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 Some fairly honest man who had been lucky in a game might suffer. So Major Cottrell was obliged to confine himself to denunciations, expressed to equally indignant neighbors who called at his house, and through the newspaper, which ran off an extra in the middle of the week to spread the disastrous intelligence of defeat.

For a few days it appeared that Simrall's purchased victory was not going to avail the town anything. The county officials, with the one exception of the sheriff, refused to recognize the election as valid. They announced their intention of remaining in the court house at Damascus until the courts had passed on the question. The sheriff, whose sympathies had been with the opposition all the time, removed himself and the records of his office to Simrall, leaving a deputy in charge of the prisoners in jail.

The sheriff had no sooner removed his spittoon and swivel chair from the old county seat to the new, than the citizens of Simrall made demand on the remaining county officials to follow suit, and bring their records and books, as well as the county funds, along. The matter hung that way a day or two, Damascus standing fast in its entrenchments waiting word from the county attorney.

Dr. Hall was not particularly touched by the turn of the election, not having been able yet to imagine a possible future for himself in that town. The general disappointment reflected on him from his belligerent friend, Cottrell, and that veteran's townsite partner, Judge Waters. The judge had followed the county attorney to Topeka, called by telegraph to lend his argument to the cause. Hall missed his stately, gander-like presence on the street. It seemed as if the very essence of Damascus

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 had gone with him, that it must droop like a plantain leaf in the hot sun, to revive no more, if mischance should prevent his return.

Summer was beginning to concentrate its powers on the gray, buffalo-grass region west of Dodge. Inside the boxcar office Dr. Hall found the heat intolerable from midday onward well into the night, although Little Jack Ryan protested cheerfully, even hopefully, that this was only a little sip of a sample. Wait till the latter days of July, and from then on to October, he said, with what seemed a pride in the man-killing rigors of those blazing, quivering, long white days.

Out of gratitude for Dr. Hall's ministrations to Mrs. Ryan, Jack had contrived an awning from an old tent which made a little thumbnail of shade before the office door. Here, in spite of his conspicuosity in the eyes of all who traversed Custer Street between depot and square, Dr. Hall regularly planted a chair of afternoons, and took what comfort he could from a book.

The never-ceasing southwest wind had begun to blow harder, coming hot and shriveling from the grates of whatever inferno bred it to blast and torture the Kansas plains. It felt at times, along about three o'clock of a cloudless afternoon, that it would almost singe the hair. Wild sunflowers by the roadside hung despondently, the gray bunch-grass stood sere and brittle. On what had been the cattle range until a little while past, now dotted by plank huts of homesteaders, a vast transformation had fallen. The refreshing rills which had sparkled down the old buffalo trails a few weeks earlier, promising water in abundance, had dried up to the last drop; their hard-baked beds were cracked.

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 Good water was a grave problem among the settlers, who had depended largely on these springtime rivulets. One must bore deep to strike the living water that flowed from the mountains in widespread stream beneath those shaggy swells. It was a process beyond the means of most homesteaders, who were hauling water already long distances from the Arkansas River, or the few creeks which emptied into it. This water carried a heavy alkaline content, which brought illness to those unaccustomed to its use, especially true in the case of children. A few cases of typhoid had occurred; less dangerous enteric disorders were widespread.

Dr. Hall had responded to several calls from stricken families in instances where Old Doc Ross either could not or would not go. Ross was a hard bargainer, his invariable rule being the demand of payment for each visit in advance. His rate for country visits was two dollars, a large sum to the poor homesteader. If the caller could not produce the amount, or give satisfactory assurance that it would be paid on reaching his house, Ross refused to go. Hall never declined to attend one of these cases; feeling that, as he made no charge for his services and Ross had refused to act, he was not cutting any ground from under his unworthy confrère.

Due to Hall's charitable practice, the impression got sown abroad over the country that the railroad doctor at Damascus was a sort of free, public institution, something like the well in the court house square. It took a lot of explaining; many a man was obliged to go to Old Doc Ross and dig up two dollars after having counted on having the services of this public physician free. Whether Old Doc Ross appreciated this fair dealing, Hall did not

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 know. While the old fellow was holding an unprecedented streak of sobriety, he never bent from his stiff, unforgiving attitude of lofty indifference, passing Hall, ignoring his friendly salutations, as if he were a shadow in his path.

Dr. Hall was sitting under his awning on a certain afternoon while the event of the county seat contest was still swinging undetermined, no definite encouragement having come from Topeka. It was especially hot and parching that afternoon, the steady wind pouring over the shimmering, treeless spaces drying the skin until it had a sandy feel to the touch. Nance, the station agent, came out of his office, standing bareheaded in the blazing sun, looking up and down the track. Then he came down the platform toward Hall, walking fast, as if he must go somewhere and back on an errand before some unexpected train, carrying no telling what dread and mighty official, might come along and catch him off duty.

Hall noticed Nance's appearance, and start in his direction, watching him with a divided interest, thinking he might be going to the White Elephant for a glass of beer. He remarked how the rails wavered and seemed to throw off a hot vapor, as if they were dissolving in the heat of the sun; to writhe and shimmer in the distance, where they came to a point down the long stretch of straight track. He thought of the jerries out there, toiling with heavy sledges, tamping-picks, bars so hot they would take the skin off the toughest hand unless kept driven into the ground when not in use. People who complained of life's hardships must go up against something like that, he thought, before they could qualify for a certificate of experience.

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 Nance crossed the little desert of cinders, pulled up before Hall, and stopped.

"Hello, Doc," he said, looking around in his sniffing, rabbit sort of way, like a man who could not even call his body, to say nothing of his soul, his own.

"Hello, Nance," Hall returned languidly, eyes turned away from the fascination of the shimmering rails a moment, open book fluttering its pages in the wind.

"Say, Doc, it ain't none of my business, and I don't want to be buttin' in, and I may be gittin' in bad by tellin' you," Nance said, sparring and sidling, but all the time straining his buttons to keep in some kind of news.

"What's up?" Hall inquired, alert and interested.

"I don't know as I've got any business tellin' you, Doc, and I may be gittin' in bad when I do, but you'll keep it under your hat where you got the tip, won't you, Doc?"

"You know it, Nance. What's happened?"

"Nothing's happened, but something's goin' to happen. I've just been talkin' with the operator at Simrall—but this is on the q.t., Doc, you understand?"

Hall nodded, his interest beginning to wilt. It was too hot for a piece of railroad gossip to hold a man's backbone stiff, especially when he had to wait on a cautious man like Nance to come over the fence with it.

"He called me," said Nance, pausing to spy around to see that nobody else was near, "to tell me they're gittin' up a crowd in Simrall to come down here and move the court house—but of course that was only a josh. What they're comin' after is the books, records, money—everything loose. He called me to put me wise."

"When are they coming, did he say?"

"Right away. He said they had four wagonloads of

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 men and all kinds of guns. I thought you might want to tip it off to Burnett and the boys up-town."

"I don't know," Hall meditated. "I suppose they ought to be told, so they can get ready to stand them off—if they've got it in them to do it."

"Well, as a favor I ask you to keep my name out of it, Doc. I'm tellin' you because you stood by me one time when I needed a friend."

"You can breathe easy," Hall said. "Isn't that Six whistlin' up there?"

"She's about due, she was reported out of Simrall on time." Nance consulted his watch as he spoke, in the railroad habit of looking at a watch when any matter of time or circumstance of whatever nature is discussed.

"I'll tell them one of the boys on Six tipped it off to me," Hall said. "I'll ask one or two of them about it when she stops."

"You're a prince, Doc. I thought you'd want to tell that old major, anyhow—he's a good old guy, I kind of wanted him to know. But a man in my position's got to be careful. Sure. You know that, Doc."

"Thanks, old feller. We'll work it as carefully as if we were going to blow a safe."

Nance gave him the high-sign to show his appreciation of the promised secrecy, and trotted back to his bay window. There he was seen a few moments later, in due and official form, leaning out to look up the track at Number Six, which was rounding the curve three-quarters of a mile away, coming down under gravity, safety-valve singing, but scarcely a flag of the escaping steam seen in that superheated air.

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jumped to its guns with the fervor of a righteous cause. Major Cottrell spread the news of Simrall's impending raid, throwing off his weakness as a bedridden person is said to overcome his sickness in the menace of death by fire.

There were some who questioned the report at first, inquiring its source, the habit of humor being so well established in the town as to cause its citizens to poke every tied bag and turn every buffalo chip to look for the joke before accepting anything for what it appeared on the outside to be. Several young men leaped the saddled horses which always could be found hitched around the square, and rode off in the direction of Simrall to investigate, and the county clerk, who owned a spyglass, mounted the court house tower to take a peek at the road, which undulated over the hummocks like the picture of a tapeworm in the almanac.

It was a true report, the county clerk said, coming down from the tower white around the gills, sweating, with cobwebs across his extensive forehead, which occupied all the ground where his forelock used to be. He calculated them to be about three miles out of Simrall, with five to come. There were four wagonloads of them, escorted by a troop of horsemen, which appeared to number twenty or thirty. There were enough of them,

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 he said, to wipe Damascus off the map and never leave a mark.

This report from aloft flashed around the square, quickening the preparations for defense. Men were locking up their stores, piling goods boxes, barrels of salt and sugar, sacks of flour and even hams, in the windows to prevent the bullets doing damage among their shelves. Women and children were hurried into the cellars, with instructions to stay there until the fight was over unless driven out by fire. Many of these were struggling to their places of concealment carrying feather beds and pillows, the frontier faith in feather beds to stop bullets being firmer grounded than anybody's experience justified.

Major Cottrell was standing at the head of the court house steps, where he had fought his unequal battle against the Simrall raiders of another day, his pistol ready to his hand, a rifle on his shoulder. On account of his military experience and his official position in the county, the major was looked on as leader.

Other armed men were coming, not at all warlike in appearance, peaceable family men in shirt sleeves, the butcher with his apron tucked up at the corner like an ancient apprentice, the druggist with his eyeglasses and upstanding hair. The Baptist preacher was seen coming with a double-barreled shotgun. He stopped to question Kraus, who appeared to have a sudden pressure of business in the opposite direction.

Meantime, Elizabeth Cottrell and Dr. Hall were collecting the county's funds, small books and documents, which they carried to the bank and locked in the vault. The bank's safe was not large enough to admit the county recorder's books, the things most desired by the Simrall

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 people. The title to every piece of real estate in the county depended on those records, of which no complete abstract had been made. Let Simrall get its hands on the books, and the county officials would have to surrender.

Hall returned to Cottrell's office from a hurried dash across to the bank with some last sheaves of papers, to find Elizabeth standing before the pile of broad, flat books in which land titles were recorded. This array of records had grown fast in the past six months of the county's history; heaped as they two had stacked them in the hope of being able to get them into the bank vault, the pile was almost half as high as Elizabeth, three tiers wide.

"This is likely to be a very serious affair," Hall said.

"I'm afraid there's going to be a terrible fight!" she replied. She was standing with her hand on the books, in a pose of affectionate protection. Her face was very pale.

"Your father's in no condition to take a hand in this, but he'll not listen to anything. He's running on the pressure of excitement, likely to snap like an icicle any minute."

"They won't let me have a gun!" she complained indignantly. "Dad says I must go home, it's no place for a woman, but I'd be more good to them than the best man in the bunch, except him. They're not fighting men, Dr. Hall."

"No, that's the pity of it. They'll throw their lives away in this foolish quarrel, fighting for so little. This old dump! The whole thing involved isn't worth the life of one man, much less five or six—maybe more—that are

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 likely to be killed here to-day. I think your father's right. Home is the place for you, Elizabeth."

"What are you going to do?" she inquired, lifting her anxious eyes. "You haven't got any gun."

"It isn't my fight, Elizabeth," he replied gently, meeting her questioning glance steadily. He touched her hand where it pressed the books. She drew it away, subconsciously, it seemed, shaking her head.

"It's everybody's fight to-day," she said.

"I'm an outsider," he reminded her, "but Damascus doesn't appear to be a respecter of persons in its brawls. It has reached out and involved the innocent bystander before; it may do it again. If anything like that happens I'll have to act on the impulse. That's all I can say, Elizabeth."

"But you haven't got a gun," she insisted, in a half complaining, half blaming way.

"I'll make out without one," he replied, somewhat stiffly, his dignity touched by her manner of indictment for what she too plainly believed his remission in a manly duty.

"It's suicide to meet that Simrall crowd without a gun," she continued her censorious arraignment. "I've always told you a man couldn't face the music in this country without a gun, and now you'll see I'm right. Rustle around and get one, can't you, before they come?"

"That would spot me at once as an enemy to Simrall, which I'm not," he replied, disloyally, she believed, as the the sudden flush of her cheeks gave token.

"I shouldn't think you'd want somebody else to do your shooting for you all the time," she rebuked him, a

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 little note of meanness in her voice, a little squint of meanness in her eyes.

If she expected to hurt him that way, or urge him by such nagging to abandon the calm attitude of indifference toward the quarrel which he held to be contemptuous and of small account, it was proof that she had not plumbed him any deeper than the rind. He grinned, untouched by her innuendo, bending the toes of his polished shoes as if he tried the flexibility of their soles for a race he was about to enter, lifting his heels slightly from the floor, legs spread a little, his whole attitude benignant, patronizing, tolerant.

"As long as I'm not in debt to you for it, I don't give a damn," he replied, so unexpectedly, so surprisingly out of his character, as to make her start, much as if somebody had sneaked up behind her and shot off a gun.

Whatever Elizabeth had in mind to say, and it was certain from her bridling look that she had plenty, was cut off by the arrival in the square of the young men who had ridden out on the Simrall road a little while before. They had gone a little sheepishly, like men who expected to be sold, making a joke of it, with light words and humorous quips; they had come back with the humor wrung out of them, feeling more like going on than stopping, if there had been any place to go.

Simrall was coming, every able-bodied man in the place, it seemed, approaching deliberately, the riders holding back to keep with the wagons. They were not more than three miles away.

Major Cottrell had been laying his plan of defense before the men gathered around him at the court house steps. The fervor that had seemed to animate this crowd

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 of citizens was cooling off like a blaze in a pile of shavings. It had come up with a roar, mounted to its height in a moment, and fallen to nothing more than a little wavering smoke before the excited scouts galloped up with their appalling confirmation of the county clerk's long-distance espionage. Some of them began to hedge; to debate the advisability of offering armed defense of a position which a court decision might pronounce illegal in the end.

Among the advocates of this policy stood the lumber dealer and a lawyer named Pettyjohn, the latter a lank usurer of hard repute, but a man of persuasive tongue. Burnett, Dine Fergus, and the other notable humorists of the town were not present, although Hall had seen Larrimore skulking on the edge of the crowd as if he dodged around in the hope of picking somebody's pocket or finding something that had been lost.

The weight of these men's opinion had effect; others spoke up in support of that policy of nonresistance. Some of the crowd began to drift around the corner of the building and disappear; others turned calculative eyes up the road toward Simrall, as if figuring on whether they had time to make it to cover and hide their guns before the raiders appeared. Their guns appeared to have grown heavy in their hands.

Major Cottrell heard these vacillating citizens with scorn. They were strangers in his country, men of another age. He denounced them as pusillanimous cowards, unworthy usurpers of brave men's places in a country that was too big for them in all its dimensions. He called for volunteers to stand by him and fight for the honor of the town and county.

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 To this call there was a very feeble response. Peters, leader of the cowboy band, sleeves rolled up from his stringy forearms, just as he had turned from making stovepipe to pick up his rifle and run to the square; the butcher, wearing his apron with the corner turned up, to get it out of the way of his legs, perhaps, or maybe to remove any doubt or question of the sex it shrouded; the blacksmith, who was a grave, slow-spoken negro, with a grayness creeping into his kinky beard; the druggist, looking frightened and anything but a dependable recruit.

These four, and these four only, out of the business men and others whose interests were centered in Damascus, stood forward to signify their willingness to fight for what they believed to be their rights.

Major Cottrell regarded this little bunch of volunteers, all that was left out of the first eager grabbing of guns and running, with a softening of his stern aspect. The others were leaving, singly, in pairs and groups, heads laid together, no doubt arguing the justification of their act.

"I don't give a damn how it looks," the lumberman said defiantly, turning for a shot in answer to Major Cottrell's unspoken contempt for them in comparison with the little group before him, "I've got thirty thousand dollars' worth of lumber in my yard, and I can't afford to have it burnt."

"Let the law take its course, as it inevitably will," said Pettyjohn, striding off beside the lumber dealer.

"Thank you, gentlemen," said Major Cottrell, speaking to the four men who remained with him defenders of the town.

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 He went down the steps, shook hands with them, with a hearty word of commendation for each.

"If they open my heart when I'm dead, as the old queen said, they'll find your names engraved there," he said. "But I can't accept your sacrifice, gentlemen. For it would be a sacrifice with only a handful of us against them. You are honorably discharged. Go home; leave it to me alone."

Dr. Hall and Elizabeth had gone to the window when the scouts arrived, where they had stood listening to the report from the road, and the subsequent proposals and arguments. As Major Cottrell turned from his few valiant townsmen, after dismissing them honorably, Hall saw him stumble at the threshold of the court house, and heard his rifle fall.

Hall ran to the corridor, where he found the butcher supporting Major Cottrell, who was standing with a hand braced against the wall, his head drooping, making a determined struggle to keep on his feet. The old man grappled weakly to support himself against Hall's shoulder, lifting his head for a moment, mortal agony in his appealing eyes.

They carried Major Cottrell into his disordered office, where the pile of records which he would have given his life to defend stood in the middle of the floor. He was unconscious when they laid him on the floor, Hall's coat under his head. His gaunt white face was drawn more in an expression of sadness than suffering, as if the thought of yielding the county he had built out of the wilderness, and the town he had fathered in his pride, over to men too base to stand in their defense, had overwhelmed him and broken his heart.

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 Dr. Hall sent the druggist to his office for his medical case, and the blacksmith to the hotel for blankets and a pillow. He was kneeling beside Major Cottrell, hand over the old man's fluttering heart, Elizabeth opposite, stroking her father's face, calling to him in little coaxing endearments. She implored Dr. Hall with her eyes. He tried to avoid them, for they carried an appeal which he knew no resources of his could meet.

Jim Justice would not trust any hands but his own with his bedclothes, which he came carrying clasped against his round front, encircled by both arms. Jim knew the armful of bedding would be his passport into the room where Major Cottrell lay. His curiosity to know the nature and extent of the old man's visitation was greater than his fear of the Simrall men. Jim was in a state of dishabille common to him at that hour of the day, without coat, collar or vest, his broad red suspenders conspicuous across his white shirt. He almost wedged in the door with his load. Dr. Hall motioned the major's four supporters to come in after Justice, and closed the door.

Elizabeth hurried away at Dr. Hall's suggestion to bring her mother, while the men in the room worked rapidly under the doctor's direction, building a low couch for Major Cottrell out of the county records. They spread these under the window at the farthest point from the door, covering them with blankets. Dr. Hall was engaged with hypodermic needle, attempting to stimulate the old man's weary heart, hoping to tide him over until his wife might see him once more with the spark of life in his body.

They composed Major Cottrell in dignity on his hard couch of books, where he lay apparently lifeless, his face

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 white as the pillow, his breath so weak there was no perceptible movement.

"They're comin'!" Justice announced, turning from the window, his drowned mustache almost bristling as he suddenly realized his predicament. "They're comin'!" he repeated, standing faced half around from the window, his mouth open, apparently struck immovable in his boots. "God A'mighty, men! let me out o' here!"

"You've done all you can do for him, gentlemen," Dr. Hall told the others as the door banged after Justice. "There's no use in compromising yourselves by being caught here with guns. Leave them here, and go home."

"We promised we'd stand by him, Dr. Hall," Peters said with quiet dignity. "The records they're coming after are here. They'll not respect his condition—"

"I'll answer to the people of this town and county for their records," Hall replied. "Major Cottrell swore me in deputy recorder and treasurer before he'd allow me to touch a paper, or a dollar of the funds. He tried to tell me something out there in the hall when I went to him; he couldn't speak, but I read it in his eyes. He passed it on to me, gentleman. It was his lone fight up to that minute. Now it's mine."

Hall pushed them gently from the room, denying their protests with stern countenance, stern shaking of the head, as he urged them on their way, but said not another word. Peters was the last to go; he held to his gun until Hall wrenched it out of his hand at the threshold, and closed the door on his reluctant heels.

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came riding into Damascus at the head of his forces, pretty well filling the seat of his buckboard, bending the slatted platform of it under his weight. From a big man in the beginning, he had grown through inactivity and indulgence into a very tun of a man, his chin lying in rings against his collar-bone. He had a little streak of black mustache, thin as a mandarin's, which ran out to almost a single hair at the points, ridiculous adornment in his vast red countenance.

Dr. Hall, watching the invaders from the window of Major Cottrell's office, saw the suspicion with which they marked the quietude and passivity of Damascus. Merchants had removed the hurried barriers out of their windows and opened their doors; people were passing about their business, or pretense of business, with no more apparent concern than if the visitors had come to do peaceful trading, with money in their hands instead of guns. It was the biggest surprise for Simrall that could have been devised.

All this indifference, this outward show of innocence, was only a blind covering a trap of some kind, the leader of the raiders believed, as shown by his cautious movements, his hurried posting of mounted men around the square, his conference with lieutenants before the court house steps. A wagon was drawn up before the main

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 door, guarded by four men with repeating rifles; a squad of half a dozen or so, led by Simrall, marched up the steps.

Dr. Hall knew Simrall had picked his most determined men for that charge to the very seat of their objective. They came into the corridor noisily, brave fellows, Hall credited them, not knowing when a burst of shots from one of the numerous doors might cut them down. They stopped at the county recorder's office, trying the door. Finding it locked, one beat on it with something harder than a human fist.

"Cottrell, open this door!" came the peremptory demand.

Dr. Hall crossed to the door softly, opened it, to be confronted by Simrall, pistol in his fist. Hall was coatless, his shirt sleeves were tucked up. He held a hypodermic syringe in his hand, poised carefully, as if he had been disturbed in applying it to his patient. He kept one hand on the door, opening it only partly, but enough to give them a sight of Major Cottrell on his bed under the window.

"Open her up!" Simrall ordered, making a gesture with his gun.

"What's all this about?" Hall inquired, simulating surprise, but holding the door as it was.

"You know damn well, and none of your stallin'!" Simrall replied. "We're after the county books."

"Gentlemen," Hall said softly, "I've got a mighty sick man in here—I'm Dr. Hall, the railroad physician. Major Cottrell's been struck by an internal hemorrhage. He's a dying man."

"He can do all the dyin' he damn pleases after we take

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 them books," Simrall said. "It's a bluff you fellers're tryin' to put over on us—I thought there was something suspicious in the looks of this town."

Simrall gave the door a sudden push, throwing it wide open. Hall stepped quickly in front of him as he started to enter, his men crowding behind.

"Gentlemen, I'm a deputy in this office for the time being, and I can't permit you to come in," Hall said firmly, stretching his arms across the door to bar Simrall's way. "You're on the wrong scent, there's nothing here you want. We heard you were coming before you left Simrall. We removed every dollar, every scrap of paper, to a safe place. You can see for yourselves there's nothing here."

"I'll see for myself, all right," Simrall replied. He swung his gun to brush Hall aside, pushing his big body, which fairly filled the door, into the room.

Hall plunged the hypodermic needle against Simrall's paunch.

"Drop that gun!" he ordered, his quick words sharp with warning.

Simrall was caught between doubt and fear, plainly expressed in his hesitant manner, the surprised look of cheapness in his face. The point of the needle was biting through his shirt, cold tooth that carried what venom he did not know. He tried to squirm away from it. Hall grabbed his open vest, one stout suspender with it, jerking him suddenly forward until the needle gouged him to the quick. Simrall dropped the gun.

"There's enough strychnine in this needle to kill you in thirty seconds," Hall declared. "If any man out there lifts a gun I'll jab it to your gizzard! Send them out of

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 here. As soon as Mrs. Cottrell and her daughter come, I'll meet you out in front. I'm responsible for the county books; I'll answer to you for them."

Mrs. Cottrell and Elizabeth were in the corridor that moment, their way blocked by Simrall's men. The presence of the two women, their distracted appearance, the panting eagerness of the elder one to reach the room, her piteous entreaties to let her pass, convinced the men that Dr. Hall was not playing a part in a trick to deceive them. They cleared a way for the women to pass. Hall, still pressing the needle to Simrall's stomach, backed him into the corridor, kicked his gun into the room and closed the door.

That done, Dr. Hall put the bright little instrument in its case, stuck it in his pocket, motioned Simrall to the outer door.

"Go on; I'll talk to you outside."

"Simrall went as far as the front door, where his followers had stopped, a certain respect, if not much sympathy, in them for Major Cottrell's wife and daughter. Simrall snatched a gun from one of them, and jammed it against Hall's ribs.

"I'll make you swaller that damn squirtgun!" he threatened. "Are them books in that office?"

Dr. Hall looked at Simrall with an expression of amused tolerance, as if to say he considered him quite harmless and quite comical, but not impressive in his threatening attitude. He stretched himself with a high superiority of ease, seeming to grow two inches or more, while Simrall and the others, not accustomed to this sort of silent expression of gratification, thought he was gathering himself to throw some sort of trick. Three rifles

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 were thrown down on him while he still balanced on his toes; Simrall screwed the gun against his short ribs as if to bore him to the gall.

"Are the books in there?" Simrall asked again.

"I told you everything was taken out of that office, Mr. Simrall."

"Where are they?"

"In a safe place," Hall replied calmly.

"You'll stick around with us till we search this buildin'," Simrall announced. "If we don't find the books, we'll see if there ain't some way to make you tell the truth. We'll start at the recorder's office."

The search didn't go very well in that quarter. Simrall and the two men who started with him in such fullfeathered assurance came back with a good deal more speed than they went, ducking and dodging, running doubled as if they had touched off a blast which they expected to shower them with rocks before they could get to cover.

"Them two hellions!" Simrall puffed, safe around the angle of the wall.

"Guns enough in there to start an army," said a cowboy-looking little old chap with a grizzled tuft of whiskers.

"I ain't a fightin' women, nohow!" another one of the bunch declared, in that renunciatory tone of a man who has picked up something too hot to hold.

At this declaration the youngest man in the crowd winked, grinning broadly, directing his pleasantries: to Hall, in which quarter he rightly calculated they would be most appreciated. Hall was standing with his back against the wall, a look of unconcern on his face that he

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 did not entirely feel, raising himself to his toes: up and down, up and down, with the gusto of a man who had eaten a good dinner and felt at peace with everybody, especially himself.

Simrall looked on these gymnastics with ill-favoring eye.

"Yes, by hell! I'll give you stretchin' enough if we don't find them books!" he said.

Simrall sent a man to the tower, to see if they had hauled the books up there; he led the expedition from room to room of the building himself, even to the basement, Hall meantime in custody of the winking young man, outside on the front steps.

"We've been hearin' about you over in Simrall, Doc," the guard said.

"I'd like to believe it was something good, but I don't," Hall replied.

Hall was roaming his eyes around the square, glad to see the placidity that seemed to rest on the town in spite of this burglarious invasion of its rights. The Simrall men were stretched out in a long line covering Custer Street and the front of the court house, suspicious and alert, even a little anxious. There was not a ripple of excitement, scarcely of interest, in the town.

The barber was lounging in his door, smoking a cigar, shoulder against the jamb; the butcher could be seen moving around behind his counter, his white cap with red letters—it was a soda advertisement—quite plain. From Peters' hardware store a tinny sound of hammering issued, like a chant of some hard-legged insect among the bushes. A few boys were standing near the corner of the saloon, ready to scoot at the first shot. Pink Fergus

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 was putting her false-fronted head out of the door and drawing it back, like a hen in a coop.

"Yeh. We heard how you bluffed the crowd that was after Gus Sandiver with a sponge soaked full of water," the young man said, grinning widely, showing short, worn teeth and red gums, as if he had been gnawing his subsistence out of hard things since very early in life. "Yeh, and I'm bettin' that was a bluff you run on Simrall, too. I'm bettin' I could swaller all the strickenine you had in that gun and never gag."

"You'd lose," Hall told him, confidently, taking the little case from his vest pocket. "If you've got any doubt, just stick out your arm."

The young man shuffled back, presenting his rifle threateningly.

"You stand right there, pardner! you stand right there!" he said.

"Just as you feel about it," Hall replied indifferently, as if he had offered something that the young man had been the loser by refusing.

Dr. Hall looked at his watch with the bored air of a man kept waiting in an appointment that was of little consequence to him. A train whistled faintly, far to the west. Dr. Hall drew out his watch again, although he had slipped it into his pocket only a second before, in the railroad habit of looking at the watch to identify by time everything that goes on wheels. He stood that way, watch in his palm, head turned to listen for the whistle again, and at that minute, full of interest and speculation for the young man with the rifle, Ora Simrall and his searching crew came out of the court house basement.

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 Simrall beckoned for the guard to bring Hall down.

Simrall's humor had not improved with the prospect of his expedition turning out a failure. The prisoners in jail had guyed them as they went poking into the empty cells, not willing to take the deputy sheriff's word that no records had been hidden there. This deputy was a loyal Damascus man. When Simrall had tried to make him tell what he knew about the removal of the records, he had hinted darkly that they had been shipped out of the county on Number Six that afternoon.

"Dr. Hall, you've got a name of bein' a purty shrewd kind of a man," Simrall addressed him, puffing and mopping his hot face. "Throwin' a bluff seems to be your long suit, but I want to tell you now you're goin' past the limit of this game. We've got one more place to look for the record books of this county, and if we don't find them there you and me we'll have a little session off to the side between ourselves. We're not goin' back without them records. If they've been shipped out of this county, you'll answer for it."

"They haven't been sent out of the county; I can assure you on that point," Hall replied.

"You'll have to tell us what you've done with them, Hall. You can't stall around this way any longer. But we'll take a look in your office as we go by."

Simrall appeared to be in earnest, but it was hard to tell how far he would go to get what he wanted out of Hall, for he was not a convincing sort of man. Hall did not feel himself in any danger, although Simrall added two men on horseback, who carried ropes on their saddles, to his picked gang of six as they started down Custer Street toward the railroad. There were trees along the

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 river. Between them and the ropes, there seemed to be some sort of hint of Simrall's intention delicately suggested, Hall believed.

Hall did not like the notion of parading the street as a prisoner. More than that, he was troubled deeply over the final outcome of this affair, for he knew he could not go on stalling them off from their final search of Cottrell's office, which they were sure to make when all other sources failed. No matter what he might tell them under stress, it would not be where the books were. That was his solemn decision as he went along the dusty street, the young man's rifle close to his shoulder-blade.

And Elizabeth and her mother would fight. There was no doubt about that. With the guns left by Peters and the others in the room they could stand the raiders off a while, but no longer than the ammunition in the magazines lasted. It would be a deplorable finale to this unfortunate day.

As he walked among his armed escort down Custer Street, Hall thought nobody in town appeared to be greatly interested in what was going to happen to him. While he did not hope for any attempt to rescue him, he did feel a little hurt, in a foolish, prideful way, that nobody even came to the door to see him pass.

The was coming down to the switch head, loafing along to give the brakeman time to run ahead and throw the switch, as they arrived with Hall in front of his office. Mrs. Charles and her daughters were interested, and anxious, spectators of this proceeding.

They were grouped in the kitchen door, Mrs. Charles carrying a big yellow bowl which she wiped vigorously by spells with a cloth, running her hand round and round

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 its wide mouth. She would stop this wiping abruptly, to turn and say something to one of the girls, or lean out a little to try and catch what was being said by the men with guns who were marching Dr. Hall among them. Then she would wipe again, furiously, as if she had to engender fire in the yellow bowl to heat up the jerries' supper.

The worktrain was worming down the siding, where it would come to a stand presently between Mrs. Charles' kitchen and Dr. Hall's boxcar office. The engine was not more than five or six rails' length away when Mrs. Charles saw a large fat man come out of Dr. Hall's office, red and wrathful, and shove a gun in the doctor's face. With each jab of the weapon the fat man shoved it a little nearer, Dr. Hall backing away from him. It was a very insulting, extremely humiliating, proceeding, Mrs. Charles thought, for a man of Dr. Hall's dignity to bear.

A similar thought was passing through Dr. Hall's mind at the same moment. It was trying on a man's patience, a test of his self-control. Simrall had no call to make that insulting play, and he. Andrew Hall, had no business to stand and take it.

As his cogitations rose to a sudden hot head with this conclusion, Dr. Hall hauled off and hit Simrall somewhere in the several folds of chin that hung like heavy dewlaps in front of his red neck. It was a good punch, and well directed, with all the force of outraged dignity and overtaxed forbearance in it. Simrall flopped back into the open door as Mrs. Charles shrilled encouraging applause.

Being started. Andrew Hall was not an easy man to stop. He at once landed a good solid kick on the young man who had been detailed as his personal guard, putting

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 it in the place where he carried his provisions; swung round and planted his big bruiser in the whiskered cowboy's countenance as that person clapped his elbow against his ribs and pulled a quick shot.

The shot went wild under Hall's punch, smashing the yellow bowl that Mrs. Charles held on her hip.

"They're killin' Herself!" an old jerry yelled, as the engine of the worktrain came between Mrs. Charles and the fight.

"They're murtherin' the dochter!" Mickey Sweat shouted, grabbing a tamping-bar and leaping from the flatcar.

Dr. Hall was having a busy moment just then. They had him hemmed against his office, Simrall kicking his heels in the door like a floundered cow, pressing him so close none of them would risk another shot for fear of hitting a friend. Some were pegging him with their fists, some trying to land a crack over his head with reversed guns, others prancing around the edge of the disturbance dodging and squinting to get in a shot, like men looking for a rabbit through a fence.

That was the situation when the jerries began to pour off the worktrain with their pick-handles, shovels and tamping-bars. The Simrall men were too busy to notice them until the pick-handles began to fall.

Mrs. Charles, far from killed, hot as a hornet over the loss of her bowl, threw a leg to the top of a flatcar and was across the track in a wink. She grabbed a shovel as she came, landed with it lifted, rushing into the fight with a whoop. There was a shot or two, futile, foolish little pops in that hurricane of Irish wrath, before the Simrall men broke and ran for the square.

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 Simrall was the last to get under way; he was just getting up off his haunches in Dr. Hall's door as Mrs. Charles arrived. He caught a crack from her shovel that put him down again, nothing left stirring inside him to bring him up.

The jerries went whooping up Custer Street after Dr. Hall's assailants, Micky Sweat leading them on his long legs, his tamping-bar carried like a gun with a bayonet at the end of it. Close after him, second in pursuit, Dr. Hall himself ran, going a bit foggily on account of a bunged eye, but careless of appearances, dignity, and everything else but vengeance, the pick-handle some kind jerry had given him ready for the first head he might reach.

At the square there was consternation among the Simrall ranks. Those left to guard against an uprising in town were terrified at sight of this tremendous, sudden charge from an unexpected quarter. From their distance the jerries' bars looked like guns. There was a break for the wagons; somebody got Simrall's buckboard. It led the retreat at a gallop, carrying three men.

Up Custer Street the railroaders came, roaring like a tornado, Mrs. Charles in the midst of them, her hair flying, her sharp voice rising high. One by one the jerries overtook the men who had come to search Hall's office, a cottonwood tree on the river bank their ultimate objective; as fast as they were overhauled they fell, were submerged, thumped and kicked, nobody but the two on horseback getting away unmarked.

To make matters worse for the Simrall men who were whipping their teams to escape this irresistible charge of railroaders, somebody began shooting at them from the

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 court house steps. It was a woman, somebody said Well, they hadn't come there to fight women—not on your life! That was a good and valiant excuse for going, and going faster with every turn of the wheels.

When the railroaders arrived at the square there was nothing but a cloud of dust to speak for the Simrall raiders. A girl was sitting on the court house steps, a rifle beside her, head bent to her knee, face hidden in her arm, crying and crying, as if she, too, had held a golden bowl and seen it shattered by some relentless hand.

Major Cottrell lay dead on his couch of books, sacrificed in the county seat feud, squabble so unworthy to exact such consequential toll. Mrs. Charles sat on the court house steps beside Elizabeth, the yellow bowl forgotten, the jerries' cooling supper a thousand miles out of her mind. She put her arm around the weeping girl and drew her head to her bosom, where she soothed her with those tender Irish endearments which no other tongue can equal in all the sympathetic vocabulary of human-kind.

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and five of his men were in jail at Damascus when the county attorney, Judge Waters and a marshal from the state supreme court arrived two days after Major Cottrell's funeral.

They were a badly battered outfit, several broken bones among them, one of them lying inert with a cracked skull. There was no spirit alive in their town to attempt a rescue. Even the sheriff had returned to Damascus when he found himself on the losing side, and was now one of the loudest of its partisans.

The county attorney had obtained a restraining order from the high court, which the official accompanying him had come to serve on Simrall and thirty others of the opposing faction. To make Simrall's knockout complete, Dine Fergus sought the county attorney within an hour after his return, urged to that virtuous course by his mother, who had an eye to the future and did not want to give up her growing business. Dine made a bargain for immunity, confessed his part in selling his electoral services to Simrall, and named the other nine.

Whether the county attorney who, as has been said, was not an incorruptible man, tipped it off to the bunch with a fraternal warning, people could only surmise. However it was, Larrimore and a bunch of petty gamblers were missing from their accustomed places next

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 day. Fergus was accorded the promised immunity from prosecution as a reward for his betrayal. Some said he was obliged to split the five hundred dollars he got for his vote with the county attorney.

Dine appeared to consider himself a public benefactor. No taint had stuck to him in the transaction, as far as his rather dulled scent could discover, no disgrace whatever, according to his conscience, which was a very miniature affair, altogether. He strutted around town grinning and well satisfied; he held down his corner of Jim Justice's porch with equanimity and sang froid.

Damascus accepted his great public service in its notably jocular way, neither lifting nor lowering Fergus in the place that was his. They joked him about the money, and his designs for the outlay of it, making a very comfortable diversion out of the episode all around.

The wrecked invaders of Damascus' sanctuaries were under the ministrations of Old Doc Ross. Misfortune does not always make men honest; a drubbing seldom has acted as an agent of reform. This bunch from the rival town was sorer and wiser than when they came, but very likely in no particular a hair's breadth better. Old Doc Ross declared he never had set bones for such a doubly damned set of rakings from the settlings of horse-thievery as these.

Ora Simrall admitted his town was out of the contest for the county seat. Let him out of jail, he proposed, forget the trifling incident of bribery in the election, and he would lie down. The accommodating county attorney agreed, seeing a fertile field for votes when he should come out for circuit judge. The county attorney took

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 great credit to himself for compounding the county's difficulties that way, leaving Simrall unsmirched. The talk of calling a grand jury to indict him for his crimes died down; Simrall and his men were taken home.

Damascus was not without gratitude for Dr. Hall, cynical as it was, and worldly superior to the weakness of human sympathy. He had protected and secured the county records at the hazard of his life. The scoffers, such as Charley Burnett, Kraus, and others who had composed the mob that clamored for Gus Sandiver's neck, said fool's luck, rather than courage and resourcefulness, had carried him through. They pointed to the fact that, somebody always stepped up at the critical moment in Hall's adventures and saved him from extinction.

No matter for this scoffing faction, which embraced some of the corner posts of Damascus society, Judge Waters and others were of the opinion that Hall's services to the town ought to be recognized by some public expression. There was a division on whether this concrete token should take the form of a gold-headed cane or a loving-cup, one being about as useful as the other to a man in the country west of Dodge.

This question still was being debated a week after the invasion and defeat of the Simrall raiders. It was a very spring in the desert to the humorists who gathered on Justice's porch, affording them great opportunities for the display of their native wit. While Larrimore's sardonic comment was missed, there was no lack of aspirants to fill his place at this round table of mud-slinging knights. Humorists hatch like maggots in places like Damascus. They are a hard breed to suppress, patient

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 of their opportunity, watchful of their chance, eager to slip out into the sun. For every humorist, as well as every dog, must have his day.

Dr. Hall did not feel himself bound up any closer with the affairs of town and county, although each succeeding bit of trouble he put his foot into there appeared to involve him deeper. Viewing himself from an impersonal standpoint, he looked a little way off to be a man inextricably wound up in the web of that county's destiny. He had come to the habit of stepping aside and looking at himself in this connection, marveling at times how so much could have happened to him against his intention and desire to stand aloof from the affairs of that place.

Hot days had come to that high, treeless country west of Dodge; anxiety was growing into almost terror among the settlers in the wild country that had lured them by false, transitory promises of early spring. The corn they had planted was shriveling in the long ribbons of sod, the hot winds poured through the cracks of their little box houses, whistling around the rough board-ends of their eaves with melancholy note. It was said there would be no corn, which was equal to saying there would be nothing at all.

Men were coming from these homesteads every day, applying for work on the railroad, already harrassed by the fear of hardships which lay ahead. There was no use expending labor on their puny crops; they were leaving it all to a chance rain and the women and children to do what could be done. There was no place on the construction gang for these men, raw farmers unused to that kind of work. Bill Chambers was not a man with any great reputation for kindness or sympathy, but his

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 face began to wear a shadow of sadness as he turned these gaunt applicants away day after day.

Dr. Hall's popularity had increased, his fame had spread among these courageous pioneers who had come to this last frontier of Kansas to make homes and establish an industry where success seemed not a chance in a thousand. Hardly a day passed without a call to some distant homestead, where too often the mother of the family had been overtaken by accident or disease.

These were not the type of pioneers Major Cottrell had supposed them to be. Those hardy, self-doctoring, self-burying frontiersmen which he had in mind belonged to a generation past. These were more the products of civilization and interdependence. They were even subject to appendicitis, ailment unknown among the tough sodbreakers who subdued the central Kansas plains a generation before these more modern people came into: the country west of Dodge.

They appeared to consider Dr. Hall a sort of public institution, as has been said, something like a county surveyor or recorder of deeds, except that no fee ever figured in any of their dealings with him. They called him without hesitation or restraint of delicacy, to set their bones and cure their fevers, service which he never accepted until the possibility of Old Doc Ross had been eliminated by that notable's blank refusal.

It had become such a common thing to be called into the country on these charitable missions that Dr. Hall had bought a horse, which he boarded in Kraus' barn. But as he had not purchased the horse from Kraus, the liveryman looked on the creature with scorn only a degree tempered from the contempt in which he held its owner.

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 In these rides about the country tributary to Damascus, Hall often met the young settler Holbrook, who had come into that virgin land to grow the seed of kafir corn.

Holbrook was working as a sort of agrarian evangelist, trying to induce his neighbors to plant a few acres each of the grain then almost unknown to Kansas, since become so popular as the dependable drouth crop. He was offering the seed on the condition of repayment in kind, three bushels for one. Many were accepting, yet doubtfully, with little faith in a grain that could be planted in June and brought to maturity with little rain, as its sponsor claimed. Little patches of green were to be seen here and there, where the kafir had come up, undeterred by the hot wind, hearty and heartening in that place of failing hope.

Dr. Hall was returning from one of these distant calls on a Sunday evening something more than a week after the raid, bent toward melancholy by the scene he had left, the father of a large family down with typhoid, and in a bad way. The poor fellow was driving his team in his delirium, heedless of the pathetic assurance of his worn, sunken-eyed wife that the horses were turned out, and he was lying in bed, and everything was all right. It was such an unreasonable assurance that Hall did not wonder at its failure to quiet the sufferer's unrest.

The doctor was speculating, as he rode slowly toward town, on what would be the fate of this family if the man should die, and he was a strong, rough-modeled fellow, such as commonly fall to that insidious disease. He was thinking of this, and the great hunger that must urge a man away from the chances of employment with a certain reward, even though scant, into this life of hazard

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 and hardship. A home, a piece of land with a fence around it, recorded at the county seat as his own. A social importance and dignity that freedom from wageearning servitude gives, the higher, nobler satisfaction of having a piece of this wide earth's ground that he could call his own.

It must be that, thought the doctor. It must be this great urge which has turned the faces of peoples westward, ever westward, in the world-old migrations of mankind. A home; a place to set a fence around and view with the satisfaction of something won.

Let it be barren, storm-swept, wind-plagued, sunstricken, such as this; let it be raw and unruly, heartbreaking to subdue, unfended, ungraced by the green leaf of even the stunted sumach of the more eastern prairie gulches. A place to set one's foot, and sit down after the toil of day; a place to stand in the midst of, and draw the breath of freedom with expansive pride. Home.

That was the answer to the world-old roaming, the world-old quest. That was the answer to this unequal contest against the unfriendly elements, this hard, unresponsive, rough-hummocked, wild, gray land. Home. That was the answer to it all.

Somebody on his way to Damascus, whose haste was greater than Dr. Hall's, came galloping up behind, breaking this meditative train. Hall glanced back to see if it was anybody he knew, concluding after a little study of the rider that it was not, although there seemed something familiar about the figure, whose long legs dangled far down below the body of his horse. Hall drew aside to give the rider an open road.

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 In a few moments the horseman was alongside, where he checked his gait to fall in with Hall. The doctor's thoughts had gone wandering from his present situation after the broken ends of his previous meditation. He drew up suddenly on his reins, looking sharply around to see who this was that wanted to visit with him along the way.

"Hello, Doc," the rider hailed, in slow, rather sadsounding voice. "I saw you from the top of a hill three mile back."

Dr. Hall was looking at the man keenly, surprised more by hearing him speak than by seeing him, for the traveler was no less notable person than Gus Sandiver, silent patient of a well remembered night.

Gus had not changed in appearance, for better or worse, since his lone-handed attempt to step on the necks of his enemies in the county seat. He was still wearing the boots with collapsed and wrinkled tops, which appeared so short on his uncommon stretch of leg; the same shirt, apparently, and unquestionably the same hat. Of course, Dr. Hall admitted, a man could not be expected to undergo a great change in a few weeks' time, especially in the matter of boots and hat. The one great surprise about Gus was his voice.

"I didn't know you could talk, Gus," Dr. Hall said, dispensing with salutations, speaking what was forward in his mind.

"The last time you saw me there wasn't much talk in me, Doc," Gus replied, jogging along beside Hall in friendly proximity. "Satan was in me that night. He kep' me so tantalized and undecided between cussin' you

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Solanum.]

1. S. nigrum, ''Linn. Sp. Plant.'' 186.—Erect, herbaceous from a somewhat woody base, glabrous or pubescent, 1–3 ft. high; branches spreading, angular, the angles sometimes minutely tuberculate. Leaves on slender petioles; blade 1½–3 in. long, ovate or ovate-rhomboid, acute or acuminate, narrowed into the petiole, entire or coarsely and irregularly toothed, membranous. Flowers small, white, drooping, ⅓ in. diam., in small umbellate 5–8-flowered cymes; peduncles slender, supra-axillary. Calyx 5-lobed to the middle. Corolla deeply 5-lobed. Berry ¼–⅓ in. diam., globose, black or red. Raoul, Choix, 43; ''Hook. f. Fl. Nov. Zel. i. 182; Handb. N.Z. Fl. 200; Benth. Fl. Austral.'' iv. 446.

2. S. aviculare, Forst. Prodr. n. 107.—A leafy unarmed softwooded bush or shrub 4–8 ft. high, perfectly glabrous in all its parts; branches spreading, smooth or marked with raised lines decurrent from the petioles. Leaves alternate, petiolate, very variable in size and shape, 4–12 in. long or even more, lanceolate or linear-lanceolate and entire, or irregularly pinnatifidly lobed with 1–3 spreading lanceolate acute lobes on each side, membranous, glabrous, main veins spreading at right angles. Cymes 1–3 in the axils of the upper leaves or lateral, shorter than the leaves, few- or many-flowered. Flowers ¾–1 in. diam., purplish or white. Calyx-lobes short, broad, obtuse. Corolla shortly and broadly 5-lobed. Filaments as long as or longer than the anthers; anthers oblong, spreading, opening at the tips by transverse slits which are usually continued down the sides. Berry broadly ovoid, ¾–1 in. long, drooping, yellowish.—''A. Rich. Fl. Nouv. Zel. i. 193; Hook. f. Fl. Nov. Zel. i. 182; Handb. N.Z. Fl. 200; Benth. Fl. Austral.'' iv. 447. S. laciniatum, ''Ait. Hort. Kew, ed. 1, 247; A. Cunn. Precur. n. 386; Raoul, Choix,'' 43.


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 and thankin' you I couldn't get the upper hand of him till you put me on my horse and started me off."

Dr. Hall looked at Gus, queerly puzzled, not understanding whether the dry old salamander meant it for a pleasantry. There was nothing jocular in the man's voice, which was slow and deep, and altogether lugubrious. If voices were to be classified by color, thought Dr. Hall, Gus Sandiver's would be called a faded blue.

"What was your final decision, Gus?" the doctor asked.

"It was the decision of any man with as much insides—to him as a garfish," Gus replied. "You saved my neck at the risk of your own. I could see that in them wolf faces pushed up around your door."

"I don't know about that," Hall said, indecisively.

"You know better than I do what you poured on that sponge, Doc. Maybe it was hartshorn, but I didn't get a sniff of it if it was; maybe it was some kind of stuff I never heard of, and maybe it was plain water, as I suspected at the time, and suspect harder the longer I think it over."

"Just so it worked," said Hall, depreciating the trick.

"I went over that night specially hopin' to sling a chunk of lead into you, Doc."

"Well, as long as you didn't do it, I guess we can forget it," Hall proposed, laughing over it a little, although he was not especially easy in his saddle just then.

He noted that Gus was wearing his gun, and that his right hand appeared to be in condition to use it, although it was bound around the wrist with a cloth, over which a broad strap was buckled.

"I was feelin' as mean as a skunk towards you, Doc, in

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 spite of you stoppin' my bleedin' and dressin' my arm, till I heard you give it to them fellers straight in the ear about my kid brother. That was when the light begun to come back to me."

"I'm glad you understood it, Gus. I don't suppose your brother was any saint or angel, but they didn't give him a square deal that day, and the cowards swore it off on me."

"That was what got me started wrong. I fell for their put-up job. No, the kid wasn't no saint, and I'm afraid he's gittin' a touch of for his sins, for he died with 'em on him as thick as mud on a hog. But he went clean compared to what I'd 'a' been if I'd 'a' throwed lead into your carcass that night, Doc."

"It's all right; you didn't, so we'll let it drop."

"Yes, I'm a regenerated man," Gus sighed, as if unloading himself of the past. "The light's come back to me; I've been born again."

"You mean you've got religion, Gus?" Hall was farther away from this fellow's drift than ever. He wished there were three miles between them, instead of less than three feet.

"I didn't get it, I guess, Doc, but kind of recovered it, as the feller said. I used to be a righteous man, Doc. I was a preacher before I went to—before I went off wrong."

"You don't tell me!"

"I was," Gus nodded solemnly, "and I was a damn good one, too. I'm goin' back to pasturin' as soon as I practice up a little longer on breakin' off this da— this infernal cussin' habit."

Hall looked at him again in that slantwise, quizzical

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 way of doubt, expecting to hear Gus cap the matter with a laugh. From all outward appearances the man was sincere. He nodded, slowly, like a horse, looking just about as mean and no-account as ever, in spite of his profession of reform.

"I used to be a 'vangelist," Gus explained, "back in the days before I drifted to that hell-hole of iniquity called Dodge City. That's what ruined me. Back in North Car'lina was where I started. They used to call me the fiddlin' preacher; I could play 'em up to the mourners' bench in droves. I'm goin' back to my callin', I've made up a team with a man in Saint Joe. He's got a tent he moves around from place to place. I can fight the devil better now than I ever could; I know more about his tricks."

"I wish you all kinds of luck, Gus," Hall said, not knowing what he ought to say, or might be expected to say. He felt embarrassed, due to his inability to accept wholly this reformation so solemnly proclaimed. He reached out his hand in earnest of his good wishes.

Gus met the friendly offer heartily, holding to the doctor as if he had designs for dragging him up to the penitential bench while he had him in hand.

"How is your arm?" Hall inquired, noticing it appeared to have plenty of energy in it to swing a gun.

"Just about well, Doc. The doctor thought I was goin' to lose it at first, but he didn't know how I was set on keepin' it. Where would a fiddlin' preacher be at with his right arm off? Tell Old Doc Ross when you see him I said it was all right. Tell him I don't hold nothin' agin him. I know he acted for the best, and I thank him for it."

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 "I didn't know he attended you," Hall said in surprise. "I never saw you in Damascus, not even the day of the raid."

"You're a funny feller," Gus said, his face a little redder than its ordinary infernal hue. "I wasn't with them fool boys when they went over to raid the court house; I'm not ridin' in lawless by-paths any more. But at the first I sent word over to Old Doc Ross I was comin' to Damascus as soon as I was able to swing a gun and take a shot at him. But tell him it's all off. I ain't out gunnin' any more."

"Take a shot at him?" said Hall, more mystified than before, staring blankly at Sandiver, who was riding along with his head bent pensively, about as hard-looking scraping of a man as the country west of Dodge could produce.

"Yeah. I passed the word along to him."

"Did you know him in Dodge?"

"I heard of him, I didn't know him. I wasn't stayin' around much in society in them days, Doc."

"If I get a chance, I'll tell him what you've said," Hall promised. "I suppose he'll understand?"

"Oh, he'll understand, all right. Tell him I said I felt I owed him a debt, in place of havin' one standin' agin him to collect. Well, both me and you owe him for that shot, I reckon, Doc."

"That shot?" Hall repeated in amazement. "What shot are you talking about, Gus?"

"What other one but that one," Gus replied, sadly, holding up his bandaged arm. "It was the only one he ever took at me."

"It's the first I've heard of it," Hall declared.

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 "It is?" said Gus, astonished in his turn. "Why ain't you heard?"

"Because nobody ever told me. Are you sure it was Ross?"

"Because nobody never told you!" Gus repeated, out of breath in his amazement at such great innocence, or great stupidity. "Everybody in Simrall knows it, and I'd bet money, if I was a sinner, everybody in Damascus knows it but you—if you're givin' it to me straight."

"He's the last person in the world I'd have guessed. What proof have you got it was Ross?"

"A cowboy from one of Simrall's outfits was standin' by the old rooster when he pulled his gun and busted my arm. It was Old Doc Ross, all right, no difference how them fellers have been stringin' you along it was somebody else. He can shoot the eyes out of a crawfish when he's sober, they say."

"I suppose Burnett and that gang know," Hall reflected. "I thought they'd been keeping some trick up their sleeves on me. You see, I don't belong to the town, Gus. I'm an outsider. They think I'm a kind of a joke."

"There ain't ten men in that town that's worth a hallroom in hell, Doc," Gus said, in the mild, dispassionate way of a man stating a well-known truth. "It was Old Doc Ross shot me that night—nobody else. It don't cut no ice what they've been passin' out to you; it was Old Doc Ross."

"I'm glad to get it straight," said Hall, but looking far from jubilant.

Gus was on his way to Dodge, carrying what he possessed behind his saddle in no very imposing roll. He

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 said he thought it unlikely he ever would come back to that country again, his plans being laid for a visit to his boyhood home at the end of his engagement with the tent evangelist. When they reached the parting of the roads, near Major Cottrell's famous landmark at the edge of Damascus, Gus stopped to shake hands in farewell.

The former, for that pursuit, Hall was sure, had engaged his talents until a short time ago, just how recently he did not know, went on his way. Dr. Hall continued slowly and thoughtfully toward Kraus' barn to stable his horse.

He was not entirely convinced of either the probity or reformation of Gus. Still, the old reptile had seemed earnest enough when dictating his message of assurance and peace to Old Doc Ross. Hall felt chastened, cheapened, lowered greatly in his egotistical estimation. It was a humiliating situation, having gone prancing around all those weeks in debt to Old Doc Ross for saving his skin a large puncture and never making acknowledgment of it, never paying even one little word of thanks on account. Old Doc Ross must despise him from the bottom of his whisky-pickled heart.

The sod house was closed, curtains drawn down over the long narrow windows. Hall thought, as he rode by, that it appeared to have closed its eyes and died with its builder, never to come to life again. Elizabeth and her mother had gone away with Captain Cottrell to Fort Leavenworth. It was not likely, Hall believed, that gray sad country, with all its memories of contention and tragedy, should ever call them back again.

It was easier for him that Elizabeth was gone, to have this thing about Old Doc Ross come out on him that way.

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 He had clung to the pleasing conviction that Elizabeth had stood his friend that night, in spite of her ingenuous denial, there being nobody else who fitted pleasantly into his scheme. It hurt to remove her from that warm little nest of gratitude, into which the unruly figure of Old Doc Ross would not fit at all, let him try never so hard and conscientiously to adjust him to the place.

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. Hall was reluctant to go to Old Doc Ross and discharge his debt of gratitude, not because he was afraid of the fiery old scamp, or gave a thought to the material such course would provide the humorists of Damascus. Pride alone restrained him. It was hard matter to dismount from his high horse and eat a dish of crow before Old Doc Ross.

He knew that Burnett and the others who did not like him were saving up the episode to use some day to his discomfort, yet he could not get himself in the proper state of mind to go. Pride always stepped in front of him and: barred the way, and pride has made many a valiant man seem a coward in the judgment of the world.

A week passed in that indecisive way, between upbraidings of conscience for his delinquency and weak justifications on the promptings of pride. Sunday afternoon came, and with it a resolution laid hold of Dr. Andrew Hall as he sat in his surgical chair surrounded by the cast leaves of the Kansas City papers. It was as if the plan of action had come flying into the door of the boxcar from its fledging-place somewhere in the unknown.

Dr. Hall opened the closet door where Old Doc Ross' pistol and holster lay, put them in his black surgical bag; got into his black mohair coat and broad-brimmed

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 Panama hat, and set off for Old Doc Ross' door. The hot wind flapped the pliant brim of his hat and ballooned his thin coat out at the back; heat glimmered up from the hard, dry ground, which was riven in jagged cracks as if ripped by lightning, gaping fissures appealing to the mottled hot sky for the rain that did not come.

There was not a loafer in sight the length of Custer Street. Jim Justice's veranda was swept by hot wind and hotter sun clean of the human rubbish that commonly eddied around its posts. Even Jim's splint-bottomed chair was gone from the place where its legs had worn hollows in the floor, and Jim's head had made a dark spot on the side of the house where he leaned.

Several horses were hitched in front of the saloon and around the square, some with heads thrust under the pole of the hitching-racks for the little line of shadow; others stood in the dejection of misery, stamping fretfully to dislodge the swarms of flies which gnawed their fetlocks and shins. The owners of these beasts were in the saloon, out of which the sound of clashing pool balls came, and the droning of a mouth organ, and a drift of cigar smoke over the latticed doors.

Hall passed on his way with a freedom from publicity that was quite a comfort to his pride, but he might as well have advertised the object of that hot Sunday afternoon walk in the paper, for all the somnolence of the town. Pink Fergus was as persistently active as the southwest wind. She came to her door, nodding her false bangs, grinning her perfectly natural big teeth at Dr. Hall as he tried to swish by on an especially hard gust of wind. She opened the screen to put her head out and watch him; followed the head with her flounced, tight-laced, bustle

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 padded body as Hall turned in at Old Doc Ross' little plank office next door.

Ross was sitting at his table-topped desk, as Hall had hoped to find him, reading a paper. He was dressed in his garb of sobriety: a heavy, dark suit, stiff-bosomed white shirt with high collar, and the same light-colored sombrero he had worn when he came to shoot Hall out of town. His vest was buttoned to the top, his long coat draped him almost to the floor. In this garb Ross concealed the tops of his boots under the legs of his trousers, after the Missouri fashion. It appeared to add somewhat to his length of legs.

Ross looked up from his reading as Hall swung into the room without a moment's pause at the door, making a poor pretense of going on with it immediately, paying no heed to the younger man's salutation, which was as friendly and cheerful as Hall's somewhat reluctant tongue could pronounce it. But Ross was not to carry it off in that manner of high disdain. Hall had come on the impulse of that flying resolution, and he was going to have an end of it that day.

There was another straight-backed kitchen chair in the office, such as Ross himself occupied, the pioneer doctor's equipment being very meager. This extra chair was the seat of agony that patients occupied for the extraction of teeth, lancing of boils, stitching of wounds, and all the office ministration which Ross's broad field covered. Hall took possession of the chair, put his hat on the desk, and his bag on the floor.

He was indecisive about the way to come to the core of this uncomfortable moral obligation; whether to lead up to it with a sort of local anesthetization of pacific pre-

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 liminaries, or stick the knife into it at one bold stroke.

Ross did not offer any encouragement. The old sinner did the best he could to carry off a pretense of oblivious indifference, holding his newspaper before his whiskers as if absorbed in it entirely, flicking the top of it now and then with pettish little movement to scare away the flies.

"I've been putting this visit off a good while, Doctor—longer than I should have done," Hall began.

There he seemed to run out of words. He stopped, fingering his hat-brim nervously, looking at Old Doc Ross's averted face and three-quarters presented body, as if for help to go ahead.

Old Doc Ross flipped his paper; read on a little way; turned the page with hateful, vindictive suddenness, rustling it more than necessary, jerking it to stretch out the fold.

"You might 'a' put it off a little longer," he growled.

Hall was encouraged by the speech, ungracious as it was. He grinned, beginning to feel easier, to get himself headed right.

"I might have, like any deadbeat that's dodging his debts," he admitted. "I didn't know until a few days ago, Dr. Ross, that I was under obligation to you for your timely interference the night I butted my fool head into other people's troubles and came pretty near getting it shot off for my pains. I've put off coming to you and thanking you for your friendly hand longer than a strictly honest man ought to have put it off. But I guess I'm not a strictly honest man."

"Who in the hell is?" said Old Doc Ross.

He threw his paper down with the question, turning to

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 confront his visitor with severity, scowling as if he had caught the most notoriously dishonest man in Damascus and had him where he wanted him.

"I didn't know who put in that good shot until I met Gus Sandiver on the road the other day," Hall went on, not trying to answer Ross's general impugnment of mankind. "It's a kind of weak acknowledgment for a turn like that, especially when it's been put off this way."

"There's no use singin' a song over it," Ross said, crabbed and ill-favored. "You've got it wrong if you think you owe me anything. You don't. Whatever I did wasn't done on account of an individual, and I don't want to hear any mushy talk about thanks and obligations. I acted for the profession, sir. I've never stood by and seen the profession assailed, and I never will. Individuals are nothing to me, sir; the profession is all."

Old Doc Ross said it with dignity, his red face considerably redder under the pressure of his feelings.

"If you acted for the profession, surely you'll permit me to speak for the profession," Hall returned. "The profession is grateful to a chivalrous gentleman."

The fiery red tide subsided out of Old Doc Ross's face as if Hall had brought him news which swept away completely his fortunes and hopes. He looked out of his door at the rising waves of glimmering, shifting, wavering heat, shaking his head in sad denial.

"I'm not a chivalrous gentleman, Dr. Hall," he said. "I'm not even a common one. I'm nothing but a damned old drunken bum!"

Hall couldn't find anything to say. It requires far more than the assurances of a grateful stranger, or even a sympathetic friend, to palliate the bitterness that rises

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 from a convicted conscience. No indictment of a grand jury can compare with the arraignment that remorseful guilt pours out against itself.

"I'm sorry there was any misunderstanding of my position and intentions here from the first," Hall said presently.

"I was an old clown," Ross said, contemptuous of himself. "I put on a show for a bunch of single-barreled sports."

"Yes, I figured it that way," Hall replied.

"You've been square with me," Ross said, turning in his chair suddenly, his face so set in its habitual expression of severity it seemed incapable of any change except the rise and fall of color. His attitude and stern look seemed to threaten assault, but it was only the bearing of a man whose habits and deeds made a constant front of belligerence necessary to keep him from sinking under the contemptuous familiarity of the base.

"I tried to explain that I wasn't to be considered a competitor. There's nothing more to be said, that I can see."

Hall tried to pass it lightly, desiring to spare the man any further humiliation. Ross shook his head, appreciative of the courtesy, but refusing to spare himself.

"When a man's played 'em fools for twenty years it rubs the hair off to have 'em turn the trick," he said. "I've come into towns like this and convinced sixty percent of 'em in two days that they either had fits that minute or was liable to have 'em the next. I've sold communities like this enough potassium iodide and aloes at five dollars a bottle to float the Great Eastern. It wasn't so much because I was a quack as because I was a

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 natural-born cynic. I liked to play 'em, I liked to slip a ghost under their shirts, I liked to drive along the road and laugh at 'em. I thought everybody was a damn fool but myself. And look at me now! Playin' the clown for a lot of single-barreled sports."

That was an ingenuous confession, Hall thought; that was putting a dignity on quackery he never had heard attempted before, the dignity of a traveling philosopher who roamed around analyzing the follies of mankind. But the five dollars a bottle behind the scheme seemed to—weaken the defense.

"Justice told me about it," he said reminiscently. "He said you had them throwing fits all round here for a while."

"I've been thinking I'd move on, if I could get the little bit of money out of this shack and lot I've put into them," Ross disclosed. "This town and the country around it are filling up with the wrong kind of people for me. I guess I've been drifting ahead with the dross so long I'm out of place among respectable people. This is a young man's town, a young man's country. You've got the edge on 'em here, Doctor. Why don't you settle down here? If you'll give me seven hundred dollars for my property, I'll drive out of town to-morrow."

Hall laughed a little over the proposal, shaking his head.

"Maybe it's because I can't see the future of this country they talk about so confidently here. I'm not able to visualize myself in it; I don't seem to fit."

"Since they opened Oklahoma up last spring I've been turnin' my eyes down in that direction," Ross said. "That country's full of grafters and come-on men. It's

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 the place for an old humbug like me. Think it over, and let me know."

Hall promised to think it over, that being the easiest formula for putting off a real estate man or a sewing machine agent. He felt that the new understanding had reached a point where Ross's gun might be introduced without anybody's pride being hurt very much. Acting on the thought, he took it out of the black bag and laid it on the desk.

"This is yours, I believe, Dr. Ross. It was left at my place on a day both of us would regret if we remembered it any longer. I'm sorry it's been there so long."

Ross sat up stiffly, his face flashing as red as one of Little Jack Ryan's switch lights.

"It's no gun of mine!" he disclaimed hotly. "No man ever took a gun off of me and lived long enough to tell me about it. Take that damn thing out of my presence, sir!"

Hall was stung to the quick by this wrathful repudiation, this reopening of the feud which he had believed so happily closed.

"I'm sorry to be misunderstood," he said, as haughty and distant as Ross at his best.

He threw the gun into the open bag, picked up his hat and started for the door.

"Come back here!" Ross commanded sharply, springing to his feet. "Give me that damn fool gun—of course it's mine. How I came to lose it, and when, we don't remember, as you've said like a gentleman and a scholar, sir."

Hall delivered the weapon to Ross, who weighed it and turned it in his hand, a look of satisfaction in his eyes that told how much he prized it. He put it away in

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 a drawer of his desk, and solemnly offered Hall his hand.

"The incident is dead," he said.

"And buried," Hall rejoined.

"Will you—step out with me and join me in a little refreshment, Doctor?" Ross proposed, looking at Hall with straight, meaning, invitational glance.

"Why, I"—Hall hesitated a moment—"I'll be honored to do so, Dr. Ross."

Whereon Old Doc Ross settled his hat firmly within an eighth of an inch of his savage eyebrows, took his younger confrère by the elbow with every mark of affection and hospitality, and marched him out into the blazing sun; escorted him in dignity to Pink Fergus' door, opened it with free and easy flourish, followed his new friend and astonished guest within, and ordered ice-cream with as much consequence as if it were champagne across the White Elephant bar.

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was like a branding-iron fresh from the fire thrust down on the country west of Dodge. It was as Little Jack Ryan had said: what had gone before was only a salubrious tickling of the skin compared with this. Dr. Hall's boxcar office would have baked potatoes at any hour of the day between nine and seven, and steamed a pudding during its coolest and most refreshing interval.

Still the old-timers said it was a pleasant summer, and unusually abundant. Rain had come toward the close of June, perking up the withering corn in the long ribbons of sod out on the homesteaders' claims. There was going to be a crop, a sort of starvation crop, to be sure, but enough to rough the animals through the winter and make meal for the tillers of that unresponsive soil.

Things were looking brighter in Damascus as the result of this promised harvest. The lumberman was selling planks and shingles for additions to houses; other merchants were beginning to hear money tinkling in their tills as the settlers emerged from the shadow of their early fears and began to spend their guarded reserves.

For Dr. Hall, things had gone along in about the same rut. There seemed to be no further adventures in the town's program to involve him in its affairs. The citizens, having been unable to agree on either the walking-stick

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 with a gold head, or a loving-cup with his name engraved, had let the matter drop without presenting him with either. Old Doc Ross came down to the boxcar office now and then of an evening, to sit in the long shadow and smoke a cigar, at which times he recounted many humorous, and frequently shady, experiences of his life. He hadn't been drunk for more than six weeks, and was an entertaining and companionable man.

Hall felt the pressure of heat and inactivity wearing on him. He was restless to be away. He was somewhat browner than when he came to Damascus; his hard cheek-bones seemed harder, more capable than ever of withstanding the blows of adversity. He had conformed to the exactions of railroad style, his hair cut short, neck duly shaved. His shirt was a soft gray one such as the jerries wore, a shade finer, to be sure, worn open at the throat without the entangling complications of a necktie, which the wind whipped around and made troublesome unless the ends were tucked into the bosom. He was thinner than when he had walked into the West Plains Hotel the evening of his arrival, quicker, if anything, on foot.

His eyes seemed older than the passing of a few weeks could account for, but they were as disquietingly judicial to Jim Justice as before. There were some, and their numbers were not few, who thought them kindly eyes, especially when Dr. Hall drew down his heavy black brows and narrowed them to bright, glittering points. He seemed then to look into a person's troubles, his sickness and pain, with the assurance that it was going to come out all right.

Hall was sitting in front of his office one afterneon in

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 this mid-July, in that undress array of gray shirt, belted loose trousers and little else, thinking over his situation in that sun-pelted, leafless, unlovely little town. He reviewed how he had come there and stumbled into its affairs; how he had gone on, undesignedly, against any intention or will, knitting himself up with its life and ambitions, thrust forward by some grotesque chance as the chief figure through it all. Now the play was over, the adventures were done. Damascus had achieved its ambition. If there was any virtue in being a county seat, its fortunes were secure.

He had raised up many friends in that unlikely place. Where they had laughed at his way of assurance at the beginning, they came to him now with their sins. That was something; that was considerable, when everything was considered. It made a man swell up a little. Sitting there, his legs stretched wide, he gathered the muscles of his calves, pressed his toes to the ground, trying out the machinery for hoisting himself in his old-time, comfortable way.

Still, he could not see himself in Damascus a year hence, ten years hence, the new generation of prairieborn people growing up around him. A sturdy people they would be; a fast-striding, keen-faced people, with new visions which they would bring to realities, new desires which they would build into the form of utility and live. It would be a great life there among them, sweeping along in the crowding events their fuller lives would bring. Maybe there would be trees in Damascus then, and water works, and lights, and beautiful white houses with green lawns.

But he could not see it so. He could see nothing but

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 an old sad gray sod house with narrow windows, when he looked far away with that dream-cast in his eyes. There it was standing, weathered and tattered and worn, jagged glass in its broken frames, open doors choked by brown tumble-weed, its footpath guttered to a rivulet by rain, as the old buffalo trails were guttered, the feet that traced it far away, as they were far away to-day.

Elizabeth would not come back.

Nance came out of his office into the blue-hot sun, in his oversleeves and green eyeshade, bareheaded, indecisive, looking up and down the track as if he had lost a train. Still looking around in his shadow-pursued way, he advanced toward Dr. Hall, as he commonly came when he had prize-fight news, or something equally important that he had caught from the wire.

"Say, Doc," said Nance, cautiously, like a man feeling ahead with his foot in the dark, "say, have you heard the news?"

"No, I haven't got my finger on the pulse of the world like you. What news is that?"

"Burnett," said Nance, spying around with his timid, distrustful look.

"Burnett?"

"Skipped," said Nance.

"The devil you say!"

"It's been goin' over the wire for an hour, shootin' it out to sheriffs and police all over the country to grab him."

"Is that so? What's he done?"

"The tip's comin' from Kansas City—they say to hold him for fraud. That's what the tip to the sheriffs is. I got in on a press wire a little while ago and copped some

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 of it. He's put over the biggest swindle that ever was worked, it said. Got away with a million or two, cleaned up and skipped, leavin' them Kansas City bankers holdin' the sack."

"Well, it's not so astonishing, after all," Hall said. "I always thought the man was a crook. How did he work it?"

"That's all I got, Doc. A man can't cut in on them press wires too long, you know. If I grab off anything else I'll let you know."

"Thanks, old feller. I guess it's going to jolt them here in Damascus."

"Won't it?" said Nance.

Mrs. Charles appeared in the kitchen door, wagging her head in friendly greeting. She waved her apron vigorously at the flies as she held the screen door open to talk across the track.

"Who won the fight?" she wanted to know, in a pitch unnecessarily loud, considering that her voice had to carry only about forty feet.

"What fight?" Nance countered, in voice equally strong.

"I don't know. Wasn't there no fight? You look like you had prize-fightin' news."

"Better than that," Nance assured her, at the same time piquing her curiosity.

"What's happened?"

"It's on the q.t.," Nance shouted. "I'll come over and put it in your ear, but on the strict q.t. between railroaders, you understand?"

Mrs. Charles nodded her full understanding, and Nance knew she was an old-timer, to be trusted with the

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 state secrets of roadmasters and resident engineers. He went across the rails, glad of the chance to spread his amazing news.

No man ever planted a seed that bore such immediate and alarming fruit as Nance's news brought forth in the kitchen of the boarding-train. Mrs. Charles lifted her arms and yelled. It was not a scream, such as might, and perhaps should, issue from the feminine throat in time of overwhelming stress, but a full-chested, hair-raising, masculine yell. Nance was so amazed by the result of his disclosure that he backed off, hooking his heel on the rail, almost hitting the grit in a posture most undignified for a man of his consequence.

"Oh, m' Ga-hd!" said Mrs. Charles, bursting through the screen doors, standing half way down the steps in her wild perturbation. "I'll kill him! I'll cut his heart out! Oh, my money! Oh, m' Ga-hd!"

"Easy, easy," Nance counseled, standing off a safe distance in the middle of the track. "I didn't know you had any money on him, or dang if I'd 'a' told you."

"Oh, my money, my money!" Mrs. Charles groaned, descending from high pitch to low, a look of utmost misery in her white face and staring eyes.

Hall was surprised to hear this disclosure of her relations with Burnett. He had supposed her caution, together with his advice, had restrained her from putting her money into the fellow's scheme.

"Oh, my girls! Oh, my money!" Mrs. Charles moaned, her voice very low, repeating the words over and over, very disturbing and pathetic to hear.

Annie and Mary were taking the little spell of ease that fell to them in the middle of the afternoon, very

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 likely stretched out on the floor of the commissary car, Hall knew, refreshing themselves with a nap. Mrs. Charles dashed up the steps, moved by a sudden onrush of despair, silent and grim, striding like a man, her hair flying in forty ways.

"Well, what do you think of that?" Nance said, crossing back to where Hall stood looking at the empty kitchen door.

"It looks like he roped her in after all,' Hall replied.

"I didn't know the old dame had anything up on him, or I wouldn't 'a' tipped it off to her. I told her it was on the q.t. too, and listen at her—just listen at her!"

It didn't require any great concentration to hear Mrs. Charles. She was raging around in the train, plainly in a wrathful mood now, railing and accusing and berating, the object of her reproach no matter of speculation for Hall. Mary was catching it, Annie standing between, as the girl's soothing, pacific voice attested, low and pleading, like the note of a violin in a boisterous storm of brass.

Nance heard his instrument sounding his call, insistently, imperiously, as a way-station call always sounds when a despatcher does not get an immediate response. He dashed up the platform to answer it, Mrs. Charles' clamor pursuing him, the first note of denunciation and bitter reproach the news of Burnett's rascality set sounding not only in Damascus, but through three states of the middle country east of Dodge.

Hall was not moved by any great depth of sympathy or pity for Mrs. Charles, for it is against human vanity to raise up either for one who has disregarded one's wise counsel and disinterested advice. Let her howl it out,

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