On the day set for the trial of the Regan murder case the court-room at Mont-Mer was crowded. Long before ten o'clock men and women were flocking into the building, eager for the most desirable seats. Residents from some of the country districts brought their lunches and prepared to spend the day.

The court-house was an antique structure heated only by wood stoves, but the fur-coated and the threadbare rubbed elbows and were oblivious of drafts. For it is in the audience chamber of a criminal court that those who seek will find the true democracy. One touch of sensation makes the whole world kin.

A few hours before the trial Clinton Morgan arrived in town and was permitted to see the prisoner. The vigilance of the Mont-Mer officials did not preclude visitors, rather welcomed them as a possible means of gaining valuable information from the suspected murderer when he was off his guard. Dayton, who was in conference with his client when Clinton entered, was immensely relieved by the appearance of this new actor in the drama. "This thing seems to me to be a little too one-sided, professor," he remarked when introductions were over. "The court-room over there is jammed with people who expect to see us done to death. It's good to have an ally loom up in the offing."

He left them alone for a few moments while they waited for the sheriff, and Clinton measured his friend with an anxious eye. "I don't know what you could have thought of me for not coming sooner," he said, "but I couldn't possibly get away. You look all in, man. Haven't they been giving you anything to eat?"

"As much as I wanted." As he returned the grip of his hand, Kenwick was wondering if Clinton Morgan suspected that this encounter, in a prison cell, between himself and the brother of Marcreta filled his cup of humiliation to the brim. Her name was not mentioned by either of them. Clinton's whole attention was centered upon the developments in the case.

"You're not going to take the stand yourself, are you, Kenwick?" he questioned, standing with one foot upon the backless chair.

"I was, but Dayton has advised against it."

"Absolutely. You'd be at an immense disadvantage."

"I suppose so. I can furnish proof from Dr. Gregson Bennet, in the city, that I'm perfectly normal now. But after all, that doesn't really count for much with anybody but myself. It was such an immense comfort to me when he made the examination. I came away from his office feeling that it was going to clear up everything. But no matter what science says, I'll always be at a disadvantage."

Clinton laid a hand upon his shoulder. Ever since his first sight of him he had been trying to conceal the fact that Kenwick's altered appearance was a shock to him. And like the attempts of most straightforward men, the effort had been a failure. "Why, buck up, man," he admonished now. "They can't convict you, you know; not under—the circumstances. You haven't been thinking that?"

"I've been thinking a good many things since I came back to Mont-Mer," Kenwick answered slowly. "You see, Morgan, I know more now than I did when I was trying to ferret this thing out up in the city. For one thing, I know a little more about my adversary. As I've figured out this story now, it goes something like this.

"After that adventure out at Rest Hollow, Glover found himself in a hole. But there were three ways out of it for him. If he wanted to retain the grip that I think he has upon my estate, he had to choose between these. The first one was to make it appear that I was dead. This seems, at first thought, to be a hazardous venture, but it was not so difficult in my case as it would have been under normal circumstances. And when he first decided to take it I think he supposed that I was dead. He had every reason to think so. The man to whom he had entrusted me had mysteriously disappeared, and he had some strange woman come down and identify as himself a stranger who had been killed in an automobile tragedy; a very easy thing, in reality, you see. When Glover discovered, upon inquiry around town, that there had been such an accident, he concluded that I had been killed and that the man who was responsible for it was afraid to let him know and had made his escape after having himself declared dead. I haven't a doubt that Glover thought I was the man who was shipped up to San Francisco in a casket. And believing this, the whole thing seemed to play right into his hands. He knew, of course, that he couldn't keep his hold on my fortune forever, but he wanted to play the game until he got as much as he could out of it.

"But suddenly he discovered, by some means, that his whole hypothesis was wrong. He discovered that I was alive, and what was infinitely more appalling, that I was apparently restored to competency. He had been willing to risk my possible reappearance, you see, for if I were ever discovered wandering about deranged somewhere, I would have no means of identifying myself and, after a medical examination, would simply be committed to some institution. He would not have to connect himself with that at all. But since I had come to life mentally as well as physically, he had to take the second course—prove me irresponsible and have me sent to an asylum. How he went about this I don't know, but I'm sure that he must have attempted it. And I don't know either why he failed, for as I look back now upon some of my moves I can see that they might have appeared—erratic."

"I think," Clinton told him dryly, "that any of us could furnish convincing proof that we have been, at certain periods of our lives, dangerous to the public safety."

But Kenwick went on, unheeding this attempted solace.

"At any rate, Glover apparently failed in this attempt. So in order to get himself out of this mess, there is only one thing now for him to do." He broke off, eying his visitor with somber eyes. "You know what that is, Morgan. In order to save himself, he must prove me to be a cold-blooded murderer. Can he do it? Why shouldn't he? I'm certainly not in a position to offer any convincing opposition. A contemptuous pity is what I have read in the eyes of every person whom I've seen since this thing came to light. I don't suppose there is a person in this town who thinks I am innocent. I don't know whether Dayton himself does."

"But what motive could you have had for murder, Kenwick? You say that you never saw this Regan in your life."

"I say so, but what does my testimony amount to? And especially what does it amount to when I am trying to save my own skin? I told you once, Morgan, and I tell you again that it's impossible for a man to live down my sort of a past. He may get his eyes back out of the bramble-bush, but he'll never be able to make the world believe that he can really see with them. I feel sorry for Dayton. He's working day and night on this case, and he's a nice fellow. But he hasn't got any chance to make good on it. I feel sorry for him."

"I have been thinking," Clinton mused, "that there might be something out at Rest Hollow that would furnish a clue to help solve the question to the satisfaction of the jury, as to just when you arrived at that house, how long you stayed, and so on."

"The place is full of clues, of course," Kenwick admitted. "But by this time they have all been carefully arranged. Dayton went out there, and he told me that the public are not being admitted to the grounds at all. The place is under guard night and day. There may be danger there for Glover; I don't know anything about that, of course, but he knows. And whatever else you may say about him, you can't say that he has been asleep on this job."

The door opened to admit the sheriff. He shook hands with Clinton Morgan and nodded to Kenwick. In absolute silence the trio walked through the semitropical grounds to the court-house. As they entered the packed audience chamber the buzz of conversation stopped, and in deathly silence Roger Kenwick took his place.

The barrage of eyes leveled upon him was only partly visible through the haze that for the first few moments blurred his vision. He told himself that it was like that last charge, through blinding smoke, that he had made across No-Man's-Land. Then the scene cleared and individual faces emerged from the mist. There were the weather-beaten faces of ranch workers, the smug, complacent faces of those whom life has petted, the resolute faces of those who have come to see grim justice administered. Among them, here and there, was a scattering of veiled faces; women eager to see, but ashamed of being seen. Kenwick wondered contemptuously if some of the writers of the perfumed notes were among these.

During his dispassionate survey of the spectators he was acutely conscious of the presence of a man sitting at the far end of the table around which the lawyers were assembled. He had felt this personality when he first entered, but had reserved his attention until the blur of his surroundings should clear. Now he turned slowly in his chair and looked straight into the "tiger eyes" of Richard Glover. There was neither anger nor appeal in his own face; only a curious, questioning expression. An anthropologist who has stumbled upon some strange human relic unknown to his research might wear such an expression. Any physiognomist could have read in Kenwick's gaze the question, "What is this all about?"

And here again his adversary had him at a disadvantage. For his was not the mobile temperament which gives visible response to its emotional experiences. Life played upon Kenwick as upon a highly strung instrument, and drew from him whatever notes she needed in the universal symphony. But Richard Glover permitted no hand but his own to manipulate the keys of his life-board.

It was ten o'clock now but the trial seemed long in beginning. The judge had barely noticed Kenwick's entrance and continued an inaudible conversation with some one at his high desk. The district attorney, a florid little man who seemed to find difficulty in keeping on his eye-glasses, fussed with a mass of papers at the end of the long table and spoke occasionally to the bald-headed man on his right, who was evidently his colleague. Dayton leaned back in his chair and tapped the table impatiently with his pencil. Kenwick was surprised to see that the nervousness which his attorney had shown when he had visited him in jail seemed now to have completely disappeared.

There was an eminent surgeon among Kenwick's New York acquaintances who suffered from a nervous malady that was akin to palsy, and yet who, in the vital crisis of an operation, had a hand as steady as an embedded rock. He found himself wondering curiously now whether Dayton would develop under pressure an abnormal sagacity. Some miracle would have to intervene if he was to be saved from the ravenous clutches of fate.

Other persons were entering the court-room now and taking places that had evidently been reserved for them. Dayton leaned over and presented them at long distance to his client. "That fellow that just came in is Gifford, the undertaker. He got the jolt of his life when this thing blew up. Don't think he'll be much of a witness. He gets rattled. That chap with him is Dr. Markham. Ever see him before?"

Kenwick nodded. "He bandaged my leg that night in the drug-store. He'll remember it, too, for he was a little suspicious at the time that the sprain was older than I admitted. And I think he knew the man whose name I chanced to give as mine."

"Yes, that was a bad break, your chancing upon the name of Rogers. A fellow by that name was visiting out at the Paddington place, and although the doctor had never seen him, he had an engagement to play golf with him that afternoon out at the country club. Fortunately the man himself left town the next day so it wasn't as bad as it might have been. But it was an unfortunate thing, such a beast of a thing, that you should have given an assumed name at all."

"I suppose so. But that one seemed safe enough; it was my own name backwards. And I'd been through enough during the last twenty-four hours to make me cautious and secretive. And as it turned out, the taking of another name was the thing to do, Dayton. If I had hurled 'Roger Kenwick' into that group, I imagine that some one would have made connections and turned me over to the lunacy commission. My guardian angel was on the job when I decided to keep my identity a secret that night."

Dayton surveyed him with obvious satisfaction. It was a good sign that Kenwick had thrown off some of his former apathy. And yet there still remained a cold indifference about him, a sort of contemptuous disregard of the crowded room, that for a man of Kenwick's caliber and social position seemed to him inexplicable. He had an uncomfortable conviction that this inscrutable self-possession would not take well with the jury; that it somehow gave credence to the theory of the prosecution that the prisoner was a hardened criminal. The local reporters were already busy with their pencils. And Dayton could visualize a paragraph in the evening sheet beginning, "Roger Kenwick himself showed a complete indifference to the proceedings which——"

The conference with the judge had ended and he was rapping for order. The charge against the prisoner was read and the tedious task of impaneling the jury began. Dayton paid little attention to the formal process of getting the legal machinery into action, except to object in a decisive voice to three or four of the prospective jurymen. Aside from these interruptions, he continued to identify the various witnesses to his client, in an impersonal, entertaining manner, like the official guide on a personally conducted excursion.

A short, ruddy man in long overcoat entered and cast impatient eyes about the room for a seat. One was immediately brought in for him from an adjoining room. "Annisen, ex-coroner," Dayton explained. "He's got a fine position now as health officer somewhere in Missouri. He hated like hell to come back and get mixed up in this fracas. You see, he never was a howling success out here; made the mistake of knocking the climate when he first came out, and no southern California town can stand for that. And then, he had too many irons in the fire all the time, and neglected his official position sometimes. I have a haunting suspicion myself that he didn't spend any too much of his valuable time over the examination of your supposed remains. We don't need to fear him; he'll be a reluctant witness."

He swung about in his chair to announce himself satisfied with the twelve men who had been selected to try the case, and then engaged for a moment in conversation with the district attorney.

Kenwick turned his gaze to the window where he could see the date-palms from a new angle, their curving leaves motionless now in the still wintry air. The swinging doors of the court-room fanned incessantly back and forth, but he no longer felt any interest in the hostile faces of the witnesses. His mind was wandering back along the sun-lighted path of his boyhood to the days when he had mother, father, and brother, and had never suspected that he would ever lose any of them. It was a good thing, though, he told himself bitterly, a good thing that they were gone; that the last of the Kenwicks should go down in disgrace without spreading the cankerous taint to anyone else of that proud name. The imminent exposÉ appeared to him all at once in the guise of a mighty tree, which was holding its place in the earth only by a single supporting root. Now that root was to be chopped away. The house of Kenwick was to fall. But in its fall it would harm no one else. For the tree had long stood alone, solitary and leafless amid the white wastes of life.

He became aware at last that the buzzing noise of the court-room had increased. There seemed to be some new excitement in the air. He brought his eyes back from the courtyard and glanced inquiringly at Dayton. But he had leaned forward in response to a curt signal from the district attorney. Every one except the jurymen was talking in low tones with some one else. In their double row of seats the twelve newly-sworn judges sat solemnly silent, freighted with a sense of their responsibility.

Whence the news came Kenwick never knew, for during the moments just preceding he had been deep in reverie and had lost connection with his surroundings. But whatever it was, it seemed all at once to be upon every one's tongue. Those who did not know were eagerly seeking information from their neighbors. Kenwick's eyes swept the room, puzzled. Dayton would doubtless tell him when he finished his conference. But before he had time to gain the knowledge from this source, it was hurled at the court-room from behind the lawyer's table. The district attorney evidently deemed this the only way to quiet the increasing tumult. He got to his feet, and flapping the fugitive eye-glasses between his fingers, faced the judge and made one brief statement, unembellished by explanation or judicial comment.

"Your Honor, news has just been received from a reliable source that the house at Rest Hollow has burned to the ground!"