnecessary hazard in passing it. Brushing the warning aside, he went on defiantly, and just before he came within identifying range of the loungers on the hotel porch an omnibus backed to the curb to deliver its complement of passengers from the lately met northbound train.

Griswold walked on until he was stopped by the sidewalk-blocking group of freshly arrived travellers pausing to identify their luggage as it was handed down from the top of the omnibus. Alertly watchful, he quickly recognized Broffin among the porch loungers, and saw him leave his tilted chair to saunter toward the steps. Then the fateful thing happened. One of the luggage-sorters, a clean-limbed, handsome young fellow with boyish eyes and a good-natured grin, wheeled suddenly and gripped him.

"Why, Griswold, old man!—well, I'll be dogged! Who on the face of the earth would ever have thought of finding you here? So this is where you came up, after the long, deep, McGinty dive, is it?" Then to one of his fellow travellers: "Hold on a minute, Johnson; I want you to shake hands with an old newspaper pal of mine from New York, Mr. Kenneth Griswold. Kenneth, this is Mr. Beverly Johnson, of the Bayou State Security Bank, in New Orleans."

Thus Bainbridge, sometime star reporter for the Louisianian, turning up at the climaxing instant to prove the crowded condition of an over-narrow world, much as Matthew Broffin had once turned up on the after-deck of the coastwise steamer Adelantado to prove it to him.

While Griswold, with every nerve on edge, was acknowledging the introduction which he could by no means avoid, Broffin drew nearer. From the porch steps he could both see and hear. Bainbridge, cheerfully loquacious, continued to do most of the talking. He was telling Griswold of the streak of good luck which had snatched him out of a reporter's berth in the South to make him night editor of one of the St. Paul dailies. Johnson was merely an onlooker. Broffin's eyes searched the teller's face. Thus far it was a blank—a rather bored blank.

"And you are on your way to St. Paul now?" Griswold said to the newspaper man. Broffin, whose ears were skilfully attuned to all the tone variations in the voice of evasion, thought he detected a quaver of anxious impatience in the half-absent query.

"Yes; I was going on through to-night, but Johnson, here, stumped me to stop over. He said I might be able to get a news story out of his sick president," Bainbridge rattled on. "Ever meet Mr. Galbraith? He is the bank president who was held up last spring, you remember; fine old Scotch gentleman of the Walter-Scott brand."

"When did you leave New Orleans?" Griswold asked; and now Broffin made sure he distinguished the note of anxiety.

"Two days back: missed a connection on account of high water in the Ohio. Might have stayed another twelve hours in the good old levee town if we'd only known, eh, Johnson?" And then again to Griswold: "Remember that supper we had at ChaudiÈre's, the night I was leaving for the banana coast? By George! come to think of it, I believe that was the last time we forgathered in the—Say, Kenneth, what have you done with your beard?"

Something clicked in Broffin's brain; then the wheels of the present slipped into gear with those of the past and the entire train moved on smoothly. The final doubt was cleared away. Griswold was the man whose story Bainbridge had told under the after-deck awning of the outward-bound fruit steamer; and the story in all its essentials was the same that Miss Grierson had told on the veranda of the De Soto. Broffin knew now why there had always been a haunting suggestion of familiarity in Griswold's face for him. He had seen and marked the "bloody-minded nihilist" of Bainbridge's story when the two were saying good-by on the banquette in front of ChaudiÈre's.

Broffin's right hand went swiftly to an inside pocket of his coat and when it was withdrawn a pair of handcuffs, oiled to noiselessness, came with it. Deftly the man-catcher worked them open, using only the fingers of one hand, and never taking his eyes from the trio on the sidewalk. One last step remained: if he could only manage to get speech with Johnson first——

During the trying interval Griswold had been fully alive to his peril. He had seen the swift hand-passing, and he knew what it was that Broffin was concealing in the hand which had made the quick pocket-dive. He knew that the crucial moment had come; and, as many times before, the savage fear-mania was gripping him. In the cold vise-nip of it he had become once more the cornered wild beast.

After the introduction to Johnson his hand had gone mechanically to his coat pocket. The demon at his ear was whispering "kill! kill!" and his fingers sought and found the weapon. While he was listening with the outward ear to Bainbridge's cheerful reminiscences, the little minutiÆ were arranging themselves: he saw where Broffin would step, and was careful to mark that none of the by-standers would be in range. He would wait until there could be no possibility of missing; then he would fire—from the pocket.

It was Johnson who broke the spell. While Bainbridge was insisting that Griswold should come in and make a social third at the hotel dinner-table, the teller picked up his hand-bag and mounted the steps. Griswold's brain fell into halves. With one of them he was making excuses to the newspaper man; with the other he saw Broffin stop Johnson and draw him aside.

What the detective was saying was only too plainly evident. Johnson wheeled short to face the sidewalk group, and Griswold could feel in every fibre of him the searching scrutiny to which he was being subjected. When he stole a glance at the pair on the porch, Johnson was shaking his head slowly; and he did it again after a second thoughtful stare. Griswold, missing completely now what Bainbridge was saying, overheard the teller's low-toned rejoinder to the detective's urgings: "It's no use, Mr. Broffin; I'd have to swear positively to it, you know, and I couldn't do that.... No, I don't want to hear your corroborative evidence; it might make me see a resemblance where there is none. Wait until Mr. Galbraith recovers: he's your man."

Griswold hardly knew how he made shift to get away from Bainbridge finally; but when it was done, and he was crossing the little triangular park which filled the angle between the business squares and the lake-fronting residence streets, he was sweating profusely, and the departing fear-mania was leaving him weak and tremulous.

Passing the stone-basined fountain in the middle of the park he stopped, jerked the pistol from his pocket, spilled the cartridges from its magazine, and stooped to grope for a loose stone in the walk-border. With the fountain base for an anvil and the loosened border stone for a hammer he beat the weapon into shapeless inutility and flung it away.

"God knows whom I shall be tempted to kill, next!" he groaned; and the trembling fit was still unnerving him when he went on to keep the appointment made by Charlotte Farnham.