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 "And attack the lease?" The old eyes glared.

"Yes, sir," responded Henry.

"With all that that implies?" Boland asked, and his tone was the calculated menace of a man of ruthless will and tremendous power.

Now Henry Harrington was young—not seasoned yet for such a stroke. A kind of awe—in spite of himself, a kind of fear—crept into him. Still he would not be cowed—not by a mere tone at any rate.

"Yes; yes, sir. I suppose so, sir," he responded, his gaze straight into the face that awed him.

For a moment Old Two Blades was motionless and glaring. There ensued a stunned, nerve-pricking silence. Then came the acceptance of the inevitable; the admission that the combat was joined—mild words enough but of momentous meaning, with quick acidulated utterance. "Very well! . . . Very—well!" The autocratic voice was so crisp it fairly crackled. "Scanlon will arrange to take over whatever legal business you have on hand, and to receive your resignation as special counsel."

These were brief words but they contained a good deal for the senses to drink in all at once. Henry could not quite believe his ears. His mouth fell open in spite of him. There it was! As simply as that. He was to be put out—actually out! The world grew black about him and began to whirl. His career, his prospects—his. . . everything. What Billie, what Clayton, what Madden had so clearly intimated had befallen him. And yet the thing was so unreasonable—so silly—so. . . "Mr. Boland," he said, "I—I didn't suppose that this honest difference over what seems to both of us a vital matter would necessarily"

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 "Bah!" Old Two Blades barked. "You've got too much sense not to see that you can't break with me in a thing as big as this Hurricane Island matter and not break in everything." Mr. Boland looked quite incredulous, and Henry passed his hand blunderingly across his brow, as wondering how he could have made such a mistake himself; then all at once he understood and grasped at the explanation, for he did not like to appear a fool.

"With an ordinary man, Mr. Boland, yes," Henry discriminated; "but I did not think you were an ordinary man."

Mr. Boland acknowledged with an imperious nod that he was not an ordinary man, but started impatiently to say: "Because in this county alone twenty thousand families draw their living from my enterprises it doesn't follow that" When Henry broke out in exultant speech as if he suddenly accounted for his stupendous misconception.

"That's it exactly, Mr. Boland, your genius for organization has given you a twenty thousand man-power mind, and I—I guess I figured it had given you a twenty thousand man-power heart—a twenty thousand man-power conscience, too."

Harrington stopped abruptly, almost reverently, before what seemed to him a very large idea which he had stumbled upon; but Mr. Boland's long lips were already curling in scorn at the fantastic absurdity, and his sneer made him utterly unlovely! "Why do you do this rash thing, Harrington? Oppose me like this?" he reproached, with the very slightest note of consideration mellowing the gall of his bitterness.

"Because I told you once, Mr. Boland, that I would

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 never lie to you," flashed Harrington like a rapier thrust. "You confessed to me that you knew you were surrounded by liars—that you liked to have men lie to you. That is why you are displeased with me today—because I am not lying to you."

The old man's rage flared up again. He crashed his talon hands down again impatiently upon the talon chair arms and roared: "You will resign everything—everything—not forgetting," he remembered to specify spitefully, "the presidency of the Shell Point Land Company."

"Shell Point?" recalled Harrington. "By heavens! Shell Point!" Then he hesitated. In these moments of astounding self-revelation on Mr. Boland's part, he had learned swiftly that he must mistrust everything the magnate had ever told him, every enterprise to which he had ever committed him; and now, at the mere thought of Shell Point, a flood of light broke in upon, and enraged him with himself as with this wily schemer who had duped him.

"Do you know, Mr. Boland," he observed cuttingly, "since I've been through this Hurricane Island transaction, I've been less and less satisfied with that finespun reasoning of yours about Shell Point. I believe this scheme was a damned fraud. I think I'll block it." He was intrepid now.

"The Shell Point patent was signed this morning," defied Mr. Boland.

Henry, startled, glanced at the calendar upon the desk and took account of the flight of days.

"I'll block it yet," he challenged. "I'll prove it's a fraud—just exactly as I'll prove that the Edgewater & Eastern Railway is a fraud."

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 at a place called Lestourville, close to Franceville, established in memory of a Governor who died, are now the outposts of Christianity in these West African regions. The main results of these travels on the Ogowé may be summarised as having shown that the Ogowé is one of the great rivers of Africa, the largest river between the Niger and the Congo, the largest strictly Equatorial river in the world, its course lying fairly neatly along the line for over 700 miles. It has a catchment basin roughly computed—for its basin is not yet thoroughly explored—of 130,000 square miles, and its discharge of water into the Atlantic is, according to the season, between 360,000 and 1,750,000 cubic feet per second.

Its main affluents are, in order of merit, the Ngunie entering on its south bank, and the Ivindo, and the Okanda, both of which enter on its north bank.

The Ogowé is, on the whole, more of the nature of the Congo than of the Niger, save that unlike the Congo, it has an immense delta. This delta commences at Lembarene, just below the point where it receives the waters of the Ngunie river. The delta region is tremendously interesting both in flora, fauna, and fetish; but it is tradeless, and its main population is made up of malaria microbes and mosquitoes, and it is supremely damp. Indeed the whole of it and the country from the Gaboon to Cette Kama, save the strange bubble-shaped mountains like Mount Sangato, Mount Mandji and Mount Okoneto, is under water when the Ogowé and its neighbouring rivers come down in the "long wet"; and the lakes in the Lembarene district, Elivã Ayzingo and the still larger Elivă z'onlange, and all the string of lakes along the O'Rembo, Ungo, and Vinue overflow into the forest. The Sierra del Cristal cuts the course of the Ogowé just above Njole, forming the region of the rapids. There are 500 miles of these rapids, rendering navigation impossible in any other craft


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 John Boland straightened on his feet. Hurricane Island was a trifle but Shell Point was a matter of millions. His lips parted, his teeth gleamed like yellow fangs, his cold wrath became hot; his fierce brows beetled and crawled like excited caterpillars. He was no longer an offended majesty but a baffled beast of prey, halted above his kill.

"Young man!" he raged, and his voice was freighted with a sense of the inadequacy of words to convey his feelings, "I warn you!" He shook his lean forefinger. "If you, by so much as one word, breathe a hint against the integrity of that Shell Point transaction, I'll have you pilloried in this community. I'll have you stripped! . . . I'll have you put in jail!!!! That's what I'll do with you." The walls of the private office vibrated to the venomous crescendo.

Yet Henry found Mr. Boland less terrible as he became less subtle. Put him in jail? That sounded cheap and weak; as well as absurd. Put him in jail for being helplessly honest and decently truthful? Ridiculous!

"Do your worst, Mr. Boland," he invited, with a low vibrancy in his tone; "for me the zero hour has come."

"You traitor! . . . You ingrate!" raved Mr. Boland futilely.

This was a good deal to stand. Henry whitened, then reddened, then bit his lip, while his brow was elevated a trifle. "No; neither of them. But, by thunder, it looks to me as if I'm the only man near you who isn't both. I feel sorry for you, Mr. Boland."

Mr. Boland relieved himself of a gesture of irritated contempt; yet appeared to hold his final burst of resentment in a state of suspended utterance until youth's infatuated conceit might reach its climax.

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 "You're treating me rather badly, Mr. Boland," Henry remonstrated, "saying some pretty harsh things to me, and I know they seem justified; but they're not. You'll see they are not. You have ordained that I shall be fighting you for a time—for the sake of simple justice to some humble creatures all of whom have trusted me and some of whom have trusted you. The result of that fight will vindicate me, Mr. Boland; vindicate my judgment. I expect, when it is over, that you will invite me back to your friendship and your confidence, with a frank confession that you are entirely wrong. It is this—this faith in you"

"Faith in me?" roared the insulted magnate, only to be rendered freshly speechless by another example of youth's magnificent assurance.

"In you," affirmed Henry with low emphasis. "I accept your present ultimatum because I know it will be withdrawn. I go under your displeasure, but I believe I shall return under your favor. I am sorry for what you have said to me, but have not resented it too greatly because you are today a man beside yourself, deceived by bad advisors, a man whose business counselors have become mere toadies and flatterers. We are about to part—you in anger, I in sorrow. You have been a friend and a father to me. I am grateful. Yet today you have called me ingrate and traitor. Mr. Boland, I believe I have never been so loyal to you as now—never done you so great a service as that which I am about to do."

Mr. Boland's expression during the latter part of this speech had been one of utter incapacity to believe what he was hearing. "You—you n-n-nut!" he exploded.

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'D have said it couldn't happen," panted Henry, once more in his office, breathless and noting a slight disposition to fall to pieces. "Did they know him better than I did," he speculated, "—Scanlon, Madden and the bunch; or am I right about him after all? Anyway, it's a fight. That's clear."

And Henry Harrington was supremely at home in a fight. The first blow, he decided, should be delivered at Shell Point. He dictated a telegram to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, embodying forcefully his changed views on the matter, and took the precaution of having Miss Mayberry take that telegram to the main office instead of sending it out over the company wire; but did not know that the manager at the main office took also a precaution; he carried it first to Mr. Boland's back door. Now Mr. Boland's idea of autocracy did not extend to holding up interstate communications, but he took account of what this message said, and just as his strategy demanded that instant steps be taken to make that message futile, so his organization policy required immediate punishment for the traitor who had sent it. For days, as the treachery itself had begun to take head and rise, the form of that punishment had been preparing. The plan was ready and the Boland power was always mobilized. The short sharp order went forth to Scanlon. "Thumbs down," it said, "definitely and finally and smashingly down

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 on that bright and audacious young gladiator, Henry Harrington."

This order was issued while Henry was delivering his second defiance by gleefully supervising Thorpe and the office boys as they piled waste baskets high with papers, pertaining to Boland litigation, and carted them into Scanlon's room. With a grateful sense of decks cleared for aggressive action in the next important matter, Harrington was just taking up from his desk that venire of one hundred citizens of Socatullo County from which tomorrow would be chosen the Adam John jury, when Thorpe reëntered apparently with something important on the tip of his tongue; but before he could get it off Scanlon himself had come charging in. He had got his orders.

The last time Henry had talked to the Chief Fixer, Scanlon had been mellow and mild, gently, incredulously reproachful. That day he had been one finger of the velvet glove, but now he was the boniest knuckle of the mailed fist. Disguises were off; dissimulations were dead; euphemisms were in the discard. He came to gloat; envy, jealousy, malevolence, hate, were all in his manner. "You young fool!" he exulted.

"Yes," admitted Harrington coolly; "I've been a fool."

"After all we've done for you! You ingrate! You—you traitor!"

Harrington straightened and paled, but did not strike, although his pose was the immobility of a coiled spring, and his voice was lowered dangerously. "I'm getting a little sensitive about those two compliments, Scanlon," he remarked acidly, "because they don't apply to me. There are ingrates and traitors, how-

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 ever, in Mr. Boland's organization; and I expect to make it clear to him who some of them are. As one step to that end, I shall be on my way in half-an-hour to the courthouse to have myself entered as attorney-of-record for Adam John."

Scanlon's yellow eyes gleamed.

"Take some bail along with you, then," he taunted, "because while you are in Charlie Hunt's office I'll be in Jeff Younger's, swearing out a warrant for your arrest for stealing twenty thousand dollars!"

"You cur!" Harrington's pose was momentarily shattered; he swayed forward and flexed his arms while his teeth ground in sudden rage; then he sneered: "So that would be your game, eh? You would like to smut me, wouldn't you? Well, go to it. . . . Charge me. . . . Try me. . . . Damned if I wouldn't like to know who got that twenty thousand dollars anyway. You know it has occurred to me, Scanlon, in the last few hours that maybe you and Quackenbaugh stepped on shore and gathered that coin in, while I was in the woods. You never did make such an awful lot of fuss about it, if you remember."

Scanlon started as if stung and his face purpled with rage; but, as if unwilling to trust himself to rejoinder on that subject, he jeered coarsely, "Why, say, Boland won't make two bites of you. Not two bites. Here goes for one of 'em right now," and with one final, blasting glance he heaved himself toward the door, banging it behind him viciously.

Harrington watched him go, laughing contemptuously. The room echoed and grew still. "So all they have is cheap threats," he grinned. "Movie stuff! Put me in jail. Highway robbery, eh? Ha, ha!" In

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 this community? With the people strong for him as they had grown in the last two years to be. Why, the fools! The idiots! They would get themselves laughed out of the court of public opinion in an hour.

But Thorpe was in again bursting with that information which Scanlon's coming had damned up in his throat. "Say, chief; there's an awful row up about that McKenzie's Tongue bill," he reported excitedly. "The very devil's broke loose. The merchants of all three towns are getting up on their hind legs about it, and the chamber of commerce has called a mass meeting for two o'clock in the opera house."

Harrington still smiled, but more grimly. "Beat me to the opera house, eh?"

"Yes; and Madden and Clayton are going to be there to tell them all about it."

"I'll make monkeys of 'em," boasted Harrington; with one of his fighting grins: "They'll be lucky if they don't get themselves tarred and feathered for putting Socatullo County in a disgraceful position like that before the State. Anything else, Thorpe?"

"No, no!" stammered the Sergeant, staring as if a little confused at his chief's enormous display of self-confidence. "Except that Mr. Moody just phoned that he would like an appointment with you at 12:15."

Henry glanced at the brass clock on the mantel. It was 12:05 now. "It will suit me better if Moody can come in right away," he told his chief clerk shortly.

Moody, Assistant Secretary of Boland General and a sort of financial factotum of Boland personally, was presently announced and came in, sleek, sandy, slightly bald, a man of medium height and medium weight, a medium man all over.

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 "Your stock accounts are in a pretty bad way, Henry. There's nothing really paid for, you know," began the assistant secretary, gently reproving as a man of accounts and contracts will be when time and terms have been violated. "You were always so keen to make new contracts for purchasing new blocks of stock that you never bothered to close up old contracts."

"But Mr. Boland always encouraged me to bite off more and more," defended Henry.

"Yes, I know, I know," assented Mr. Moody, slightly pained, "but you recall how those contracts all read. When payments are not made on the agreed dates the whole purchase price becomes immediately due—and"

To cut it short—they stripped Henry that morning of every dollar of his holdings in the Boland corporations; and the twenty-three thousand odd he chanced to have in bank as the of a deal in timber they practically wiped out by attaching the account for twenty thousand dollars and two years interest.

Furthermore, that afternoon at the opera house the people of the three towns made a total wreck of their popular idol. Ingrate, traitor, Judas—were the mildest words they hurled at Henry Harrington. Even Billie was there accusing; and when the mad riot was over and Henry, dazed and battered in spirit, ventured on a personal appeal to her to at least understand him, it was evident that God had answered her prayer to make her firm.

"You went against your own town!" she said scornfully.

"But that's just what I didn't do," protested Har-

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 rington, almost crying in his desperation. "I'm the only person here that didn't go against his own town. Billie, believe me, I'm the only person that hasn't gone against your father in this other matter. I'm truer to him than any of the others, just as I'm truest to you when you think"

It was her manner that interrupted him—the manner of utter incapacity to believe. "Perhaps when you see how much your madness is making us all suffer, you will decide to be sane again," she reproached bitterly, but with a tremulous note so prominent in her voice that at last it quavered almost pitifully as she concluded, "I wonder—oh, I wonder how much of this it will take to bring you to your senses?"

"You—you wonder?" Henry breathed in amazement, marveling in part that she could still be blindly partisan as the others, and in part that she did not see that he was suffering too. He was almost angry with her and backed away confounded, shaking his head like a man who struggles with the contradictions of a bad dream. Yet, after a moment, it was persistently, patiently a love-light in the distraught eyes which followed that haughty, tremulous slenderness into the dispersing crowd. "Isn't that hopeless—isn't that hopeless?" he murmured to himself. "She loves me and . . . isn't that hopeless?" He sank into a chair at the front of the emptying hall and meditated dismally. Billie! . . . She could have been of help to him. Instead she had added to his burden which was already fairly heavy. Well, dear girl! she had been very much put out with him. And—she couldn't understand—not yet. It was environment that blinded her, of course; but—well—something

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 might happen to the environment. This thought pounced into his mind almost as if he knew what ere so very long would be bulletined in the windows of the Telegraph office, what would be in the headlines of extras of the Blade, the Star and the Constitution which newsboys would be crying so excitedly about the streets.

"Dear girl! . . . Dear girl! . . ." His voice vibrated tenderly, and the echo of it died. He heard the banging of distant heavy doors. He seemed quite alone in the building. He might be locked in—if he did not stir himself and get out—if the janitor did not notice. Well, he did not mind—gloomy old hole—gloom in his soul—as well there as anywhere!

But—there came a touch upon his shoulder.

It was Lahleet.

"You were grand!" she whispered tumultuous in her emotion. "Sublime!" And as she wrung his hand strength came back to him, and he rose up, remembering his next duty—to enter himself as attorney of record in the defense of Adam John.

Lahleet, clinging to his arm for comfort, went with him, but at the courthouse door he was arrested for murder—Henry Harrington for the murder of an unknown person "a human being," on Hurricane Island.

"But you didn't!" the soul of the Indian girl raged in protest.

"Of course, I didn't, but hush!" Harrington commanded fiercely, as he feared she was about to blurt out confession. "The point is—I let them think I did. Now hush! Not one word! Besides, it's all a farce," he soothed. "They can't prove I killed him. They know they can't. It's only a temporary frame-up to

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 keep me from defending Adam John. I'll be out on bail in an hour."

Now bail was not obligatory in murder cases, but, perhaps as carrying out the game of baiting Henry Harrington to his doom, Judge Allen had fixed bail in advance; and the hasty telephoning which Henry began to do from the Sheriff's office did not disclose any one who was willing to risk fifty thousand cash or one hundred thousand bond to pledge the person and presence of the prisoner. There was one who might have, but that one was not appealed to.

While this telephoning was going on Lahleet was speculating wildly as to just who did kill that man.

She had heard a shot, had seen the man fall, found the smoking pistol in the path not half a dozen yards away, but of him who fired it and dropped it—by accident, no doubt—she saw and knew nothing. For two years, with that sclf-centered absorption of which her nature was capable, she had not cared.

Now she did care, now she set all her cunning to find out; but she hinted nothing of this to Harrington, For some reason which she did not quite fathom, he had fiercely frowned down her first impulse to aid him openly and this made her wilfully secretive as to her further intentions.

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ENRY grew discouraged with his telephoning.

"We'll try what Thorpe can do personally," he said in hollow tones; and Deputy Lunt "took him across"—across the bridge of sighs to the county jail. There Jailor White honored Henry by conducting him in person to a cell of the upper tier—a cell de luxe, with a window looking northward, but a cell nevertheless—just one cubicle of an iron-grated cage.

The footsteps of the jailor receded along the corridor, and Harrington sat down on the edge of the bed with face bowed into his hands. "I'll put you in jail!" Mr. Boland had gnashed at him. Well, he was in jail all right! They had stripped him and damned him and jailed him. He didn't believe it possible but they had.

Some movement of the man in the next cell attracted his attention and he glanced at him indifferently, a smallish, dark man with beady eyes that glittered as they gazed while an expression of slow, stupefied amazement was photographed on his oddly stamped features.

"Adam John!" cried Henry springing up. "Hello, Adam!" He offered his hand, but through the double grill of steel their fingers only could touch.

"How do?" inquired Adam politely.

"Rotten!" said Henry. "They've framed me—so I can't defend you tomorrow."

"You defend . . . you talk judge?" Adam John's

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 sparse eyebrows were lifted with astonishment; he was learning for the first time that this amazing good fortune had been in store for him. But the animated expression settled swiftly into disappointment since Henry Harrington was, like himself, a prisoner behind this grill of steel. Curiosity over that unbelievable contingency presently got the better of his natural taciturnity.

"How come?" he blurted, employing his army idiom.

"They charge me with murder," explained Henry with a gesture of disgust, "with killing that unknown devil on your island—the man in the blue shirt who was annoying Lahleet. Adam, I owe you an apology for getting you into this mess. The town is crazy. There is no justice in it," he avowed dejectedly. "They'll send you up for life tomorrow."

"Not send me up," protested Adam with a shake of the head. "Me tell truth to jury."

Henry gazed thoughtfully at that grave mask of faith and felt his heart bleed for this naive child-man. He had just had an experience of telling the truth to a Socatullo County jury—rather a large jury—and had failed to produce conviction in a single mind. "I wish you luck, Adam," he said. "Things have got away from me all right." And he drew up his hands in a gesture of helplessness. "Of course, I'm still hoping, "he confided presently from where he sat on the bed, elbows on knees, head in hand. But at eight o'clock Sergeant Thorpe came in and killed the hope.

"Not a thing doing, chief," he confessed sorrowfully. "God! It's fierce the way they are."

"They?" challenged Henry.

"Everybody."

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 nature of these beds of justice in my next chapter; and in the chapter following that, you shall step with me, Madam, behind the curtain, only to hear in what kind of manner my father and my mother debated between themselves, this affair of the breeches,—from which you may form an idea, how they debated all lesser matters.

ancient Goths of Germany, who (the learned Cluverius is positive were first seated in the country between the Vistula and the Oder, and who afterwards incorporated the Herculi, the Bugians, and some other Vandallick clans to 'em,—had all of them a wise custom of debating every thing of importance


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 "Suppose I may as well give up the idea for tonight," conceded Henry. "Get me the venire of the Adam John jury, and I'll see if we can't figure out somebody on it who might give the poor devil a ghost of a chance." He said this in a whisper that Adam John might not hear.

"Aw right, sir. Anything else?" The sergeant made this inquiry solicitously, with devoted eagerness, as if his own anxiety to be helpful might somehow compensate his chief for a world's cold injustice.

"Nope," said Henry indifferently. Everything on that desk seemed now so unimportant that he could have swept the whole mess into the waste basket. Yet there were interest-piquing documents upon it—new ones that had arrived since he departed from it.

Thorpe hurried out, greatly cast down. It was not his faith in the community which had been shattered. Thorpe was hard-boiled as to that. His confidence in community enthusiasms and loyalties had begun to languish the day he returned from the war and was long since stiff in death. It was his faith in his chief as a sort of superman that had been sickeningly jarred.

Harrington's head was in his hands again. The weight of the thing was beginning to tell. Everybody had failed him, except Lahleet. Everybody. Even—even. . . But his eyes brightened, his face lost its gray look. Not everybody. No! He wouldn't believe that Billie Suddenly he was exulting. The murder charge! Why, they'd done the very thing that would melt Billie up and bring her to him. Something swelled in his heart. Something mounted in his throat. The fools—they had defeated themselves. The

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 idiots—they had overplayed their hands. Let Billie but hear that he was in actual jeopardy, restrained of his liberty, in danger of being branded for life, and she would realize at last what black sinks of iniquity some of his traducers were. Imperiously she would command Scanlon, even her father to lay off, and she would fly to his rescue. Henry got quite a fine thrill out of contemplating her coming. He expected her at any moment.

"This'll bring her; this'll bring her," he exulted, and his gesture comprehended the steel bars surrounding him. "That murder charge'll get her." He shook himself in a kind of ecstasy as if already he felt Billie's arms about his neck. He closed his eyes in that anticipatory rapture; and they were still closed when slouching footsteps came methodically along the corridor and the shadow of a man loomed against the grill work of Harrington's cell.

"Lady to see you, sir!" announced the guard.

"Lady?" Harrington gulped the word and a tide of tingling emotions boiled up in him.

"Thank God!" But when he had followed the trusty down to the visitors' room it was not Billie but Lahleet. The girl saw his stunned look, his slackening lip, his swift endeavor to recompose his features, and understood perfectly; yet like that savage stoic she could be was only sadly imperturbable.

"There isn't a chance in the world for bail," she told him sadly, looking up out of large concerned eyes. "Not a chance. The story in the Star about the murder charge and the chamber of commerce meeting are both perfectly terrible." The girl drew a rumpled paper from under her arm, smoothing out the wrinkles which

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 her anger had crushed into it. It was the first extra of the Star that night.

Henry's eyes drank in the scare-head: "—Henry Harrington accused—Astonishing Revelation."

"They can convict you, Henry," breathed Lahleet awesomely as she saw his eye at the end of the column.

Harrington wavered like a tree in a blast. "I believe you," he whispered hoarsely, and sank slowly into achair. "I believe you!" At last he too was frightened. Lahleet could barely repress a cry. It seemed so awful to see him frightened.

"Oh, Henry, you never can stand it. Nobody could. Your nerve will break—you'll go insane, you'll" She was wringing her hands and crying.

Harrington was pretty white, pretty desperate, but he shook his head doggedly. "It looks bad though," he admitted, "for the time being."

Lahleet found consolation by slipping one hand timidly into his. Harrington, unaware, sat scowling at the wall.

"Thanks, Lahleet; awfully good of you to come," he remembered to say when it was time for her to go, "but there's only one hope now. Billie! She'll come—the first thing in the morning. Once let her know about this murder charge and let her have the night to think it over, and she'll show 'em! That's where Scanlon overplayed his hand all right. She'll show 'em. She'll come the first thing in the morning."

Again the mask of Lahleet's face was sadly imperturbable; but: "That china doll will never come near him," she was scorning as she went down the steps. "He's spoiled now for her. He—he isn't ornamental

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 any more," she sneered vindictively; and was thinking proudly: "What will save him is for me to find out who killed that man." But that was going to be a desperate quest—to find out in time. There were clues—that she knew of. Since parting with Henry in the sheriff's office she had started work on these, but now must wait. Yet it was oh, so hard to wait; so dangerous. These silly people—why, they might, they might do anything—they might even storm the jail.

Mourning over her love that was not only unrequited but unperceived—restless, wrathful, indomitable Lahleet drifted out of the jail, into the parked area surrounding the courthouse and sat down upon a bench. The hour was something after nine o'clock. A haze of fog shut out the stars, leaving the heavens unillumined save where the line of stacks of Boland mills and waste-consumers glowed faintly, proclaiming how day and night, night and day, the orderly processes of Old Two Blades' money-making, civilization-building machinery went on and on, indifferent to all minor human concerns.

A sort of silence of exhaustion hung in the air, as if after a day of considerable excitement the town was at length composing itself for slumber. Into this stillness there broke abruptly a hoarse shouting, strident cries and bawlings, beginning at a common center and then spreading and singling out through the streets.

Hurrying across the lawn to the sidewalk Lahleet bought the second extra which the Edgewater Star had issued that evening; and under the glare of an are light read the new headline: Eagerly her eyes ravished the column of its contents, and two minutes later she was breath-

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 lessly imploring the night jailer: "Please—oh, please! I have something so important for Mr. Harrington to see."

And even night jailers are human.

"Oh, Henry, look at this!" she cried before the cell door.

"Lemme look at it first—see you ain't got no saws or dope or somethin' in there," demanded the trusty, taking the newspaper from her hand, but after inspection, he accommodatingly held his own electric torch so that Harrington could read the Star's second big scoop of the day—read that all was not lost with the McKenzie's Tongue Project; that immediately after the chamber of commerce meeting, Senator Madden and Assemblyman Clayton had raced back by automobile to the state capital; that at 6:15 Assemblyman Vannice of Wilson County who had voted against the bill had moved to reconsider; that, most astoundingly, not to say suspiciously, this motion to reconsider had been carried by two votes; the votes of that same Jerry Cunningham and George Lamont who Senator Murphy had explained to Henry were under bonds of gratitude to the Boland interests.

Henry read this much and then something in him burst; in his brain something slipped. It had been a day of nerve-strains and bitter disappointments, succeeding three other days of nerve-strains and disappointment. He had borne all rather well but there is a limit to human self-control—especially to a man who has gone through what Henry Harrington had overseas where they had given him the sobriquet of Hellfire.

"It was a job!" he shrieked wildly, livid with wrath,

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 his face contorting. "It was a job! They had the votes all the time. It was a trick to get me in bad at home so they could do this to me—this!" He stood for a moment shuddering at the awful nightmare of that afternoon meeting while his mental processes took account of that depth of devilishness by which he had been tricked into a position where the town—his town—that he loved and believed in—had turned against him.

"Ah-h-h-h!" he screamed like an insane man and raged from end to end of his cell. "The crooks! The damn, dirty, disgusting crooks! They double-crossed me! They double-crossed me! Let me out of here!" he bawled and, seizing the grill work of his door, shook it till it rattled and clanged discordantly. But the puniness of his strength made him rage again. He flung himself against the iron bars; he roared, he shouted vituperations; he bawled mad challenges and then began to plead. "Let me out, jailor! Let me out. They've jobbed me, I oughtn't to be here at all." His hands clutched at his throat as if he were strangling, as if he felt a rope about his neck. "The devils," he panted. "The devils! They'll get me in the funny house."

Protests had begun to rise in the cages. Cries of "Aw, shut your trap!" "Can it!" "Gag him!" "Slug him!" "Take the D. T. to the dungeon!" resounded from both tiers. The whole prison was in an uproar.

"Now, see what you done!" the trusty reproved Lahleet. He had marked Henry's outburst with no great perturbation but signs of severe disapproval. "You put him plumb off his nut."

"Oh, Henry! Henry!" implored the girl in tearful

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 tones. "You'll hurt yourself. See—your forehead's all bleeding."

But Harrington's frenzy had already passed, he sat again upon his bed, trembling and coughing, feeling weak and overcome, wondering what had happened to him.

"Hey? . . . Hey?" he asked, peering crazily. "What's happened? What's all the row about?"

"You're batty in the belfry—that's what's happened," reproved the trusty gruffly. "Better get onto yourself; or I'll begin to figure if somebody ain't been slippin' you some hootch."

"Me? . . . Oh!" Henry was staring at the blood on his hands where he had wiped them across his lacerated brow. Realization came to him. "Oh!"—in a very regretful voice. "I'm sorry."

"Henry!" The girl's tone was still tearful, freighted with love and an agony of concern.

"Lahleet!" he responded, bitter in his self-reproach, and coming forward thrust a penitent hand through to her. "Forgive me! I'm all right now but I . . . I guess I must have been out for a moment."

"Out is r-r-right!" muttered the guard sardonically.

"It's been an awful day, Lahleet! An awful three or four days, if you know what I mean."

"Yes, yes, I know," she whispered although barely able to make a sound; for as its real significance dawned upon her, the girl had grown dumb with grief and horror at the unbelievable thing which she had seen—"But, oh, Henry, you must hold onto yourself or"

"or I'll go off my head altogether," he finished the sentence for her. "Nope. I'm over it now—just kind of weak and ashamed of myself for blowing off

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 before you. Thank you for bringing me the paper though. That's one more thing I needed to know about this gang of crooks." He picked up the crumpled newspaper from the floor.

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'VE got to get him out—I've got to get him out tonight," the little woman was half sobbing to herself as for the second time she went down the jail steps and retired once more to that park bench beneath the boughs of a friendly tamarack. For an hour she seethed and smoldered, agonizing before the humiliating perception that she who loved Henry Harrington with all her warm heart was powerless to open prison doors for him while that girl yonder on the hill with ice-water in her veins—she, choosing to do so, even at this time of night, could have secretaries and cashiers jumping, vault doors flying open, securities tumbling out. Why, she could have Henry out of jail in fifteen minutes.

"I'll make her!" Lahleet exclaimed, mad with sudden resolve. "I'll make her!" The black eyes must have sparkled, even in the darkness. She left the bench and began to walk rapidly. Eventually, panting slightly, she stood between the statues of Lewis and Clark and gazed at the Boland mansion.

As she halted near the heroic figure of Meriwether Lewis, an automobile of high power roared up the grade, snorted past her ear and darted confidently in the direction of the porte-cochère. It was Scanlon who leaped out of the car; the lights showed her that, and if she could have known, the man was in great distress. His past had threatened to overtake him, and

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 he was hurrying in great trepidation to his chief with the missive in his trembling hands which had shaken the tree of his life to its roots. It would have surprised Lahleet considerably to know that that sheet, of which she caught a fleeting glimpse, half open, clutched in the excited hand of the Chief Counsel, had been but twenty minutes before in the trembling fingers of Henry Harrington.

While Lahleet had been sitting on the bench in the park Sergeant Thorpe had returned to his chief with the Adam John venire and had presumed to bring along a day letter which had arrived after Harrington's departure for the chamber of commerce meeting.

Henry had started as he saw that it was from Wendell, of Barrett and Wendell, those eminent New York attorneys and experienced practitioners before the Supreme Court of the United States. Two or three weeks before Wendell had argued the case of Salzberger vs. The First National Bank and today he had got an inkling from Washington—an inkling which made him send Henry this rather frantic day letter of ugly warning and ominous premonition. Henry's heart was full of bitterness tonight; but as he read, it became almost sweet. Then he did an odd thing for him, whereat Thorpe gazed wonderingly. He lifted the missive to his lips and kissed it.

But though Henry might gloat he was still a man of honor. In his most imperative tone, he said to the faithful sergeant: "Have this telegram got right over to Scanlon. He's more or less of a nighthawk and liable to be in his office any time up to midnight—especially tonight."

This was how the message got to the Chief Fixer,

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 and here now, with Lahleet observing him, was Scanlon with its portent quaking in his heart. "Mr. Boland," he stammered huskily, "John . . . John, will you look at this?"

Now the number of occasions in recent years on which Thomas Scanlon had hailed his chief by his first name were few; that he did so now betokened his agitation. It was an outcrop of that earlier association between the two as fellow-gamblers in the future of a wilderness.

Mr. Boland appeared to gut the message of its contents with a glance; yet hardened instead of softening with its impact. "Well?" he challenged sharply, eyes a-glitter.

"Well!" echoed Scanlon, mopping perspiration.

"But they can't do it!" snarled Mr. Boland through sheer force of the despot's habit.

"The hell of it is, they can!" Scanlon collapsed into a chair. "Almighty God! . . . If they should happen to," he shuddered.

"They won't," snapped John Boland, irritated with weakness as always. His eyes were narrowed; his glance was hard. Old Two Blades was really looking his fifty-seven years tonight; but for all of them his lined face was tightly sealed, the spike-like jaw thrust out, the lower lip rising till it engulfed the upper and tightening till his mouth was only a seam. His masked countenance was a dare to every menace, a trumpeting that his was not a spirit to be blown out of its course by even the blackest cloud of a mere summer squall.

Billie, wearing a blue negligee, with points of lace and girdled at the waist by a rope of white silk, received Lahleet in her boudoir. With the light filtering softly

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 over her beautiful face, she appeared a proud, self-contained and superior-feeling young person. But Lahleet was in a mood to see through seemings—through the pose and the fabrics to a nerve-strung, feigning creature who rose languorously but was not languorous, who received her indulgently but felt no indulgence, a daughter of the reigning monarch patronizingly receiving the teacher of the Indian School—but, unable to hold the pose; unable to press the mask so tightly that another woman's prying eye could not see behind it the pallid cheeks of wonder and misgiving. Over this perception Lahleet gloated, merciless.

"Your man is in jail!" she assaulted bluntly.

Billie, in the present state of her nerves, was inclined to be upset. "I—I beg your pardon!" she half-stammered and half-rebuked; but there was an unsuppressible tremor in her voice, and Lahleet was surprised to find herself feeling a certain pity for this disturbed hothouse creature who had won the love of a great true man and didn't know how to value it—how to rise to its obligations.

"Forgive me," she begged impulsively, with one of her lightning changes of mood, "but Mr.—Harrington has been very terribly wronged. I think perhaps you do not understand quite how wronged."

This sudden altering of the manner of her visitor had a further shattering effect upon the pose Billie was trying to maintain; yet her face photographed a slight increase of hauteur, as questioning this girl's right to be concerned about Henry Harrington, as well as certain of the implications of her speech.

Lahleet noticed this and explained tactfully, if not altogether disingenuously: "Mr. Harrington has acted

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 sometimes for the Indians whose children are in my school. I have come to have a very great respect for him."

Miss Boland looked instantly relieved and began to let down. "Oh, and so you came to me, of course. Naturally!" Despite her capacity for icy hardness, Billie was after all a woman and her manner confessed longing for someone to talk to about her love besides those who condemned him as utterly as she did. "You have seen him in the—the jail?" Billie's tongue stuck at the word and then jerked it out. "Tell me how he is, Miss Marceau. Is he comfortable?" she demanded anxiously. The mask had fallen off altogether; for the minute Billie Boland was just a girl, asking another girl about her lover. But Lahleet's response to such inquiries, while her black eyes sifted the blue ones, was lacking in enthusiasm.

"He is comfortable—physically—if that is what you mean," she said, "but mentally—in spirit, that is—he is broken—very much broken. Oh, Miss Boland, he can't endure this long!"

Now this was the wrong speech. It encouraged Miss Billie in the resolution to be adamant till adversity brought Henry to his senses. Her concerned expression went away, replaced by a determined one. "Mr. Harrington can save himself at any time," she assured with cool emphasis. "He is merely wrong-headed, you know."

Lahleet stared, instantly resentful yet controlling herself marvelously. "But it's all a low conspiracy," she contended. "He couldn't surrender to that and be a man."

"But he has been so stupid," frowned Billie, in tones

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 that confessed her total exasperation. "He has humiliated me so. That chamber of commerce meeting was one long"

"That meeting was a job," scowled Lahleet, letting herself go a little; "a nasty trick to turn people against him. Madden and Clayton had votes enough to pass the McKenzie's Tongue bill. They are passing it right now while we are sitting here."

"But that's what makes it all so stupid." Billie was almost weeping. "Nobody can fight father. He is always right and he will always do what he wants to do. Everything was going on so nicely—father just loved Henry and we were going to be married in October, and take a trip around the world, and everything—and now this horrid mess!"

"But you don't think Henry Harrington killed that man?" Lahleet's voice was full now of a sense of outrage.

"Father does." Billie wept now quite frankly, overcome by her griefs and perplexities yet not committing herself to the murder theory. "He says Mr. Harrington has always been a very terrible person when he was roused. They called him Hellfire in the army, you know. Besides he makes such a mystery of it," she complained. "If he would only tell frankly all the details! If he would write to me about it even!"

"She doesn't believe it herself," Lahleet discerned shrewdly; "not for a moment she doesn't; but she's jealous because he didn't tell sweetheart all about it."

And then Miss Marceau took up the cudgels for Henry, tactfully she hoped, with: "But Mr. Harrington is a man of such high honor that there must be some reason for his being secretive—some honorable reason.

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 Don't you believe in the man at all? Don't you trust him—at all?"

"Oh, I believe in him altogether," replied Billie, lofty again. "But all at once we find him wrong-headed and obstinate. Getting himself into this awful mess. Father could save him from the consequences of everything, if onlywhy,"—the girl's face became white and sober as if she recalled an appalling fact,—"he was threatening to fight father. He wants to stand up in open court and denounce him and intimate that he is accessory to a murder himself. My father! Why, father has loved Henry like a son."

Lahleet was plunged in thought. For the first time she saw clearly into Billie's mind and could experience an intellectual sympathy for some of her reactions. "Yes," she admitted, but with malicious bluntness, "that would seem rather unfilial, wouldn't it—your lover standing up in court to defend that Indian by telling the jury that your father aimed the gun and pulled the trigger. It's—it's an awful position he's in."

"Oh, it's a perfectly preposterous position for all of us," wailed Billie. "Father is such a great man and Henry was going to be just like him. If father had lived a long time ago he would have been a—a—a—Cæsar or a Crœsus or something. His course is always so right and he is so determined—so absolutely relentless that there is no opposing him. Why, Henry's crazy to do what he's doing."

"But after all this father stuff," Lahleet broke in impatiently, "Henry Harrington is your man. You love him! These men are ruining him—breaking him—and you let them!"

"Oh, no," protested Billie, sadly, sweetly patient with

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 this groping misconception of the well-meaning little teacher of an Indian school. They are not breaking him. Only he can break himself. I want to save him, and that's why I don't interfere. I've tried to get him to see, and I can't. Father's tried to get him to see, and he can't. What is there to do," she appealed, with a mournful cadence in her tone, "but let events teach him the lesson he won't learn otherwise?"

Lahleet was dazed. Such a point of view was not in her book. "But—he is suffering," she reminded.

Billie shivered. It was easy to see that it hurt her to think of Henry suffering, but she shook her head. "For what he has made us suffer he deserves to be punished—mentally, you know—the only way, of course, that he ever will be punished," she explained. "When he has been punished enough he will change, become the old Henry once more—and then father—well, father is very terrible in his hatreds—but he can be merciful. Whenever Henry gives up this stubborn determination of his, father will at once find a way, I have no doubt, to save him, for all his rashness. But until then"

Lahleet was glimpsing mental processes she could not understand, that her elemental nature could not brook. She moved restlessly in her chair. She felt herself ready to fly to pieces; yet the idea came clear to her again that this absurdly reasoning, ridiculously self-pitying young woman had it in her power to save Henry and that he must be saved now. "Oh, Miss Boland," she implored, trying to melt her down, "Mr. Harrington is wretched, desperate, put upon. Let me assure you that matters for him have got beyond any question of right courses and wrong courses. The pressure must

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 be lifted from his heart. He loves you and he wants you to come to see him—to write to him—to send a flower even—he's in a perfectly terrible situation. Oh, go to him! He would go to the stake for you. Forget fine reasonings, Miss Boland. Tell him you love him. Tell him you understand him. Tell him anything that will relieve him. Lie to him if need be!"

"Lie to him?" Billie shook her head solemnly. "I couldn't do it. Henry's—why, Henry's very soul is at stake."

This was the word too much for Lahleet. It seemed an insult to the man in the jail who was there just because he was decent and square. All the hot scorn, all the tides of impatience bottling for ten minutes in her breast burst out in one volcanic eruption. "His soul?" she exploded. "If you even had a soul you'd know his wasn't in danger. You aren't worthy to mention his soul," she denounced. "You do not really love him. You only covet him—a mere possession, an ornament, to wear him like a sunburst, like a string of pearls. You have no heart. You have no discernment even—you have won the love of the finest man in the world, worth more than your millions, worth all you've got—everything! They've put him in jail, they're destroying him—his nerve, his sanity, his spirit—and of what use is Henry Harrington to any woman with his spirit broken? Everything he is, is being engulfed in this hellish plot to railroad him for crimes he is as innocent of as you are—more innocent, you—you selfish sybarite!" Lahleet paused for breath, rather proud of the word that had come last of all to her tongue.

Billie Boland stood white with anger, waiting for the moment when, without herself being cheap or com-

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 mon, she could dismiss this insufferable creature who, after winning and receiving her most sacred confidence, dared to fly into this insolent frenzy. Lahleet in that breathless moment saw a Boland chin thrust itself out, Boland lips clamp with their accustomed tenacity, and all at once was aghast at herself. What had she done? Made help impossible at the only source from which help could come. There came to her the picture of Harrington, beating his head against the bars and then sitting trembling upon his bed, inquiring with an odd demented expression what had happened. Her mood of denunciation gave way, on the instant, to terrible remorse.

"Oh," she cried abruptly, wringing her hands. "Oh!" And with a burst of weeping she was on her knees before the proud Miss Boland, fingers reaching up at her hands. "Don't be angry," she pleaded, "Forgive me. Don't mind me—I'm nothing—nobody! But save him. Oh, save him, won't you? Take your pearls, take your diamonds, your bonds, anything and rush to the courthouse and let him out before they've driven him mad, mad, mad! Do you understand? His reason is in danger, I tell you!" She had seized Billie's hands and shook them violently as she looked up from her knees.

Billie's expression of cold anger had given way to one of haughty perplexity; but all at once her face cleared. "And so you love him too?" she perceived triumphantly.

But Lahleet was in no mood to resent a tone. Disheveled, she looked up through frankly streaming eyes: "Oh, yes," she nodded humbly. "But he doesn't know it. He will never know it. He loves you with all his

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 great heart. He paces in his cell. He raves and shakes the bars. He cries out for you. He expects nothing but you. He wants to see nobody but you. I went to see him tonight and he thought it was you. The look on his face when he saw it was not—oh, it was pitiful! It was terrible—terrible for me, you can imagine." And Lahleet's utterance was again swallowed up in tearful emotion.

But, in a good many things Billie Boland went by contraries, and she went by one now. Her heart, unrelenting toward her lover, softened toward this innocent victim of his graces; and pride did not permit her to be jealous of this abject little woman, so far beneath her in the scale of opportunity. The girl's own jealousy, of course, accounted for her vitriolic outburst and made it easier to forgive. Billie shook her head sympathetically, yet reprovingly. Poor child! Unfortunate, most unfortunate that she, this teacher of an Indian school, should have let herself aspire to Henry Harrington. She should have known better—such a bright and shining figure of a man!

"I'm so sorry for you. Oh, I am really," she assured, laying a sympathetic hand on the shoulder of the weeping girl, but to find it stiffen surprisingly under her fingers.

"Sorry for me! . . . But I don't want you to be sorry for me," Lahleet protested proudly. "Don't think of me! Think of him, I beg of you. And save him!"

But Billie, studying the flaming, tear-splotched face, grew suddenly suspicious. "He sent you to me—to make his appeal for him?" she questioned sharply.

"No! . . . No! . . . No!" cried Lahleet, spring-

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 ing to her feet in the poignancy of her distress at such terrible misunderstanding. "He must never know that I have come. Never! . . . But, oh, do realize, Miss Boland, that you only can save him and that you must save him tonight or there won't be anything of Henry Harrington worth saving at all."

There was a pathos in this appeal that rang through Billie Boland's heart, but perversely, there was again hope in it. She saw she had to be adamant but a little longer, and her erring lover would be redeemed by his own suffering—and hers. "Miss Marceau," she began gravely, shaking her head, holding herself high, "for his own sake Mr. Harrington must see"

But Lahleet could contain herself no longer—made no effort to. "He will never see!" she screamed exultantly. "It is you who must see! . . . Oh, you wicked-hearted woman! Henry Harrington will not bend with all the weight that your vicious old father and all his cruel plotters can put upon him." Wrathfully she flung out of the door.

Billie spent some time in composing her ruffled spirits. Was ever woman called upon to bear more? Yet she was rather satisfied with herself. She had been outraged and insulted; yet had been dignified and magnanimous; she had been appealed to but had remained unyielding; she had had her hope quickened and her judgment confirmed—and besides she had learned something—something that always gives one woman satisfaction when she has learned it about another. She braced herself to wait a little longer.

"Of course, such an undisciplined creature would be inclined to exaggerate," she soliloquized, as her maid let down her hair.

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PENDING his first night in a cell, "She'll come," Harrington whispered, turning restlessly on his narrow-mattressed shelf, the creaking springs of which protested with each shifting of his weight. "She'll come!" Actually the man lulled himself to sleep, murmuring, with a smile upon his lips: "She'll come . . . she'll come."

But when he came back to consciousness with daylight peering through that barred north window, ugly realities were all about him. He cowered before them for a few seconds, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, staring at the unfamiliar network of bars, listening to the unfamiliar sounds, olfactories quivering to the unfamiliar smells; then thinking beyond all these sensations to what they meant.

"She'll come," he tried to assure himself stoutly; but instead of Billie it was Lahleet again who came, gazing at him hungrily, penetratingly, as if she would see in the very soul of him, how he did. Truth to tell, he did very badly at the moment and peered out at her hollow-eyed, forgetting to smile as she also forgot.

"The papers! Have you seen the morning papers?" he asked hoarsely, his anxiety admitting now what effect of good or ill to him could proceed from what these dastard little blanket sheets said and how.

"Lies—nothing but lies!" The black eyes snapped and, as though she did it to discharge a painful duty,

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 loathing while she touched them, Lahleet swept the papers from behind her and thrust them through the bars, then watched with concern and compassion while he read.

And to think that he did not love her but another—a woman not worth him—not like him—who would disappoint him now and always disappoint him.

And if she, Lahleet, saved him? Why, he might turn from the other woman and fix his eyes on her.

"But it wasn't Count Ulric who was killed," Harrington broke out, looking up from the pages of the Blade. "That beast dead, with his face turned up in the bushes, merely looked like Ulric. The complaint doesn't say I killed Ulric. It says a 'person unknown.' I thought it was Ulric, all right, till I ran onto him that same night at Boland's."

"Oh!" gasped Lahleet, mind harking back to a fact she had learned in the last few hours. "And did he tell you that he had been out on the inlet in a motorboat that afternoon?"

"No!" answered Harrington, surprised. "Was he? How did you know?"

But Lahleet only smiled inscrutably and shrugged her small shoulders as if it did not matter anyway. Henry after a second didn't appear to think it mattered either. "I expect Miss Boland this morning," he announced, as if her coming would settle all things.

"You have heard from her?" she asked quickly, though making a magnificent effort to be casual.

"No; not heard from her, no; not exactly," explained Henry honestly. "But I expect her. These calumnies, if nothing else, will bring her," he announced, crushing the papers in his hand.

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 "I should think they would, yes," she conceded; and then just to spare him the pain of others of these terrible disappointments, she suggested artfully: "Although, you know how a delicate, refined woman—if those cunning schemers had made her believe you guilty"

But Henry smiled proudly. "She'll never believe me guilty," he proclaimed. "Not on your life! Not all the Scanlons and John Bolands in the world could make her believe that. No; she'll come; she'll probably come this morning."

And then in his foretaste of triumph, he remembered Adam John and beckoned her to the grating. "It's going to be tough, seeing Adam John go out to trial without me," he choked. "You'll stick close—sit beside him today," he whispered significantly.

"Of course," declared Lahleet.

"Courage, Adam, and good luck!" Henry called to him, when they took him away.

"How's it going, Adam, old fellow?" he asked when at five minutes past twelve a deputy brought him back.

"She go pretty bad, I t'ink so—mebbe so—I dunno!" Adam shook his head wearily.

"Have they got the jury?"

"Got jury fifteen minutes," blurted Adam John. "Ever dam man dis dam town want get on my jury . . . lie like hell!" The Indian sat down upon his bed and shrouded himself in taciturnity. Henry, having been able to visualize and even to auralize every procedure of the morning in court from these brief, jerky words of Adam's and unable to construe hope from them, relapsed also into silence.

In the late middle of the afternoon they brought

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 Adam John back again to the cell. Henry marked this with honest surprise. "What's the idea, Adam?" he inquired in a low voice, as soon as they were alone.

"Idea to hang me," gutturaled the Indian, with a sullen blaze in his eye.

Henry started violently. "Guilty—they found you guilty? So soon?"

"That what!" muttered Adam, wrathfully.

"Railroaded, so help me!" groaned Harrington; for though he had believed this was inevitable, yet absorption with his own one great concern—this waiting for the coming of Billie—gave the news of the actual event all the shock value of something unforeseen.

Adam John was struggling with his indignation. "Dam fools!" he exploded. "Dam fool lawyer—dam fool jury—dam fool judge! Me dam fool too!"

The Indian seemed quite out of sorts with himself. Henry confessed with deep chagrin: "You were a fool to trust me, all right!"

Adam John, already at the side of his cell, quickly thrust his fingers through until they could touch Henry's. "Me trust you all time," he assured gratefully. "Dat one time me never be dam fool!"

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HE sight of Adam John's bowed, despondent head held Henry's mind off his own greater anxiety for a time. "Poor devil!" he sympathized. "Something's got to be done for him. Time, time is the thing to fight for. Postponement, delay, any sort of maneuver to hold things off till the public heat cools a little and that stubborn old man can have, if not a change of heart, at least a humane reaction against staining his hand with judicial murder. And yet, I can't put up any sort of a fight for Adam till I get out of here myself. Billie! O God, send me Billie!"

He was actually praying, and Harrington was not much given to prayer. But the prayer was unanswered. Billie did not come. For that matter neither did Lahleet. Yet Henry thought he knew why. She was at home crying her eyes out over Adam John. But neither did she come next morning. Again he thought he knew why. She was at the Indian school, steeling herself against the vague, wondering glances of dark-eyed pupils who would have heard from the talk of fathers and mothers that yesterday the white man's law had done a gross injustice to one of their race.

But when three days went by without Lahleet calling—even to condole with her foster brother—Henry began to reproach her a little.

These Indians were so stoical—too stoical for him.

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United Nations General Assembly Resolution ES-10/21

Tenth emergency special session

Agenda item 5

Illegal Israeli actions in Occupied East Jerusalem and the

rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory

ES-10/21. Protection of civilians and upholding legal and humanitarian obligations

The General Assembly,

Guided by the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations,

Recalling its relevant resolutions regarding the question of Palestine,

Reaffirming the obligation to respect and ensure respect for international humanitarian law in all circumstances in accordance with article 1 of the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949,

Recalling the relevant resolutions of the Security Council, including resolutions 242 (1967) of 22 November 1967, 338 (1973) of 22 October 1973, 446 (1979) of 22 March 1979, 452 (1979) of 20 July 1979, 465 (1980) of 1 March 1980, 476 (1980) of 30 June 1980, 478 (1980) of 20 August 1980, 904 (1994) of 18 March 1994, 1397 (2002) of 12 March 2002, 1515 (2003) of 19 November 2003, 1850 (2008) of 16 December 2008, 1860 (2009) of 8 January 2009 and 2334 (2016) of 23 December 2016,

Recalling also Security Council resolutions on the protection of civilians in armed conflict, including on children and armed conflict,

Expressing grave concern at the latest escalation of violence since the 7 October 2023 attack and the grave deterioration of the situation in the region, in particular in the Gaza Strip and the rest of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel,

Condemning all acts of violence aimed at Palestinian and Israeli civilians, including all acts of terrorism and indiscriminate attacks, as well as all acts of provocation, incitement and destruction,

Recalling the need to uphold the principles of distinction, necessity, proportionality and precaution in the conduct of hostilities, Emphasizing that civilians must be protected, in accordance with international humanitarian law and international human rights law, and deploring in this regard the heavy civilian casualties and widespread destruction,

Emphasizing also the need to pursue accountability, and stressing in this regard the importance of ensuring independent and transparent investigations in accordance with international standards, Expressing grave concern at the catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and at its vast consequences for the civilian population, largely comprising children, and underlining the need for full, immediate, safe, unhindered and sustained humanitarian access,

Expressing strong support for the efforts of the Secretary-General and for his calls for the immediate and unrestricted access of humanitarian aid to respond to the most basic needs of the Palestinian civilian population in the Gaza Strip, underlining the Secretary-General’s message that food, water, medicine and fuel need to be sustained and at scale, and expressing its appreciation for the critical role played by Egypt in this regard,

Expressing strong support also for all regional and international efforts aimed at achieving an immediate cessation of hostilities, ensuring the protection of civilians and providing humanitarian aid,

 * 1) Calls for an immediate, durable and sustained humanitarian truce leading to a cessation of hostilities;
 * 2) Demands that all parties immediately and fully comply with their obligations under international law, including international humanitarian law and international human rights law, particularly in regard to the protection of civilians and civilian objects, as well as the protection of humanitarian personnel, persons hors de combat, and humanitarian facilities and assets, and to enable and facilitate humanitarian access for essential supplies and services to reach all civilians in need in the Gaza Strip;
 * 3) Also demands the immediate, continuous, sufficient and unhindered provision of essential goods and services to civilians throughout the Gaza Strip, including but not limited to water, food, medical supplies, fuel and electricity, stressing the imperative, under international humanitarian law, of ensuring that civilians are not deprived of objects indispensable to their survival;
 * 4) Calls for immediate, full, sustained, safe and unhindered humanitarian access for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East and other United Nations humanitarian agencies and their implementing partners, the International Committee of the Red Cross and all other humanitarian organizations upholding humanitarian principles and delivering urgent assistance to civilians in the Gaza Strip, encourages the establishment of humanitarian corridors and other initiatives to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to civilians, and welcomes efforts in this regard;
 * 5) Also calls for the rescinding of the order by Israel, the occupying Power, for Palestinian civilians and United Nations staff, as well as humanitarian and medical workers, to evacuate all areas in the Gaza Strip north of the Wadi Gaza and relocate to southern Gaza, recalls and reiterates that civilians are protected under international humanitarian law and should receive humanitarian assistance wherever they are, and reiterates the need to take appropriate steps to ensure the safety and well-being of civilians, in particular children, and their protection, and allowing their safe movement;
 * 6) Firmly rejects any attempts at the forced transfer of the Palestinian civilian population;
 * 7) Calls for the immediate and unconditional release of all civilians who are being illegally held captive, demanding their safety, well-being and humane treatment in compliance with international law;
 * 8) Also calls for respect and protection, consistent with international humanitarian law, of all civilian and humanitarian facilities, including hospitals and other medical facilities, as well as their means of transport and equipment, schools, places of worship and United Nations facilities, as well as all of humanitarian and medical personnel and journalists, media professionals and associated personnel, in armed conflict in the region;
 * 9) Stresses the particularly grave impact that armed conflict has on women and children, including as refugees and displaced persons, as well as on other civilians who may have specific vulnerabilities, including persons with disabilities and older persons;
 * 10) Also stresses the need to urgently establish a mechanism to ensure the protection of the Palestinian civilian population, in accordance with international law and the relevant United Nations resolutions;
 * 11) Further stresses the importance of a humanitarian notification mechanism to ensure the protection of United Nations facilities and all humanitarian installations, and to ensure the unimpeded movement of aid convoys;
 * 12) Emphasizes the importance of preventing further destabilization and escalation of violence in the region, and in this regard calls upon all parties to exercise maximum restraint and upon all those with influence on them to work toward this objective;
 * 13) Reaffirms that a just and lasting solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can only be achieved by peaceful means, based on the relevant United Nations resolutions and in accordance with international law, and on the basis of the two-State solution;
 * 14) Decides to adjourn the tenth emergency special session temporarily and to authorize the President of the General Assembly at its most recent session to resume its meeting upon request from Member States.


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 There, for instance, sat Adam John, waiting to be sentenced for murder, with not a chance in the world now to escape it, yet stolid, unmoving upon his bed, eyes fixed, lips clasped, scarce a shoulder-shrug for hours at a time—never once a sign, while he, Henry Harrington, with every chance—absurdly held in duress upon a ridiculous charge that must fall the moment it confronted the light of day in open court—he was restless, turning, twisting, tramping to and fro in his cell like a caged beast, grumbling, muttering, raging, threatening to tear his narrow prison to pieces with the puny grippings of his own hands. He—he was different. Lahleet shouldn't neglect him this way. It was inconsiderate of her, when she had been coming and going for him so readily, serving him so enormously, appearing intuitively in the moments when he needed her most—and now when he had got the habit of it, accepting her service almost as a matter of course; when he depended on her, leaned on her—why, all at once to cease to come was surely inconsiderate. And yet, he told himself, that was the faint strain of the Indian in her, which colored so many of her actions so tremendously.

As for Billie, he still believed that she would come. "What's keeping her?" he would ask himself, over and over. "What's keeping her? She . . . It can't be easy for her to stay away from me like this. I've got to get out of here! God, it must be awful for her. Poor, dear girl. I've got to get out of here as much to lift the pressure on her as on me."

And there was a great deal of pressure upon Billie—a great deal. Endless and distracting as the days were to Henry, they were longer and almost more dis-

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 tracting to her. "He will surely turn today—this morning—this afternoon," she kept saying to herself agonizingly. "He'll send some word that will let me fly to him—some message—something!"

When nothing came she would grow angry, with him—with Scanlon—with her father—with the world; and, after tears, pale and distressed or flushed and tempest-tossed, but beautiful in either state, she would sit down and write to him—impulsive, tumultuous, tear-splotched notes—haughty, accusatory, reproachful notes—burning-hot with love or anger; but not one was ever dispatched. She tore them all up—scores of them—they were inadequate, every one.

Eventually she resolved to trust nothing to notes, to rise and go to Henry; a daughter of John Boland to the cell of her lover in a common jail. She got as far as to order the coupé, to dress herself for the occasion; but paused to sweep haughtily into her father's den and defy him with the announcement of what she was about to do.

"Father," she told him, but with chin quivering, "I'm going to Henry. Mills and islands and juries and all—I'm going to Henry. He's mine and I love him. I love him that much, father," her voice trembled. Instead of a defiance her announcement had become a plea.

And Old Two Blades gazed up at his daughter compassionately, his proud, self-willed, tenderly beloved daughter. "Billie," he began sadly, "I must tell you what we would have spared you. Harrington was not alone when he came out of the woods after the killing."

"Not alone?" cried the girl in low tones of astonishment mingled with dismay.

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 "That little teacher of the Indian school was with him," enlarged her father gravely. "He is shielding her or she, him. There is something between those two."

Billie Boland swooned into her father's arms.

"Henry? I—I could never have believed that of him!" she shuddered as she came to; and that was all she did say then. She allowed herself to be led away quite humbly by her maid; but once alone: "And so that explains it," she sobbed, beating her pillow. "They are shielding each other, are they? There's something between them, is there? And she came to me to plead for him! The little two-faced hypocrite!"

But the pity of it was—the shame of it, she told herself, when her weepings were over—that she still loved him. Yet now she would never go to him—never; pride would see to that. She wept afresh because she had been robbed of the sweet privilege of flying to her lover in the hour when the situation of both had become extreme.

She was impelled to write him one hot and scathing line but did not. Her treatment of him continued to be—silence, the coldest, cruelest blow that love can strike at love—an icy dagger pointed at the heart. Hour by hour that dagger entered, chilling and killing. Excuse-inventing could not stand up against it. At last it seemed that it had done its work. But that was not until the fifth day; and on the fifth day Lahleet came, but even then not to see Henry—to stand before Adam John's cell, with the two gutturaling at each other in that strange jargon of theirs—she sympathetically at times, encouragingly cross-examining, apparently; he stolidly, despondently.

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 For this was the day when Adam John must appear for sentence.

But after a little she moved over to speak to Henry and was horrified to find herself gazing at a mere wreck, a ruin of a man. His face had grayed and shrunken; there were dark hollows under his eyes. His light brown hair, usually so carefully brushed, was disheveled and stuck up at angles. The accustomed clear white of his eyes was bloodshot. There was a looseness, a trembling of the lips. His was the face of a man upon whom despair had come, into whose mind utter disillusionment had crushed. The light in his pupils, as he stared out at her, was—eccentric. He did not greet her, confess that he had missed her, or ask her what she had been doing. He accepted her presence simply as something for which he was mutely grateful, and upon the surface of his mind there broke into speech the only thing that mattered: "She didn't come!" he whispered solemnly as if awed by the immensity of some spiritual catastrophe. "She didn't come!"

Lahleet pressed her beating heart.

She loved Henry Harrington—loved him. She had kept away from him these four days purely from pride. It was not her place to be chief comforter to him so long as he looked for his chief comfort to another—but when he turned to her! Oh, how she could devote herself to him then! She, with her headlong courage in her veins; she, reckless daredevil, passionate, capable of savage abandon! Once the other woman failed, she would find a way to clear her lover from this absurd entanglement—at no matter what cost to herself. He would be hers then—worth everything

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 a man for whom to spare herself nothing—no longer a character to admire, a nobility to worship, but a sweetheart to live for, to die for! Her blood smoked in her veins—but her mind was cool.

"I've been a fool," Harrington confessed weakly, as feeling that some speech were necessary.

"No! No!" the girl urged quickly, tactfully. "You have been a man of large faith."

"I have been blind," he reproached himself.

"No, no," she objected again. "You have merely been looking at some things so intently that you did not see certain other things."

Harrington blinked and stared wonderingly. He took account of the difference in two women. Before him was this little slip of a girl, teacher of an Indian school, who was herself a racial hybrid, but in friendship and loyalty a thoroughbred. Up yonder on the hill was a different type of woman; pure in blood, softly nurtured and richly circumstanced—his kind of woman! And she loved him; but. . . feebly, futilely.

Harrington was speaking no word, yet Lahleet felt the crisis in their relations and her hand was small enough to creep through the bars; she too was wordless. There were noises about them, of course; low buzzes of conversation, an occasional oath, the clang of steel doors, the voice of a trusty paging a prisoner in the huge cage below; yet these were mere externals. Harrington's consciousness had relapsed into some vast cosmic silence. All was still within him as in the soundless spaces of the universe. An entire eon of time—of thinking, comparing, contrasting—seemed to elapse before he became conscious of some stir in the corridor, something happening. He knew what in-

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 but a canoe, and highly perilous work in that, I assure you, from personal experience; and when you get above them the river is not much use except for canoes, until you get to Franceville; beyond Franceville it is only available for canoes in the wet season, but you do not want the Ogowé, being in touch with the great rivers flowing transversely to it into the Congo.

Below the rapids, however, the Ogowé is a grand waterway, as waterways go on the West Coast. You can go up its main stream to Njole for over 200 miles, and up its affluent the Ngunie as far as Samba, where there are lovely falls. Above these falls and a set of rapids the Ngunie would be again available for small steamboats, but there are none there at present.

In addition to the main stream of the Ogowé, you can with the exercise of great care, and with the assistance of good fortune, navigate a small steamboat into Lake Ayzingo and Lake Z'onlange in the wet season, and also enter this main stream of the Ogowé from the ocean by two side creeks running down to Fernan Vaz. The current of the Ogowé is extremely swift, particularly above Lembarene, and the rise of the river in the Talagouga narrows, during the wet season, is from eighteen to twenty feet. This rise commences a month before the wet season gets established here, probably on account of the latter being earlier on the upper waters of the affluents that come in above Njole—the Okanda, and the Ivindo.

The region of the delta to the south is more water-eaten than to the north. The stretch of country to the north, between the delta of the Ogowé and the Gaboon, is rimmed along the seashore, and the estuary shore, by a sort of sand rampart which keeps in the overflow waters of the wet season, and forms the most impossible morass to get about in during this period. The human population of this region is sparse, and what there is resides in villages on the abruptly shaped bubble-like hills that rise isolated here and there. This region is very little explored; the main stream of the Ogowé, entered either from Nazareth Bay or from Fernan Vaz, being the highway to and from the interior, and the unhealthiness and absence of trade in this great swampy forest belt offer


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 stantly—they were taking Adam John away to sentence him to death. Lahleet withdrew her hand from his, stifled a sob with savage stoicism, and turned to follow.

And he was staying behind—to hear his love sentenced to death! So he thought, not perceiving that it might have been hope which died, not his love—that it was because his love lived on that his anguish was so great. However it was, he eased himself down upon that narrow shelf which in a jail is called a bed, and gave way to his emotions. He was so weak that his body did not shake with sobbings; his eyes merely streamed. This was the bitterest of all the bitter hours and it was a long hour—it lasted from five minutes to ten in the morning onward, onward. . . eternitics onward; while he waited for Adam John to come back—and Adam John never came back!

For, while Harrington steeped his soul in the bitterness of black despair, a swirl of mighty events was getting up in Socatullo County—world events, almost—of which he could know nothing, until the sound of them snarled, boomed, roared through the streets and found their excited echo in the jail as elsewhere in the community.

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ES; if Henry could have known, events were be ginning already to take their revenge on Boland. At this moment Old Two Blades was walking to and fro in his private office, all but sweating blood. For these five nights he had hardly slept. He had aged and withered, yet the most that he suffered from was anxiety—fear. Nothing had happened; but something might; and all his life he had left little to the hazard. He had made sure of uneventuated things in a thousand ways—simple, little honorable ways, he would have said; ways quite natural with him—as he made sure of the loyalty of his associates by profiting them; as he made sure of the judgment of his fellow townsmen on election days and at chamber of commerce meetings; sure of courts and juries and legislature, by managing to make his causes in some sense and after some fashion their causes.

Put baldly, in its most ignoble light, as Senator Murphy had put it, this was mere back-scratching. John Boland had, in his generous, inoffensive, unobtrusive way, scratched the backs of jurors and legislators and even judges and they, respondent to one of the noblest impulses of human nature, had in turn scratched his back whenever they found it itching.

But now an appalling situation for John Boland had come to pass, All his fortune was in the balance, hinging upon the decision of nine men, of whose mental

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 processes he had never done anything to make sure. He had never entertained one of them in his home, never laughed himself nearly into suffocation at one of their pet and venerable jokes, never favored them with the genial flattery of his smile, never deserved the gratitude of one of them through the opportunity to make an unerringly safe and immensely profitable investment. His wife had never poured tea for one of their wives, never rolled her glittering limousine to her door and said: "Use it this afternoon as your own, my dear, I beg of you." She had never helped one with the glamor of her social prestige, for the wife of a Supreme Court Justice outshines the wife of an encrusted western millionaire as the sun outshines the moon.

No; the arm of Boland had never been long enough to scratch a back in the Supreme Court of the United States. With all his plannings to insure men's right performance, he had now to depend upon the scales of simple justice—scales that turn upon a hair. It was just one man's right against another man's right; just John Boland, a straddling biped, against any other straddling biped—against Julius Hornblower, against Adam John, against Adolph Salzberg, against Henry Soderman. That, to one who thought as John Boland had been accustomed to think, was unthinkable—unendurable. Therefore, he walked the floor.

All the accumulations of his life, forty years of scheming, toiling, planning; all the industrial empire he had built; all the civilization he had created—for so it seemed to Old Two Blades, that he was the creator of civilization—all turned upon the decision of men upon whose backs he never once had bestowed

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 a brotherly caress. Why, they might not even know that he was a brotherly fellow. They might deal with him just as abstractly as if he were a sordid, avaricious, selfish person instead of—what he was.

Yes—it seemed unthinkable; yet it was so. Today all the vast upreared mountain of his possessions trembled as if based upon a sea of jelly. One rude wrench and the mountain might careen and go upside down like an iceberg when the bottom melts off. Each thought of this brought a lump into Boland's hard old throat. That such a situation had been permitted to come to pass was bad management, bad strategy, he reflected bitterly. But then it was such an unforeseen development that ever this Supreme Court of the United States would perversely overlook the briefs before, and opinions of, the lower courts and go digging into the record itself where there was skilfully buried, deeply covered over—a crime. It was a crime in the interest of civilization, to be sure, but, if a court were inclined to be extremely technical, none the less a crime.

And judging by the frantic telegrams that had been passing between Wendell and Scanlon this Supreme Court, with its unscratched backs, was inclined to be very technical. For this reason Boland was tramping by day and tossing by night; for this reason he sweated in helplessness—because there was nothing that he could do. The issues of his life hung in the balance and not a breath could he blow upon those balances. Inactivity had never been so agonizing. He had dispatched letter-long telegrams, he had sent urgent and excited representatives to Washington. For twenty-four hours they had hurried hither and yon. They had found entrée to congressmen, to senators,

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 to cabinet secretaries; they had even found entrée to the White House, and there been listened to comprehendingly; but there was not one of all of these who could conduct the emissaries of Boland to a side entrance into the United States Supreme Court. There was, it appeared, no side entrance—a most appalling defect in architecture; quite as appalling as this error in the strategy of his life. How absurd, irritating, maddening—just to have to sit and do nothing, merely wait helplessly to see whether this heady-minded tribunal would happen upon the right point of view, instead of being able through trustworthy ambassadors and by well tried means, to make sure that it happened on it.

"It was a mistake ever to let it get up there," gloomed Scanlon. "We could better 'a' bought this fellow Hornblower off. I was always afraid of it."

"But you never told me you were!" reproached Boland, surprised.

"Who the devil ever wanted the job of telling you anything unpleasant till they had to?" retorted Scanlon.

"You lied to me," accused his chief.

"You like liars," defied Scanlon. "You're fond of 'em. There's never been but one fellow that told you the truth all the time—and he told it to you once too often! Look where you put him!"

Boland straightened up in silent rage; then rasped at Scanlon: "It was your scheme in the first place. You showed me the ambiguity in the treaty calls and old Wilkinson's mistake. You—you gave me your opinion that it was safe—safe to go ahead."

"And, damn it, it did figure to be safe," scowled

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 Scanlon. "Besides, it was in the interest of development anyhow. You didn't connive at the mistake." This sentiment was always instantly mollifying to the roused wrath of Old Two Blades. "The lands were already being thrown open to patent," Scanlon soothed skilfully. "You merely took advantage of that. It wasn't wrong. Why, John, it was destiny."

Mr. Boland's face expressed satisfaction at this tribute to the magnificent probity of all his purposes. "Yes, yes," he assured himself, "it wouldn't have been right to keep this magnificent tract of timber a wilderness just so a few drunken, loafing Siwashes could have a place to hunt and fish in."

"Well, perhaps the court'll see it that way," the Chief Fixer comforted, moving toward the door. "The bigger justice is all on our side."

"Of course it is," asseverated Mr. Boland, self-righteously. But after Scanlon went out, his chin fell upon his breast again and he resumed his pacing, quite as if he chafed in a cell like Henry Harrington.

Scanlon, remembering that Adam John was to be sentenced, sauntered over to Judge Allen's court to lend the favor of his countenance to this important pronouncement of law and order. Some of the preliminaries had been got over. Eric Lindbloom had made his motion for a new trial and it had been denied. Just as the Chief Fixer took a privileged seat near the rail, Adam John was asked if he had anything to say why sentence should not be passed upon him. The Siwash broke his taciturn calm to declare eagerly that he had! And yet it seemed to have been not so much to object to being hanged as it was to express resentment at having been called a traitor in the

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 prosecuting attorney's speech to the jury, that he rose to his feet.

Brokenly but earnestly, a sorry little figure of a man and yet dignified withal, Adam John insisted that it was not against the flag that he was fighting. He declared proudly that he had fought for the flag himself. He had been wounded and he pointed to the hideous scar upon his cheek; he had been gassed, and he coughed to remind the jury of the husk that would never leave his vocal chords. "But me no fight to make world safe for Boland take my island. I no shoot flag. Shoot rotten man carry the flag. I no traitor; him traitor." And Adam John pointed to Thomas Scanlon, yawning just inside the rail. "Him traitor." And Adam John pointed to the prosecuting attorney. "You traitor." And he indicated by a nod the white-headed Judge Allen, sitting so impassive upon the bench. "All mans traitor when they make law do wrong to poor Indian. That all." The Indian sat down.

It had been quite enough. Judge Allen's classic features frowned a lofty disapproval. The man had further convicted himself out of his own mouth.

"Adam John, stand up!" the Judge commanded solemnly, and when the Indian was standing defiantly straight, went on with: "You have been found guilty of the crime of first-degree murder; and it becomes my painful duty to sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead!"

Adam John looked a proper gravity for the case in which he stood but fidgeted and his twisted mouth began to work. "Indian die," he jerked out presently. "But right not die. Long time go bad governor take

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 lands from Indians. Fifty years after, mebbe so, good President give back. Today bad judge take island from me, some day good judge gonna give back."

So Adam John voiced his faith in the ultimate triumph of justice, but all at once he seemed to realize that this could not be done with human life. "S'pose today you put rope round my neck; s'pose tomorrow you want to take off that cannot do—when I'm dead Indian. That rotten!" This with profound conviction. "You rotten judge! . . . You go to hell!"

Adam John, having pronounced his vituperative sentence upon the man who had just pronounced sentence upon him, sat down apparently quite satisfied with himself, while a blush mantled Judge Allen's marble cheek and he bristled at the indignity put upon him; yet before he could utter the burning reproof that rose to his lips, a shot rang out in the court room. Everybody started and then everybody was still but with eyes fixed on Henry Soderman. He was tall, with billowing, unkempt yellow hair, with gesticulating arms, one hand holding a pistol, from the muzzle of which a faint scarf of smoke made serpentine curves upon the air.

The most surprised-looking person in all the room, the most incensed and outraged, was Judge Allen. He stared for an instant with burning eyes, and yet already he was changed. In the center of his forehead a blue spot no bigger than the end of a lead pencil had appeared, and his marble pallor took on a faint yellowish shade. After that first burning glance, too, his figure stiffened, then began to wilt. From the blue spot in the center of the forehead issued a tiny rivulet of crimson. It trickled between his eyebrows, down

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