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 over the bridge of his splendidly chiseled nose and dropped crimson spatterings into the fleecy white of his beard, just as the massive head bent and sagged forward upon the desk.

"I have killed injustice!" shouted Soderman, still brandishing his weapon and avoiding those who sought to grasp him.

"I wish to God you had!" declared Eric Lindbloom; for Eric, as he defended Adam John, had himself gained an inkling of real knowledge as to conditions in Socatullo County. "Instead you have only murdered a good man who didn't even know he was part of the machine."

"He give my homestead to Boland," raved Soderman. "Just because I'm captain of one of his ships I let dem use de water-power five, six, seven years for not'ing, den dey take it 'way from me by de statute of limitations. Dey make me take ten t'ousand tollars for my waterfall dat make power to run all de Boland mills. He did it. Dis old robber did it." And Soderman shook his fist at the crumpled, classic figure upon the bench.

"You fool! You crazy nut!" cried Lindbloom impatiently, and by this time enough deputy sheriffs and bailiffs had surrounded the murderer to subdue him completely while Eric and others hurried up to the side of Judge Allen. He was past all mortal aid. Still with that expression of outrage and resentment on his features, he was dead. Confusion reigned for several minutes and then, as Soderman was subdued and taken from the room, it occurred to the custodian of the prisoner at the bar, who had been very much occupied, to look about for Adam John; but the Indian was not to be found.

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 "The Siwash flew the coop," announced Deputy Lunt in amazement so frank that it was ludicrous; but so great were the distractions round that for some time he was unable to get anyone to listen to his excited clamorings.

Adam John was indeed gone. Having surrendered voluntarily and sought justice according to the law of his new citizenship, and having failed, in his judgment, to get it, he confessed no further obligations. In the general confusion, he had departed—unobtrusively.

It was Scanlon who brought the word of the shooting to his chief, whereupon Mr. Boland's startled features framed a slowly mounting horror; he half-rose, with white showing in his eyes, a manifestation seldom observed in those deeply caverned orbs. "Horace . . . assassinated? . . . Assassinated!" In the changed inflection with which he breathed and then repeated that bloody word, the stern practical nature of Old Two Blades registered first his sense of shock and second his acceptance of the cruel fact that a man very useful to him had been stricken in the line of duty. He settled slowly back into his chair, the network of his cares deepening upon his forehead. Solemnly, his head was shaken from side to side.

"This community—that I have created," he reproached, in horrified voice, "that for thir-r-ty years I have been setting an example to—becoming hysterical—excitable—inclined to violence. And now, they shoot a judge down on the bench!" His soul revolted at such bloody profanation of the very altar of justice; at the same time that his heart was shot through with

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 a pang like the stab of a rusty knife, for he had loved Horace Allen since boyhood. They had come west from the same little Iowa town.

But Old Two Blades would be the stern old Roman still, "See they keep the murderer safe, Scanlon," he directed, coming out of his abstraction, yet speaking in tones which showed that every word was anguish. "Respect for law must be maintained. A painful crisis like this is our opportunity. Judge Allen was very popular. The people are sure to be wild, but we mustn't let them get in a lynching mood, Scanlon."

"I'll tell Jordan to be very careful," replied the Chief Fixer.

"Yes—yes" the magnate reflected, sadly. "The provocation is great and it is all the better opportunity to show that after all respect for law is fundamental in Socatullo County. It would be a burning reproach if anything like a lynching happened among us."

"Yes," agreed Scanlon, drily. "Us law-abiding people!" But as before, the minute Scanlon was gone, the harried magnate let himself go a little. His lips quivered; a moisture got into his eyes. "Poor Horace!" he groaned, "Poor Horace!" For if the judge was ever pliant to the magnate's purpose, it was without either ever realizing that it was pliancy at all. Horace Allen was to John Boland an upright man, an incorruptible jurist and a dear friend. He had fallen a martyr. He had been stricken on the bench by one murderer as he meted out justice to another—a bright and shining victim of that spirit of lawlessness against which he always set himself so sternly and which, of late, had manifested itself rather disquietingly to the sweet,

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 benignant natures of thoughtful and upright men like himself and Old Two Blades.

For a time Boland was still—wrestling with his grief, and with poignant speculations as to why Horace Allen of all men had had to become a sacrifice. It was Harrington's example of riotous duplicity, he decided, which must have infected the whole community—that Harrington who had once said to him quite coolly: "You can't have respect for the law except when law is respectable."

Bowing to his sorrow and perplexity, Mr. Boland laid down his head upon his desk, but presently raised it again—abruptly, and sat up very straight, listening acutely. A sixth sense had told him there was some sort of sensation afloat in his outer office, A moment later, Oskison, his secretary, a flaxen-haired, literal-minded person, came breathless through the door.

"There's a bulletin on the Star window, sir," he blurted, "that says the Supreme Court has announced its decision in the townsite case, Salzberg vs. The First National."

Mr. Boland's self-control was perfect. No subordinate had ever seen his guard down, his spirits wilted; nor should. "Yes, I suppose it's about due," he remarked in a crisp, dry tone; then looked at Oskison as in mild surprise that this should be deemed a thing to be excited over.

"But the decision's gone against us, sir," sputtered the secretary.

"Against us?" Again Mr. Boland's inflection was the most casual, as if nothing, in its final analysis, could go against him.

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 "Yes, sir!" panted Oskison. "It says your underlying deeds, although U. S. patents, couldn't hold; because they covered land that had already been ceded to Indians by treaty. Isn't that terrible, sir? Isn't that awful news for us?" groaned Oskison.

Mr. Boland's manner was still that of a sphinx, his self-control complete. He was wild to have this blundering young man rush on and tell him all that was on the bulletin board. But he must not do it. He must wait and lap up drop by drop such information as excited youth would spill. That was a humiliating circumstance—that he had to get his information from a clerk, and the clerk from the bulletin board of a newspaper. There must have been a telegram from Wendell and it had gone astray. Fate was playing him mean tricks today. But he must act the man, the superman even. Mr. Boland actually maneuvered a slight smile, or, at least, a grim parting of the thin lips that might have been construed as a smile.

"Oh, then—it's not as bad as I supposed," gasped Oskison, relieved momentarily. "I thought it meant the title to everything was gone—in fact that is what the bulletin said—the title to the townsite, the title to the timber, to the ground the mills stand on. Why—everything you have, sir—everything swept away; and that you'll have to pay back for everything you've taken off—with interest. That's what the bulletin says, Mr. Boland. It can't be right, can it?" The young man's agitation showed, however, that he feared it might be right.

"No, of course, it can't be right. Thank you, Oskison. That will do. Send Scanlon in when he is at leisure."

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 The secretary went out hurriedly. When the door had closed, John Boland straightened and glanced about him, as making sure of his surroundings and that he was alone; then slowly withered in his chair, an aged, shrunken bankrupt. He shivered once, and was still—very still, draining the dregs.

He had discounted the blow so many times in the last few days that its actual fall did not stun him—left him in possession of all his faculties. Realization was keen, vivid, splitting to the marrow.

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N THE streets of Edgewater shock had followed shock. The first swift-flying rumor that Judge Horace Allen, respected, venerated figure in the community, had been assassinated as he dealt out justice on the bench did not so much inflame as stagger. It was an assassination not of him but of every man. Why, why should this horror be—why have come to pass? So stunned minds demanded.

It is creditable to the people of Edgewater and the two adjoining towns to be able to record that this was their first reaction—a moment of profound self-examination. What was old Socatullo coming to, anyway? Only a week or two ago the assassination of their sheriff; only a day or two ago the moral collapse of that popular idol, Henry Harrington; next the discovery that he had been "collapsed" a long time ago, as indicated by the charge of embezzlement and murder; and now this Bolshevik, Soderman, shooting Judge Allen down upon the bench! These could not be mere sporadic, unrelated outbreaks of violence. There must be some underlying connection between them. They must be symptoms of some common disease.

The Blade got out an extra. The people read it and gazed dumbly from one to another. "What in the world!" they murmured, aghast; then girded up their souls.

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 But while the newsboys were crying the extra, a most astounding flash had come in over the Washington wire. Titmarsh read it and could hardly believe his eyes. Agitated, he let the flimsy flutter from his hand. He picked it up and read it again, slowly, chin trembling. A dispatch that the sun would cease to shine after today would hardly have startled him more. His impulse was to ring up Scanlon. "Look here, what in blazes is this darn thing?" he would have blundered hoarsely; but an instinct said, "No: wait a minute."

If the dispatch were correct, Scanlon was no man to consult. If it were true, John Boland was a colossus of hypocrisy, towering over the three towns, an arch-villain of his time. For twenty years the editor had looked to Boland for sustenance and profit. If Boland were a mere adventurer, building the fortunes of all of them upon a fraud—if Boland were ruined by this decision of the United States Supreme Court, why, he, Titmarsh, was ruined also. The ground his shop stood on was not his ground—the building that housed it was not his building—if everything that Boland had accumulated had been carried to pot by this one sweep of the gowned arm of justice, why, everything that he, Titmarsh, had accumulated, had been carried to pot also. So it seemed to his dizzy, recling mind. To him there came no speculation of pity for the broken buccaneer—he thought only of the victims, and among these victims, he felt first, and naturally, for himself.

A cold rage of resentment at Boland, a mighty impulse to revenge that was bigger than any emotion that had ever stirred in Titmarsh's pigeon breast, began to get hold of him. Instead of appealing to

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 Scanlon, he hurried round the corner to Gaylord, President of the First National Bank—which was the actual respondent in the suit of Salzberg over a piece of land 60 × 120 the title to which, unsettled, unsettled everything and thus let loose the avalanche. Gaylord, Titmarsh judged, would have something direct, perhaps. But Gaylord did not—not yet. The great press service of the country had outspeeded all private sources of information.

The financial man stared, then read again and his face went white as paper. Titmarsh saw in its fleeting expression his own fears confirmed, saw the height and breadth and depth of a county-wide disaster paint its appalling significance upon the features of the banker—a man accustomed by profession to think of the concerns of others.

"The ———!" exclaimed James Hobson Gaylord, and when, white of eyes conspicuous, he turned his blanched face to the editor's, it revealed his own perception that John Boland was a mephistophelian cyclops. "Judas," they had called Henry Harrington five or six days ago, for voting against the interests of the community in a little matter of a prison contract. What would they call John Boland? There was no word to characterize him. He had beggared himself—that was his affair; but he had beggared every one else—that would be their affair. The whole community was landless—and on land everything is built. Everybody had been robbed of his or her title, which was to say, robbed of increment, robbed of homes, of business houses, robbed of thrift and frugality of thirty years, robbed of the things that had been bought with youth and toil and sacrifice—with

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 the very substance of life itself; robbed of comfort now, robbed of that prospect of comfort in declining years which begins to look so sweet to people in middle life, who are the sort of people bankers come most to know and have sympathy with.

While the two men faced each other, a subeditor—who had marked some of the meaning of that first "flash," as well as noted his superior's agitation and whither he had gone bearing the flimsy in his hand—came hastily in with the more amplified account of what the United States Supreme Court had decided. Gaylord snatched and read it. It confirmed every implication his keen mind had seen in the first.

"What'll I do?" gulped Titmarsh, long trained to subserviency. Never had a piece of news affecting the welfare of Boland General come to him that he had not hurried with it to Scanlon for suggestion. He had printed or suppressed, garbled or construed, according to the effect of its publication upon the welfare of that great business operation of which every human being in the county was in some way or other a part. But Boland General was no more! It was no more than the remains of a bubble that had burst, which are not much. The two men exchanged glances; their eyes spoke before their lips could frame the words. They said: "John Boland is a dead one. The man whose personality has become a tradition, an institution—has fallen; that upreared, godlike figure has crashed to earth."

"Do?" blazed Jim Gaylord, independence of action flaming out in his decision as it had not done before in years. "Bulletin it! By God, bulletin it! It'll be every man for himself before night, and the devil take

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 John Boland, if he don't want the mob to take him. . . the crooked old coyote!" Gaylord smashed down his fist upon his desk.

Titmarsh hurried out. With his going, the banker lost something of his self-control. "My God!" he cried, raging to and fro in his glass-walled office. "My God! . . . That old devil lied to me. He's been lying to me all these years. Business man? He's a gambler. He must have known every minute what might happen—every minute for thirty years. Think of that, will you? And when Hornblower started this thing three years ago and we wanted to lynch him and Henry Harrington stopped it, the old hypocrite interfered on Harrington's side. My God, what a nerve! . . . Well, I suppose that was part of the game—he had to be like that to make suckers of us all, to dope us into the notion that he was God-a'mighty. What a gall!" Gaylord was still walking up and down, clapping the palms of his hands together excitedly. "What a gall!" he cried, almost admiringly. "That's why I couldn't be a great big crook myself; I just haven't got gall enough." Jim Gaylord sank, collar wilting, although it was not a warm day, into his chair, and began to swear, softly, fervently, almost unctuously.

Around the corner Titmarsh had stopped his press and was himself pounding feverishly upon a typewriter. He was preparing the bulletin. The rising venom in a small nature inflamed his mind, made him do the clearest, the most convincing piece of writing he had ever done in his life. Into one hundred words he got the succinct story of a colossal crime which, justly if tardily overtaking its perpetrator, had brought cataclysmic disaster upon innocent thousands.

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 Within five minutes a copy was pasted in the window and another was being transcribed by brush into huge sheets that could be read at fifty feet, while a third was being rapidly set in half-inch type—a size that would make the story all but fill the first page of the second extra of the Blade for that day.

Before the larger sheets could be pasted in the window, a group had gathered about the typewritten one; before its duplicate was past the typesetters, the sidewalk in front of the Blade office was blocked with people who had gathered to stare with straining eyes; and within ten minutes after the second extra was in the hands of newsboys hawking hoarsely, the street itself was blocked; not even police lines could have been established.

Messengers, automobiles, telephone wires hurried the news about. Housewives listened at the receiver sickly, or stared wide-eyed over back fences at the white faces of neighbor women who purveyed the story to them. These telephone conversations and over-the-back-fence group-discussions were alike exclamatory—fragmentary.

"Mr. Boland? Such a good man?" tone of utter incredulity.

"Well, if he's that kind of a man"

"I never could see why people were so crazy about that man"

"Of course, he'll have to pay it back."

"Why, he was little better than a robber."

"But can he pay it back?"

"He's rich."

"He's got millions."

"He's a beggar."

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 "But the decree says he has to pay back—make restitution for every log—every lath—every stick of timber—why, all he's got has to go back to the Government"

"Not to the Government—to the Salisheutte Indians. They're only a small tribe now."

And so the gossip went.

Men in offices and men in stores and men in shops and mills heard it and gazed at each other incredulously. "What's it mean?" they asked, and wet dry lips and felt a strange quaking in their hearts which seemed to sense or understand before their minds did. What does it mean to have the land, the foundation of society, plucked out from under? It means chaos—paralysis—Russia!

Telephones jingled more persistently, wives calling up husbands, husbands calling up wives who with their consorts had scraped and saved through tedious years of instalment and interest-paying, in order to call their homes their own—and now to learn that they had paid their money to a man who did not own what he had sold them. Lawyers were being consulted and they with grave, steadied voices gave grave, unsteadying opinions.

"If it's taken away from us, Boland will pay it back—that old hypocrite—or I'll dig his eyes out myself," one wife shrieked madly.

An excited small store-keeper closed his doors and went rushing to join the milling mass before the newspaper office. The example was contagious; others closed their doors. It became epidemic. The larger stores had emptied themselves of patrons; soon the very salespeople had begun to trickle out. A sus-

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 pension of all business activities appeared to declare itself. By four o'clock Schuler's, the biggest store in town, had closed. Schuler was not there—he was closeted with Gaylord and Foster and other wiser heads—if there were any wiser—trying to make sure of understanding, trying to behave as rational beings instead of stripped savages. Their conference was in an upstairs room over the bank as affording greater privacy.

"There isn't a loan—there isn't a mortgage that I can foreclose," Gaylord was saying, "because—well, because the title isn't there—four hundred thousand loaned by the Savings Branch on real estate and I can't collect a dollar of it."

The banker turned to the window and gazed moodily out at the signs along the street, swinging so blandly unconscious that they irritated Gaylord. Didn't they know—the fools, Tuttle and Rogers, that that was not their drug store? Ryan, that that was not his plumbing shop? Ellison that "Oh, my Lord!" he groaned, and turned back to the group, as he recalled another phase. "The new improvement bonds! We'll never sell 'em now. And the Federal Reserve loans! Why, fellows, our credit is shot to pieces. It'll take years—years of litigation to"

"Aw, let's cool off until tomorrow and then see how it looks," urged Schuler.

"Tomorrow?" snorted Gaylord, angrily. "You fool! There ain't any tomorrow. Hark!" he interrupted himself and cocked a listening ear. "Hear that, will you?"

Up from the streets came the roar of the angry throng, massing, milling, menacing.

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 Yet even up to this time there had been those who took the news quite calmly, young clerks in stores who owned nothing, workmen on the docks and in the mills who owned no real property nor hoped to. The land was still there, wasn't it? The stores still stood—and the mills. Somebody owned them—somebody would pay wages. So at the first it was only the propertied classes who were greatly excited beyond curiosity. But the unpropertied began to see that their self-interest was affected also. With values unsettled, business would be unstable; there would be less money to buy with, fewer goods to be purchased and fewer clerks needed to sell them; less work, less prosperity, less. . . It took not more than two hours for everybody to understand that this was everybody's calamity; that from the top scum to the bottom slime nobody in Socatullo County was immune. No logs from the hills meant no wages for taking them out; no lumber from the mills meant no wages for turning logs into dimension-stuff that went into the holds and onto the decks of ships; and no wages meant—starvation! And that is property catastrophe reduced to its final and inevitable terms.

Starvation! The mass thought of hunger makes for panic. Nobody had given the order to close Schuler's; it just closed. So with the other business places. And the same thing was happening on the docks; longshoremen dropped their hooks and slings swung empty from the booms of ships. It was happening in the very mills themselves. Saws turned and there were none to feed them, endless chains rattled but bore no grist of logs nor of lumber; suction pipes wheezed no streams of sawdust to the incinerators.

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 The workingmen had sensed now the astounding significance of the news and the impulse to labor was paralyzed; they went out—to see about it.

The engineers heard this and turned off the power. They too went out. Silent, barn-like with only here and there the whirl of a wheel, the rhythmic exhaust of a jet of steam that itself seemed to pant discouraged: "What's the use! What's the use!" Those great hives of industry, for the first time unproducing, became huge cavernous solitudes.

But there was nothing of solitude about the streets of Edgewater. In front of the Blade office and about the corner by the First National they were a-jam and more or less a-rumble, the crowd more excited and excitable with every moment. Inflaming rumors flew about; nobody had all the information; some got fragments of it very vividly.

"What's it mean, Andy?" shouted one man, hopelessly wedged in a thick growth of shoulders, to an acquaintance who, peering from the vantage of a barrel, was getting a close-up of the latest bulletin.

"It just means our titles are gone—plumb gone—that's what!"

"Gone where?"—incredulously.

"Gone to thirty or forty dirty Indians. That's who we've been working for, fellows—a bunch of mangy bucks and rheumatic old squaws, and the guy that put us to work for 'em, that made us do it, was old John Boland."

The crowd was doubly, triply incensed: incensed because he whom they had venerated as a god had turned out a gigantic gambler; incensed because he had let the town grow and thrive in confidence when he

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 knew it rested upon a trap-door to an abyss like this; besides they were incensed by their own fears, their own meannesses and malices, which any crisis of emotions may stir up in any group of human beings.

"Lynch him!" "Lynch the old devil!" The cry was lifted and carried far. Almost immediately a spray of humanity jetted out from the throng like the stream of a hose and led a mad dash to that squat three-story block-long building in which were the offices of Boland General.

But already J. B. had heard about the mob. "The ingrates!" he had been barking. "The cattle! They never think of my losses—it's theirs they worry about. Can't they see—dod gast 'em—they'll be protected? It'll all iron out somehow for everybody but me. It's me that's broke . . . but I'll come back. I'll show 'em—I'll show the whole dod-gasted"

A confused sound began to come to his windows from the street in front, and he was first of the little group of counselors to gather in his office—Scanlon, Quackenbaugh, Mead and others—to sense its meaning—a low mouthing that grew into a strident angry clamor and the shouting of a name.

"Go out to them! Make a speech to 'em!" rasped Mr. Boland excitedly at Scanlon. "Tell 'em it isn't clear yet; tell 'em we haven't had time to weigh all the implications; tell 'em I'll make good on everything. I always have and I always will. Anyway, pacify 'em, pacify 'em!"

"It's you they're paging," suggested the Chief Fixer drily.

"I'll go! Oh, I'll face them," fumed the ruined magnate, with another flare of his old imperiousness,

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 and rising as if he would throw his window up and shout down to the menacing masses: "Here I am—answerable!"

"Better not, Mr. Boland," warned Scanlon soberly. "Better not—they're not themselves exactly. They're a bunch of Indians and they're getting worse. Better use the private exit and get away for an hour or two."

Scanlon's words were uttered in just the tone to carry conviction to a tenacious man who nevertheless believes in discretion. Mr. Boland fidgeted for a while, hating to show yellow and hating to be rash too. Eventually he took the Chief Fixer's advice; and it was well that he did, for thirty minutes later a geyser-burst of mad humanity roared up the stairway and streamed along the corridor into his private office, through doors which Oskison opened obsequiously and hastily, knowing that they would be battered down, if he did not.

Missing Old Two Blades, the mob took small vengeance on his property; disarranging, overturning, smashing and destroying, then rushing back downward to the street, leaving the upper purlieus of Boland General looking as if a herd of wild cattle had trampled through.

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T SIX o'clock the mob forgot to go home to dinner; by seven o'clock when it was hungry as well as embittered, when that venom which had distilled itself first in the veins of Titmarsh had had time to duplicate itself in several thousand venous systems; when the men were mad and the women were madder, when leadership had been unable to assert itself; when the mob was a headless monster that flung its writhing coils around first one city block and then another; when it was an angry flood that sloshed through the streets from the courthouse on the south to the docks upon the north—then it was that this instinct to avenge itself upon the property of John Boland, when it could not reach his person, cropped out again.

It broke out first down by the waterfront, opposite Whitman Avenue, where loomed a huge warehouse with the name of John Boland—a wooden warehouse and highly inflammable, for nearly everything in Edgewater was wooden that could be wooden; and highly inflammable because the chief product of Boland General was lumber made from resinous timber.

"Burn it!" somebody shouted hoarsely. "Burn the damn thing!"

How was it done? And so quickly? Nobody knew quite. Somebody found a barrel of tar on the dockside; somebody's hands rolled it against the side of the building; somebody's axe broke it in; several some-

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 bodies flung pieces of splintered lumber at the oozing mass; then a particular somebody struck a match. That somebody was Adolph Salzberg.

For a moment the crowd had been still, as sensing that something pregnant and sensational was afoot.

The match flickered, the tar caught, smoked, smoldered and flared up. A cheer rose from the crowd. The blaze shot up at the corner of the warehouse like a swift-climbing vine of fire, like a spurt of flame, mounting to the eaves. The cheers grew wilder. The ivy of fire crept both ways along the eaves, its branches like elfin sprites of flickering yellow that balanced dancingly on the gutters and then of a sudden became huge birds with mighty sun-like wings that flapped every way at once. There was a smoke, wide sheets of smoke creeping and curling from between the shingles; then there was a crackling, volleys of cracklings, a vast barrage of cracklings and swiftly one huge explosion of fire. The whole warehouse was enveloped in fierce flame, sweeping upward into the night.

It and its contents went roaring up to the sky and the crowd cheered frantically, delighted with the spectacle, delighted with itself—so delighted that somebody—rolled another barrel of tar against another warehouse. It burned as brilliantly as the other; and there was more cheering and more frantic delight. The mob spread out and grew busy—busier and busier. More warehouses were kindling; and then piles of lumber began to go—huge fields of lumber—acres and acres of lumber leaping into red flame. Wharves and docks began to blaze and ships at these docks to take fire. When hawsers burned in two the ships went adrift, gigantic torches reeling tipsily on the inlet.

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 The Mary Boland, especially, burned well, and the north-bound breeze wafted her across the channel, into a dock, into a lumber pile—and within half an hour the whole waterfront of Socatullo was burning brilliantly, as brilliantly as burned the waterfront of Edgewater. Other ships aflame drifted Wahpeetahway and docks there too were burning. Mills were burning—mills on both sides of the inlet. The Boland lath mill went. It was the largest, the most perfectly equipped lath mill in all the world. It burned beautifully.

Gaylord and Schuler had been trying to check this incendiary passion, "Don't burn up the mills. You burn up your jobs, you damn fools!" they shouted, fighting their way through the crowds.

"Aw, let 'em burn! They're Boland's, ain't they?" retorted men with torches of flaming waste, with buckets of kerosene or fish oil in their hands, and went on kindling new fires.

The match factory, the paper mill, the salmon cannery and the drying frames on which were stretched thousands of desiccating carcasses of Alaska cod, began to go—filling the air with a heavy odor of incinerating flesh.'

The waterfront on the Edgewater side was now ablaze from end to end. Vast sheets of flame, clouds and billows of flame, torrential canopies of fire swept up into the night. They flaunted their blazing banners at the darkness overhead. Boland General was burning up.

Revenge! The mob was getting its revenge. It cheered itself hoarse—cheered and rushed about from one scene of conflagration to another.

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 But there was one who saw who neither cheered nor rushed about. Henry Harrington, through the barred windows of his cell, gazed at that mounting wall of flame half a mile away and was enough dismayed by the sight—yet his heart was too sick to be made sicker. He was rather numb tonight about a good many things. Copies of the Star extras had, of course, penetrated to the jail. He knew what had happened—to Adam John—to Judge Allen—to John Boland—knew why that wall of flame was rising. He knew it was insanity. It distressed him—yet only mildly, impersonally, as it were. He was a sort of burned-out ruin himself tonight and dumbly drank in the spectacle of the conflagration, conscious all the while of that dull pain at his heart which it seemed must never leave; for the next day after his love had died, he had been surprised to find it alive again. This was because he had subconsciously accepted Lahleet's hypothesis, so sympathetically and mendaciously planted in his mind, purely to anesthetize his suffering—the theory that Billie believed him guilty. Eventually he confessed it aloud to himself: "She thinks I'm guilty . . . They've made her believe it. . . . She's just so shocked she can't think what to do. . . . That makes her doubt me all along the line." From this moment forward, Henry thought he had originated this idea, so that when later Lahleet advanced a totally different hypothesis he saw no reason to doubt her single-mindedness.

So tonight as the flames burned up John Boland's fortune, while Henry languished, seemingly forgotten, in a cell, he could mutter doggedly, lyrically: "I love her! I love her!" But abruptly the languishing one

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 closed his eyes and opened them again, for something most unexpected had happened. While his gaze was focused on those distant cliffs of fire, the line of his vision had been broken by a something—a something on the hiproof of the jail, a few feet below his window—a human figure, silhouetted for the moment and then crouching flat. The appearance of a human figure there would have been startling enough—especially since Henry thought he recognized it—but his power to register vivid sensation was temporarily depleted by overuse. He watched this figure casually almost, creeping upward to his window, and flattening there, while hands worked at the sash with tools that presently enabled the man to remove and lay it on the sloping shingles beside him.

"Hello, Adam! What do you think you're doing?" Henry demanded in a low tone. Adam's answer was a grunt and the appearance of a tiny blue flame that appeared to jet almost out of his hand. Some furtive, some perverse instinct of Henry's made him careful to hover close to those bars in such a way that the blue flame would be invisible to eyes peering out at the lurid sky from cells behind, quite as the flattened figure of Adam John was invisible. Along the bars, top and bottom this blue flame went licking, until, lo, at a touch Adam John had plucked out four of them.

"Can beat it now," he whispered laconically in that forever gassy-hoarse voice of his.

Henry, who had been fascinated by the acetylene tongue at its work, seemed to rouse to full consciousness with a bang. "No, no, Adam!" he objected with decision. "Thanks, old man, but—when I go out of here, it'll be through the front door. The

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 folks that put me in will have to come and take me out."

This was not bravado, exactly; it was not conscience entirely. It was the faint resurgence of an old hope. Henry still dreamed of being vindicated. He doted on it. Honor seemed all that was left. Some docks and mills burning up were nothing to this young man—at least nothing so much. A far greater conflagration had been going on in his own heart all day and thus far into the night and there was something there that refused to incinerate. Vindication, not liberty, was what he craved.

"No?" Adam John had grunted, nonplused, but submissive, as always, to Harrington's slightest whim, "No?"—as if he could not understand, and yet was reconciled.

"I don't blame you though for lighting out, Adam John!" Henry assured him. "You keep under cover now till I can go to the bat for you. You got a rotten deal when I promised you a square one. This whole thing's going to untangle, and untangle darn quick. I can see that much in the light of that burning mill over there."

Adam John grunted.

"Where's Lahleet?" Henry whispered.

"Mebbe so she go Salisheuttes—fishing up coast." Adam John speculated. "Salisheuttes own everything—own all dis now; own every darn t'ing."

"The Salisheuttes!" ejaculated Henry, visioning a few tepees and lodges of smelly fish Indians. "There's a for your life. It seems as if God was giving these people the laugh!"

But Adam John did not linger to philosophize.

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Talk:United Nations General Assembly Resolution ES-10/21

Source
The link given does not work. -- Beardo (talk) 10:39, 13 November 2023 (UTC)


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 He had done what he came there to do. There was a sudden move on his part, a flattening against the shingles, then an alert lifting of his head.

"Goo'-by," he blurted and was gone before Henry could even say: "Thanks, you well-meaning old scout."

The conflagration raged on—raged wider and more fiercely. The people of Edgewater watched for hours with grim satisfaction while John Boland's possessions burned to ashes. Yet every tide that floods must also ebb. Eventually, bodies wearied and spirits commenced to sag, the dramatic gorgeousness of the scene somehow to pale.

By midnight the destroying mob had become a thin line stretched for two miles along the blazing waterfront, a line which showed a tendency to break and knot in haggard, worn-out groups, no longer potential, resolved by the lassitude of exhaustion and the subsidence of emotions into mere spectators. The spectacle, so long inspiring, began instead to seem awesome. Men gazed solemn-eyed at red clouds glowing where they had worked at desk or bench, some of them for all of their adult lives. There was some recurrence of hysteria—women weeping quietly who had wept violently some hours before. A hue of thought began to tinge the minds of gazers, misgivings to arise. The people of Edgewater were beginning to reflect—to regret even, to wonder if—if all had been as lost as it seemed before the mad impulse to destroy had come to them.

Even nature experienced a revulsion, for, while the citizens of Edgewater were thus doubting themselves, there came a change of the wind—an ominous change. The watchers on the roofs across the inlet noted it

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 first. Sparks no longer fell on them. The flames were going straight up. By one o'clock these roaring columns, pillaring the sky, were all leaning toward Edgewater. Yes, a breeze, an unmistakable breeze was bearing down from the northwest. Gentle enough at first, when it encountered all this vast whirl of heated air, the breeze quickened freakishly into a gale, a devastating blast that had breathed but once upon that blazing waterfront of Edgewater when from it there surged toward the town a mile-long billow of flame. Frightfully this rolled into the wide avenue and scorched the cheeks of spectators so that the line of them broke and gave up the cross-streets in hurrying groups. Proud, as vaunting itself on this victory, it leaped and flaunted after their heels.

Immediately, the sides of wooden buildings and the window casings of brick ones on the town side of Inlet Avenue, commenced to smoke and blister. Within a minute incipient blazes broke out along that barrier of buildings—a score of blazes, fifty of them! Stores, shops, flats and homes of Edgewater were breaking into flame.

Fire! Fire! The town was kindling as that first warehouse had kindled, with incredible rapidity. Fires by squads and fires by platoons were organizing themselves in one long regimentall front of flame. Tardily the little fire department, totally disorganized by the mob, was endeavoring to function, rushing to and fro with a thousand volunteer aids—regulars on the roofs of stores with hose, volunteers on the roofs of houses with buckets and wet sacks. Their efforts were futile, comic. This wall of flame, advancing remorseless and irresistible from the waterfront, was dooming

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 the town of Edgewater to ashes as the people of Edgewater had doomed the works of John Boland to the same.

A new kind of panic seized upon the people, a panic in their souls. They stared inert, helpless. First the ground taken out from under them and now the roof burned down over their heads; it was as if God had struck them. Why lift a hand to avert this final blow, why stir a step to fly from that punishment which seemed prepared for them? "Vengeance is Mine." They had taken their own vengeance on Boland and the fires they kindled had flared back to take a fateful vengeance on the little all that was left them.

But this attitude passed. Everybody ran to save what he might—and then to escape. The doors of stores were flung open. Stocks, furniture, fittings were hurried into the streets, to be, within a few minutes, abandoned. The flames raced too rapidly.

In the residence district there was more time—there were more open spaces; for every home in Edgewater had its lawn in front, its garden in the rear. Householders began frantically carrying out their possessions into the streets. Automobiles were being employed; trucks, touring-cars with tops thrown off, and sedans and limousines with windows lowered and household furnishings thrust frantically through the frames, were all piled high or stuffed full and making trips into the park around the courthouse or to the vacant ground at the edges of the town.

Great prices were offered for means of transportatation; great prices demanded by shameless profiteers. Horses were hurriedly hitched to wagons; wheelbarrows were trundled out of gardeners' houses and from

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 contractors' stores; articles of furniture with casters on them, a sofa that would roll, a davenport, a baby's bed—all such vehicles were piled high with most precious personal possessions, hastily and often absurdly selected, and trundled frantically along the pavement. The gas plant blew up with a mighty roar that knocked houses flat, people flat; but the people rose and stumbled on, their pathway lighted by the flames that burned a block or two away.

Mothers wept, babies cried, fathers scolded; boys shouted one to another, girls giggled hysterically; everybody was frantic, everybody was exhausted but everybody kept going, for the tongues of flame licked hungrily. The red monster had roared down the main streets; it leaped from house to house, from cottage to cottage. The smoke hung in the air, a huge black pall, a few hundred yards above the town, making a somber reflector for the flames, illuminations that revealed men and women as insects—crawling, puny, helpless entities, struggling against the ultimate.

It was one wide stage, but many dramas were going forward upon it at once—comedies some of them, tragedies some—as, for instance: Adolph Salzberg was moving his goods from out his rented cottage. In the presence of what was happening all Salzberg's philosophies fell away from him. He was a mere homeless insect as other human beings were.

From somewhere he had obtained possession of a bony horse and a rickety wagon. Into this, aided by his wife, he was madly hurrying the few little sticks of furniture that were his and the two children that God had given and for whom at times he had been none too grateful. Adolph was very excited, very human, very

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 tender tonight as he rushed in and out of the little cottage; Hulda, his wife, was more excited. She was large and her flesh was soft. She stumbled from the cottage to the wagon, lumbering, panting—turning a moment to look at the flames advancing and then with groans of fresh distress, heaving toward the cottage again.

But once as Hulda turned cottageward, she cried out sharply, "Oh, Adolph! Der pain! Der pain!" then thrust a hand to her side and sat down upon the curb. Adolph, as he wrestled with his loading, noted his wife sitting down, and that she appeared to be in distress. Before he could get to her, she was lying down on the strip of grass between the wooden walk and the wooden curb—both of which would presently take fire and burn.

"Mama!" he called. "Mama! Don't lay down dere. I get you a bed to lay on!" But when Salzberg knelt beside her and felt tenderly over that large, soft body, lo it was pulseless.

"Mama!" he called so loudly that she must hear. "Mama! I get you up from dere."

But he knew she did not hear him. Frantically he dumped the part of their houschold effects from the old wagon and made a superhuman effort to lift the body of his wife to the place he had prepared for it, talking to it sobbingly all the while. "I lift you up dere, mama. I haf you up dere in a jiff!" But he was not equal to the task. And everybody was busy—too busy with his own concerns, too busy with bird cages and green onyx clocks and family heirlooms, to consider the particular embarrassment of a broken-hearted man entirely undemonstrative in his grief. But there came a step

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 beside him, a low exclamation and a crisp voice that said heartily: "I'll help you, Adolph!"

Scarce looking up, though grateful, Adolph knew that hands less large but equally tender with his own lifted that dear treasure to its place and helped him compose it as for a comfortable sleep.

Salzberg murmured fervent thanks and looked up to ejaculate in amazement: "Py Gott! Henry Harrington!"

"The fire is coming fast," said Henry; "get along with you."

Salzberg put his children beside him on the seat, and clucked to the old horse and drove away—away from the cliffs of fire—away toward the open country—through the pungent bitter smoke, with its smell of burning codfish—Salzberg who had kindled that first warehouse down on the dock near seven hours before.

"Dam' dis man, Boland," he sobbed. "Dam' de Supreme Court. Dam' me! Dam' every t'ing but my two modderless little kids!" Salzberg, clucking thickly to the old horse, stretched a sheltering arm around his children.

"Now, wouldn't that break your heart!" exclaimed Harrington, but stood gazing after for only a minute; for he had run head-on into this Salzberg tragedy while on most personal business bent, and was immediately under way once more, pointing his course to the edge of town and up the side-hill by a short cut through scrubby fir trees to the bluff on which Humboldt House had been reared so proudly. "Billie! My Lord, what an awful blow it's been to her! Why didn't I think of that side of it before," he was reproaching himself as he plunged upward. "She wasn't to blame.

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 She didn't know her father was an old cormorant. She'll need me now," he panted, forgetting everything but that the girl he loved would now be a crushed and broken flower, prideless, disillusioned, needing only him. "She'll want me. . . she'll want me something awful!" he perceived eagerly, with all a lover's reviving faith.

Occasionally as he climbed, he glanced backward at that lurid sea of flames, a vast, yellow world blazing in the middle of night, and shuddered each time he looked, for his capacity to feel emotions was coming back to him once more. Newly impelled by these and by tenderer ones which kindled momently, he resumed, after each pause, his upward climb, more breathless than before, naturally unaware that some ten minutes earlier, say about the time when he was lifting the the body of Hulda Salzberg, a coupé had rolled madly down the roadway from Humboldt House to the town.

Daring desperately the very edge of the advancing wall of flames, this car reached the courthouse square, dashed upon the curb, bounded recklessly across the lawn and brought up quivering at the very entrance to the jail. Jailor White heard a clanging of his bell and answered it in person. As he set his iron gate ajar, two female figures, cloaked from head to foot, crowded in upon him and the slenderer of them instantly and boldly turned back the cowl-like collar, revealing the pale, agitated features of Miss Billie Boland.

"Oh!" she moaned, and reached out excited hands to the jailor. "Your prisoners!" she clamored, then choked: "They'll burn—they'll burn like rats in a trap."

Jailor White, who had started and stared wonder

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Rh

20004 CHAPTER 36 An Act to make provision about civil contingencies.

by the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows:—

1 Meaning of “emergency”
 * (1) In this Part “emergency” means—
 * (a) an event or situation which threatens serious damage to human welfare in a place in the United Kingdom,
 * (b) an event or situation which threatens serious damage to the environment of a place in the United Kingdom, or
 * (c) war, or terrorism, which threatens serious damage to the security of the United Kingdom.

 * (2) For the purposes of subsection (1)(a) an event or situation threatens damage to human welfare only if it involves, causes or may cause—
 * (a) loss of human life,
 * (b) human illness or injury,
 * (c) homelessness,
 * (d) damage to property,
 * (e) disruption of a supply of money, food, water, energy or fuel,
 * (f) disruption of a system of communication,
 * (g) disruption of facilities for transport, or

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 ingly, was quick to recover his poise and replied with that courteous consideration he always paid a lady. "Nope," he reassured confidently. "We won't burn, Miss Boland. Too much open space around us; besides, we got the whole staff on the roof with wet sacks and buckets of water. Not a chance, Miss Billie!"

"Oh!" gasped the girl, breathing quickly: "Are you sure?"

"Absolutely, miss!"

"Oh, such a relief!" She stood hesitant.

Jailor White had, in his treatment of Henry Harrington, already shown that he was a man of sympathetic heart and now he displayed a discerning mind as well. "Want—want to see anybody?" he asked, obligingly.

But Miss Boland's face betrayed a fresh alarm. "No! Oh, no!" she insisted hastily. "And you—" her hand went out imploringly—"you wouldn't tell any . . . anybody that I came? . . . That won't be necessary, will it?" Her anxiety was very great and very appealing.

Again Jailor White showed discernment. He perceived that this last was very maidenly anxiety indeed and the chivalry of his rough heart was stirred by this spectacle of the yesterday proud daughter of the tonight ruined and harried John Boland rushing downward through a wall of fire, full of fear for her lover; and then, when reassured, as full of alarm lest he might know that she had come.

"Nope; not necessary 'tall, Miss Boland. I've forgot bigger things 'n this in my day to oblige a lady."

"Thank you; oh, thank you, Mr. " Billie stammered gratefully.

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 "White is my name, Miss Boland; just plain Larry White."

"Thank you, Mr. White," Billie murmured, and pressed the jailor's hand fervently, then fled out the door and down the steps faster than her maid could follow; and it was not fear of the flames that made her hasten.

Henry, panting at last to the top of the bluff, was really relieved to find Humboldt House still standing. The mob had not rushed up here then. But the house seemed dark; yet he knew it had a private electric plant and surmised the curtains were tightly drawn; however, the front he realized must be illumined by the conflagration. Under cover of a cedar hedge and furtively for strategic reasons rather than through remembering that his status was that of a prisoner illegally at large, he made his way round the house, there to be halted abruptly, for the wide veranda not twenty yards away was at least half as light as day and alive with people, thirty or forty perhaps, standing along the rustic rail in groups, staring gloomily and talking in low, dejected voices. These, of course, would be the families of Boland executives, who had been burned out down below.

Their presence, so close to him, gave Henry an odd sort of start. Scanlon was there, no doubt; and Quackenbaugh—the men who had conspired to ruin him. He found his teeth gritting, his wild rage at them heightening. He edged nearer, still keeping close under the shadow of the hedge, and was rewarded by making out Old Two Blades himself, a little apart, his privacy respected by the others, standing motion-

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 less like a pelican on a rock, gazing downward into the vast pit of flame; and beside him, sunk into a chair, sat the considerable bulk of his wife, swaying occasionally as with inconsolable grief.

"Napoleon watching the burning of Moscow!" muttered Henry, gloating in spite of himself.

But Billie! Where was she? He strained his eyes for a sight of her, his ears for a tone of her voice; but got neither. Satisfied that she was not upon the veranda, he moved around the corner of the house to get a view of that small balcony which looked out from her own suite in the northeast gable.

"Poor, poor girl! She's just too crushed to see anybody at all," he reasoned. "Nobody would know how to talk to her but me anyway. . . . I could do a Romeo and climb up to that balcony," he decided, contemplating the mass of creepers that grew past it to the roof.

Henry had not heard a car shoot under the porte-cochère because the whole length and bulk of the house lay between. It was the coupé coming back. Still breathless from her visit to the jail, Billie's instinct was to avoid those groups upon the piazza, to avoid her grimly brooding father and her steadily weeping mother, to avoid the very house itself. Plucking at her maid to follow, she turned out, past the fountain playing in the court, toward the pergola in the rose garden. From there she could stare at that fascinating holocaust below from which no one could take an eye and give herself up to that whirlpool muddle of bitter and bewildering reflections which seemed to constitute her entire mind tonight.

Harrington, concealed by a pillar of that same per-

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 gola, was gazing speculatively at the balcony, then wistfully at the windows which he knew were hers, when there was wafted into his nostrils a faint but delicious perfume, a distinctive, delicate, bewitching fragrance that was as much personality as it was the distilled scent of flowers. He inhaled it and stood enraptured. It was Billie! She was near—she was somewhere round him in the night. The faint breeze breathed of her. His heart leaped; his nerves tingled; he could barely repress a cry of delight. Billie! Suddenly he shrank. She was there—just on the other side of the tamarack pillar. She was passing—screened from him only by the rose vines; he made out her figure clearly in that lurid half light. He could have reached out and touched her; but—caution! He must not alarm her. And, gods of ill luck, there tagged her maid after her. Her heels clicked faintly on the vitrified bricks; his were noiseless on the cushion of the lawn, and he followed after her.

Billie trailed listlessly to the very end of the pergola and sat down upon a bench of split logs where he had dreamed with her a score of times. The maid came on and sat down upon the same bench, but at a little distance, on the end nearer the house; the end that was between him and her. He had to keep behind the two of them.

"If—if she were only alone," he sighed, twisting his hands nervously, and speculating whether the maid could be trusted.

"You may go, Nana," Billie announced unexpectedly, and while her voice thrilled him, it melted him by its inarticulate sadness.

The maid, after solicitously turning up the collar of

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 the cloak about her young mistress's neck, went obediently back to the house. Harrington advanced to the very end of the bench. He had but to lean forward to lay a hand upon her shoulder. He could hear her sigh. And he could see her perfectly now. Poor, dear, bewildered girl! She had been made to suffer so. What if she had left him succorless? She was entirely surrounded by lying sycophants who had persuaded her that white was black. It was so impossible to reproach her now. She looked frail to him and wasted—as frail as he had felt till freedom gave him strength once more.

But as he considered in what way he would best announce his presence and what he would best do first for her, the realization came to him abruptly that he was not free. He was not free—he was merely out—by the grace of Adam John's acetylene torch, out to attend to certain responsibilities which the catastrophe had forced upon him, and only one of which his presence here in the garden advanced.

He felt a great pity for her as she bowed there—a great yearning for her. He wanted to take her tenderly in his arms, offer his strong young strength to bulwark her in this hour of awful calamity; but what had he to offer—really? There was nothing in him to bulwark, to comfort her; the sight of him would only shame her—shock her with the perception that, besides the other things which she believed of him, he was also a coward who had broken from his jail.

The town was burning up—but not the complaint against him. He was still under charges, under a cloud, under the ban of the law, the ban of his townsmen, the ban of. . . her. Until circumstances lifted that ban, he could be of no use at all. He must wait

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 as he had proudly boasted to her that he would wait. Now he dared not reveal himself; he could only stand a moment and yearn for her with more exquisite pain than ever, waft her a kiss that she must not see, lift above her bent head a prayer of which she could not know, and then slip away to set himself about that other important piece of business which had led him first to leave his cell and make a perilous way downward to the ground by the route which Adam John had taken.

For this next enterprise Henry needed high-powered transportation and the parking space behind Humboldt House was full of it. By a circuitous movement he was quickly among these cars. Selecting one with a full tank and ignition key in place, he felt justified in commandeering it. Forty miles away was a vast army encampment, a divisional headquarters, with warchouses full of supplies and barracks full of able-bodied men, and just before three o'clock of that fiery morning, Harrington, having driven as he had never driven before, drew up before the sentry at the main gate entrance. Something that he said to the sentry brought the officer of the guard quickly. Something that he said to the officer of the guard caused that functionary to hurry past another sentry to an orderly dozing outside the door of a man who wore two stars on his collar when not sound asleep in his pajamas, as he was at the present moment.

"Who? What!" roared the general, when his orderly, by the Pullman porter's expedient of plucking at the sheet, had twigged him into wakefulness. "Who? . . . Hellfire Harrington! Wants to see me? Well, why the devil don't you bring him in here? What do you keep him waiting for?"

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Page:Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons (IA travelsinwestafr00kingrich).pdf/416

 but little inducement to travelling about in it. Along the banks of the main waterways passing through it, the villages are all situated in similar sites, namely perched on the top of a clay bank, or dwarf cliff, behind which the land slopes steeply into what, in the wet season, is a swamp. On all sides rises the colossal, white-trunked, liane-hung forest; on all sides one may say, making no exception even for the broad river the villages face; for across it there is the tree-cliff again and in its deep dark waters are mirrored back the forest and the sky—all that the world is made of to the inhabitants of these villages; they are born, live, and die with no interval save sleep from the sight of that universe of forest, river and sky—and only a little sky—that which they can see over the river. All the change they get the seasons bring; the gloomy dry season when the wind steals softly up the river in the morning time, and down the river in the evening; the tornado seasons with their burst of earth-shaking thunder, and their lightnings coming down into the forest in great forked splashes, and their howling, squealing, moaning winds, that rush devastating through it, claiming as many victims among its giants as even the lightnings do.

The course of a grand tornado through a high forest is a thing to see, but anything but pleasant to experience. The heavy brooding suffocating heat when the great storm seems pressing its hot breast down on the very ground—the sensation of depression and wretchedness that creeps over you—and the evident apprehension of all living things of what they know is coming; an apprehension which changes into terror when the storm bursts and comes sweeping seawards with all the frenzy of its demoniac power and the roar of its rain. Behind it lie the bodies of many of the noblest trees, either lightning-seared, still standing, but turned in a moment from luxuriant living things into gaunt skeletons; or thrown down, with all their bravery of foliage and bush-rope, by the winged force which has wrung them round, and pulled them sheer out by the roots—things 100 to 200 feet high, just as you would pull out a root of groundsel—flinging them crashing among their fellows, wrecks to rot.


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 "He's here, sir," the orderly had the presence of mind to observe.

"Hellfire!" ejaculated the roused general, but not profanely; tenderly rather; and there ensued the spectacle of a man in pajamas leaping up, an oldish man with gray hair sticking out of his head at forty angles, leaping up and flinging his arms around Harrington and shouting: "Hellfire! You young !" The rest of his greeting was unprintable.

Harrington, yielding to the embrace, although embarrassed, presently put the old general affectionately but firmly from him. "You haven't heard what they have been doing to me," he replied.

"Haven't I?" snapped the general, irascibly. "Just got round to read a week's papers last night before I went to bed. Been so damned disgusted I could hardly sleep. I was going to drive over there this morning and get you out of that jail if I had to take the whole division with me. Murder! Embezzlement! Betrayal of constituency! The fools! They ought to see you where I've seen you. Hellfire, you young first-class !" The general became censorable again. "But they came to their senses and let you out, eh? And you came rushin' right over here like a boy to his dad, to tell your old general about it. Doggone you, Hank Harrington, I could just about cry over you and kick you all over this damned camp. What do you want—besides aJackson, tumble out that Scotch!"

Henry explained to the general his misapprehensions and told him what he wanted, then leaped into his borrowed car and hurried away with still another notion in his head.

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ORNING—gray, dismal morning, came to find the green earth scarred with blackened ruin. The blue of the inlet was bordered on both sides with a wide band of mourning which told where Boland's mills and docks and packing houses and lumber piles had been. There remained intact only isolated public structures like the courthouse and jail, the city hall, the high school and the library. Of the business district what stood up among the crumbling walls most sturdily was a stout three-story affair, its exterior scorched and blackened, its interior gutted, its glassless windows like hollow sockets in a skull—and this was the most that remained of all John Boland's business structures.

It was at the edges of the town that the refugees, dumping their domestic wreckage around them, had stopped their panicky flight; and daylight made all their miseries plainer. Comfortless, breakfastless, they turned back, singly and in family parties, disconsolate yet curious, toward their ruins. Before glowing pits of ashes, with gaunt chimneys standing tombstone-like over the graves of homes, they stared dumb, wretched, self-convicted. Lawlessness had punished lawlessness. They had sown the wind and reaped the whirlwind. But that was past. The question was—what should they do now?

That was what Salzberg himself was thinking. Leav-

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 ing his children with the chance neighbors whom he had found beside him when morning came, he stumbled across the town, heart-heavy. Led by some strange fascination, his feet were guiding him to that fatal spot, the First National Bank site, the only piece of real estate to which he had ever laid the shadow of a claim. In defiance of his principles he had bought that alleged title, to annoy his economic enemy, the president of that bank. Out of sheer perversity he had been a tool of Hornblower to push that claim, pushing from court to court to—this.

His mind was as full of debris as the street through which he picked his way. He wasn't a Marxian any more—not for the present. He had no philosophy to cope with a situation like this; and his mind was still wabbling when he came to a stand before a stone building with marble casements; a gutted wreck that stood on a corner.

Behind this wreck was a seething basement, full of the junk of printing presses; in front of it, in the street, were the remains of rather lavish office fittings, highly polished desks and chairs of mahogany, lying as they had been dragged. Some articles had burned afterward; some had been badly blistered and scorched; others, unscathed of fire, had been broken by rough handling. It was just here that Salzberg's eyes, roving curiously, encountered that which gave him a start. Amid this street-wide, chaotic solitude of tangled wires, broken glass and wreckage of half-consumed furniture, with a dead horse adding its grisly note to the picture, there sat, uncannily, an impassive figure in a swivel chair—a stoutish man, well dressed, with shoulders bowed, and a green velour hat pulled low over his eyes.

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 The crown and brim of the hat were lightly sprinkled with ashes. Immobile, elbows on chair-arms, fingers laced across his chest, he might have been dead, but that the drooping eyelids were not quite closed and the thumbs twiddled occasionally.

The man was Gaylord. The chair he sat in was his chair—the president's chair. Some dream had brought him back as near as possible to the scene of his business activities, and held him there absorbed—thinking, thinking, thinking. Thinking what it had all come to—this thirty years of his living, his striving; thinking what an insane complex a mob is, anyway; how unnecessary it had been to burn Boland's building: how much more complicated it had made the situation and speculating whether there was any relief, any way out. There must be, of course.

Salzberg's eyes narrowed at the sight of his ancient enemy. He bristled and gloated to see the man so overwhelmed. It was good to find one representative of the capitalistic class stripped to the clothes he wore, to the chair he sat in.

"Vell, Gaylord," he rasped, in that high, unfeeling tone of his. "Vell, Gay—" But the memory of his so recent grief checked this gloating challenge.

The banker started up aggressively. "Hello! It's you, is it?" he recognized, features hardening. "You started all this trouble, you know."

"Trouble!" ejaculated the man, with an absurdly hurt expression. "Vell, I don' vant no more; I got trouble enough py my own self." Then his fraying voice broke. "You—you can keep your tam lot," he blurted; "I don't vant nottings but my Hulda." His voice gulped and his eyes spurted tears. "I lost my

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 Hul—da! She died on me last night already right py her sidevalk, ven ve vas moving out."

Gaylord's eyes had widened with amazement; now they rounded with sympathy. "Hulda? . . . By Jehosaphat, that's tough!" he exclaimed in shocked sincerity, springing to his feet. Before he knew it, Gaylord had laid a sympathetic hand upon the shoulder of this man whom he had for years regarded as the most dangerous citizen in the community—although to be sure, he had, in the last twenty-four hours, changed his mind as to who was the most dangerous citizen.

And Salzberg's heart craved sympathy; it was the loneliest, emptiest thing in all creation just now. "Py Gott, Gaylord," he cried brokenly, "I didn't know you vas human at all before. I didn't know dat any panker vas human." The great hulking fellow toppled upon Gaylord's shoulder, weeping out his grief for Hulda, who had never looked upon the banker in her life without putting out her tongue at him.

Gaylord was surprised to find himself not minding this damp embrace a bit—not finding it embarrassing even—honored by it rather. He wept a little too, and flung an arm about that stout longshoreman's frame which quivered now like a tree in a blast. "It's all right, Adolph," he comforted. "It's all right. Damned if I ever knew the president of a Socialist Local had any soft side to him either."

"I guess ve all got a soft side to us," apologized Salzberg, twisting his head to wipe an eye on Gaylord's shoulder, "ven somet'ing hits us hard enough already."

"We are all hit that hard today," suggested Gay lord, "we're all softened up a bit."

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 Now this was tactful and it might be prophetic, but it was not exactly accurate. The community heart was not softened—yet. It was mad, bewildered, sore. Just now, in particular, the town was hungry. Breakfastless, besides physically exhausted, it was irritably unable to cope with the problem of immediate needs—yet feeling peevishly that somebody should cope with them.

Babies were crying for milk and in all that blackened area there was no milk; children clamored for bread and there was no bread; citizens looked about for some vestige of organization or leadership and there was no organization. Mayor Foster, the chief of police, the chamber of commerce—they had been accustomed so long to look for leadership to that golden circle, the cabinet of Boland General, that they looked there now. But the golden circle today was brass. Today the cabinet was not active—in leadership at least. Calls to nearby cities should have gone out for succor. Had they? Nobody knew. A statement of what the condition and the needs of the populace would be this morning should have been flashed out by wire or radio or messenger to the governor of the state while yet the flames were burning. Had it? Nobody knew. Everybody wondered; everybody felt lonely, desolate, abandoned. Everybody was realizing, of course, that by now a charitable and sympathetic world was reading of their calamity and that by afternoon supplies of every sort would be rushing to them. But now?

No food—no stoves to cook the food on—no water to cook it with or wash it down—hunger, faintness, misery! And the first pangs of hunger are the sharpest, the most desolating. Empty-stomached the refugees turned and twisted in aimless, forlorn procession

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 among their ruins—immensely cast down, immensely sore and irritable. Everything oppressed, the ashes, the debris, the ghostly marching columns of thick gray smoke from the smoldering embers. A certain stillness also oppressed.

This stillness was among the strange new things. The mills were accustomed to hum, the trolley cars to screech and clamor; but the mills were embers this morning and the trolley cars also, while the power lines were broken. So there spread a vast and mournful stillness over all. This reacted on the people. They spoke in hushed, funereal tones.

The very crying of the babies for milk had grown plaintive and hopeless and subdued; when in upon this gencral stillness there broke a rumbling sound. It was the trundle of heavy wheels and the roar of motor exhausts—a lot of wheels, a lot of motors, eight or ten of them at least—huge white-painted trucks, with a man in somewhat bedraggled business garments sitting beside the driver of the first, pointing here and there to pepperings of refugees amid the ashes, and then standing up and motioning with his arms to the convoy behind him—a truck down this street, a truck down that street and so on till the white trucks were scattering themselves through the chaos.

"Milk!" shouted somebody. "They're bringing milk."

"A quart to every family!" megaphoned drivers, through their hands. "Bring something to put it in—if you've got it."

Yes—milk. Somebody had gone fifty miles to a highway leading toward a great city and cut off and commandeered by sheer power of personal persuasion

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 a portion of that city's morning milk supply; and not only commandeered it, but personally conducted it, to the spot where it was needed. Yet it was doubtful if one of the townspeople, so intent with hurrying this distribution of the milk, recognized that nondescript figure standing beside the driver's seat of the foremost of these trucks, while his eyes surveyed again the smoking field of destruction. He might have been a hobo who had bummed a ride, and now was staring in mere curiosity.

Actually, his survey was swift and business-like. It had a military significance, and as he concluded it there sputtered up an army side-car, with its bathtub empty. At the same moment there appeared winding out of the green of the channel road, another and a longer line of trucks, dun-painted things this time, with men in khaki at the wheel.

The bedraggled man leaped down and stepped into the side-car which, quite as if it had come there for him, turned and sputtered back to meet this other column of trucks. These big dun-colored carriers were pyramided high with what might have been bricks, or tiles—odd-looking round, high-domed tiles. The man in the side-car waved these trucks one by one, out toward the bordering area where incipient camps sprang up and into the smoldering residence districts where hungry refugees knotted and grouped.

"Bread! It's bread!" shouted excited voices. A cheer was raised: "Bread! Hurrah for bread!" In a minute or two these jolly khaki fellows atop the trucks were tossing spinning loaves to hundreds of eager hands upraised to catch. The air was full of bread; and then all at once everybody's hands were full of it. Women

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 clutched the dear loaves to their breasts and hurried to the little camps. Men bore it, all that their arms could hold of it, tossing off a loaf to whoever had none; boys broke the loaves open, dug the white centers out and crowded them into their mouths.

Behind this second detachment other motor traffic appeared, trundling more slowly over the highway—a seemingly endless procession of queer-looking things like stoves on wheels. Again the young man in the bedraggled business suit waved his arms.

There were more side-cars appearing now, carrying officers—men with captain's and lieutenant's bars upon their shoulders, and even one with a yellow maple leaf: and they all stopped where that bedraggled man was standing; they hailed him, some familiarly, all respectfully; they waited for his nod and then they gave their orders; for behind the field-kitchens were coming yet other huge trucks, caravan on caravan of them.

Presently there was a field kitchen in every block of the residence district and at intervals of one hundred yards around that circle of temporary camps and dumps of household goods; and from each stack there poured smoke and from each stove there floated tantalizing aromas. Huge caldrons of coffce and potatoes were boiling and huge caldrons of that noblest institution of army cookery, beef stew, were simmering and loosing their appetizing fragrances on the smoky air. And so it came to pass that before twelve o'clock every one of these refugees had had at least some portion of food, and some had had a gorge.

But long before that, too, lines of conical khaki tents were springing up; and by the time excited mayors of western cities could call together sympa-

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 thetic meetings and arrange for those carloads and trainloads of supplies which generous-hearted people are always so quick to hurry to neighbors in distress, Edgewater had had one meal and knew that it would not miss another—knew also where it would sleep that night—on army beds with army mattresses and under army blankets.

There sprang up an instant feeling of gratitude for all this splendid succor and a marveling that it should have come so soon. Now, that it could come at all was due to the tolerable proximity of a vast army camp with its warehouses comfortably filled with supplies and its many thousand men available for this happy service of relief, which soldiers would much rather render than fight. But the red tape? Whose sharp shears had cut it so quickly? That answer was easy—a major-general. But what had so moved the major-general? That answer would have been more difficult for the people of Edgewater to comprehend. It was the bedraggled, scarce-noticed figure in the citizen's clothes—he it was and something in the past of him of which his townsmen were but faintly cognizant.

Nevertheless these stricken people speculated upon the fact. Some person or persons had rendered a tremendous service. Who was it? Talk of it ran from tent to tent. One thing became clear. Whoever brought the army, the army had brought the relief, and by one o'clock in the afternoon, a self-appointed delegation of three citizens of Edgewater was making its way to a largish oblong tent at the corner of Whitman Avenue and Tenth Street, in the very heart of the burned residential district. Before this

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 tent stood a dun limousine, with two black stars painted on its side, and with parked about. Within the tent sat the general. Now there is something about a major-general in uniform standing up to greet visitors, which rather fills the picture. Foster, Gaylord and Titmarsh envisaged only the general.

"Don't thank me," protested that gallant officer, tersely. "Thank Harrington, there! Thank 'Hellfire'? The general gestured to where at a table sat a man in the uniform of a colonel. He was the general's chief-of-staff; and beside him, as he had been beside him all day long, making suggestions, approving plans, directing officers who came and went, was the man in the business suit—still looking somewhat bedraggled—Henry Harrington. That's the man you owe your thanks to for getting us here as promptly as we did."

The committee stared. It had almost forgotten Henry Harrington. Titmarsh remembered having heard a rumor that this lesser Judas was out of jail and had been seen around; but this—this sight of him in relations of intimacy with the major-general; this revelation that it was to him the town was indebted for not missing even a single meal, for the lives of many of its babies, for so swift a reduction of its inevitable physical suffering—this was rather overwhelming to Titmarsh. To Foster and Gaylord it was rebuking. They stared stiffly—old memories rising.

"Well," glared the general, "why don't you thank him?"

Gaylord was a brusque man, but capable of some fineness of perception. He was considerably shaken; but Foster was angered, as well as totally confounded.

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 "This man," he said protestingly to the general, "has broken out of jail."

"And lucky for you people, believe me!" barked the general.

"He is awaiting trial for murder; besides which he is" Foster began sullenly to argue.

"Don't talk that piffle to me!" roared the general, livid with wrath. "Don't have the effrontery to repeat one of those damn-fool charges against this man with which the papers have been full the last few days. I know they're lies if you don't. Henry Harrington couldn't do a dishonorable thing if he wanted to. That's probably why you've got him in jail. He offended this old hypocrite that you've all been saying your prayers to and he put him in jail. Get out of here before I become violent, please. I don't want your thanks and I'm damned sure Harrington doesn't."

When the community learned that Henry Harrington was out of jail; that he was being harbored in the general's tent; that he was advising and disposing and practically issuing orders; that, in fact, it was he who had got the army relief in here six or eight hours before the first of it could otherwise have arrived—to say nothing of having gone out and commandeered that truck-train of milk, which, everybody agreed, was a godsend, the pendulum began to swing—values to assume new proportions. The crime of Henry Harrington in betraying his constituents for a single day appeared insignificant compared with the crime of John Boland in betraying them all for a lifetime.

Indeed there was a kind of amnesty granted to Henry

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 that very afternoon—so far as his crime against the community was concerned. There arose a feeling that he had wiped it out.

And when they heard late in the afternoon that he, after an affectionate good-by from the general, had walked calmly back into the jail, they began to feel that Henry Harrington was really a superior person although a murderer.

That night fifteen or twenty gaunt men and half a dozen worn, anxious women, leaders in the leaderless mass of burned out townspeople, met in the courthouse to take counsel what to do. Mayor Foster presided, and Lawyer Moses Duffield had the last word.

"It stands to reason that there is a remedy," he was summing up. "The Court has found what the law is; that's all it can do. But Congress can grant relief. What we'll need is somebody to represent us before Congress—somcebody that we all believe in—that we know is honest and that they know is honest back there; somebody good at convincing individual congressmen and individual senators; somebody that we could appoint a sort of commissioner to represent us and lobby for us—using that word in its good sense. It all depends on Congress."

Congress? They felt as helpless as before. Congress was such an august, inchoate, far-away body.

"Somebody we all believe in—and we all know is honest," reflected Herman Schuyler and pursed his lips.

"But it isn't only Congress," perceived Mayor Foster. "It's these dirty Siwashes we've got to deal with, isn't it, Moses?"

"The Salisheuttes? Yes; they are our landlords tonight," affirmed old Moses with simple conviction.

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 "It's got to be somebody that can deal with the Siwashes."

His auditors looked from one to another hopelessly. Where was there' such a man—whom they all could trust because they all knew he was honest? Since yesterday they hardly trusted themselves.

The meeting didn't exactly adjourn, it didn't exactly break up, it just wasted away; here and there a bewildered man, here and there a couple of gloomy women got up and went out to stumble through an area of broken bricks, clinking glass and ashes, guided by the faint gleams of candles in tents, until they came to where they and theirs would sleep that night.

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OW it had also happened that while the commit the of townspeople was meeting in the courthouse and looking for a man—a man whom everybody could trust because they all knew he was honest—the cabinet of Boland General, meeting in the library of Humboldt House, was doing almost the same thing. They were all haggard, anxious, depressed; yet old J. B., though looking thin and harrowed, was stout-hearted still—or affected to be.

"We're not lost yet," he proclaimed huskily. "Temporarily, though, we'll have to ask for a receivership. It's come to that."

"He'll have to be somebody familiar with the details of the business," observed Quackenbaugh, perhaps as nominating himself.

"He'll have to be somebody this town will believe in and trust like the sheep trust the shepherd," cut in lean Jim Pierce, perhaps as dashing Quackenbaugh's hopes.

"He must be a man who can deal with Indians too, for by this decision, the Siwashes are our masters." Mr. Boland went on doggedly, facing the bitter fact. "They own us. We must deal with them. But—why" the old eyes lighted and his face and voice began to glow with a new birth of enthusiasm. "Why, if we can get them to be reasonable; if we can get them to set a fair valuation on their holdings—agree to a

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 long period of amortization, why—why, Boland General can pay out every obligation and be as rich at the end as it was before the Supreme Court robbed us of all we've been working for."

"It all depends on—on getting the Indians to see reason. They have to do something with this timber; they have to continue the development of their property if it is to pay them a dividend. We're here; we're in position; they might as well arrange with us to go on manufacturing as to try to have someone else do it."

"But Mr. Boland," objected Quackenbaugh, "an Indian don't look at things like a white man. He isn't practical. Revenge—the satisfaction of kicking us all out—might mean more to them than dollars. They are queer, Indians are. Look at that yellow devil, Adam John."

So the discussion went forward in the Boland library, almost till the gray light of the second morning after—a morning which saw many things happen.

It saw the Red Cross come in. It saw Julius Hornblower come in. It saw the Salisheuttes! The Supreme Court had upset Hornblower's claim as it had upset Boland's title; yet it was his suit that had turned the eagle eye of that high court upon the matter, so that in a way he was the author of all this calamity; yet that abashed him nothing—pleased him perhaps. Anyway, vulture-like, bird of evil omen, he came flapping his way back into the debris, knowing it would be strange if he could not make some profit out of so much misery. It was indicative of the general mood that no one paid any attention to Hornblower at all.

But the first spectacular event of this second spectacular day was the return of an entire nation to its

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 ancient seat and heritage. It came up the inlet in two largish gasoline launches, moving slowly, because towing each a string of smaller fishercraft behind. Out of these boats there clambered to the shore this nation—family groups of dark-skinned beings; members of both sexes in their prime, bowed and wrinkled old women, gnarled and twisted old men, children of all ages from infancy to adolescence, with here and there papooses astride their mothers' hips. All beyond infancy were more or less grotesquely dressed in more or less of white man's clothing—oldish men with rusty frock coats above overalls; stout, squat women in calico aprons, yet wearing blankets; middle-aged men in moccasins but wearing reefers or sweaters or even celluloid collars.

Having debarked at the inlet's edge, this ancient, tiny patriarchal nation began a reconnaissance in full force. Still in family groups, carrying their children or leading them, patient with the aged tramping slowly, with bright-colored handkerchiefs about their brows, the expedition moved through the ruins and stared about with a curious look of new proprietorship in its glance. Pigeon-toed, knock-kneed, inarticulate, seeing much and saying little, the Indians ambled along the front and up Whitman Avenue to come at length to a stand before the courthouse; for their reconnaissance was by no means aimless, and they had been proceeding under escort.

This escort was a white man, tall and awkward-looking, wearing a suit of clerical blacks; a spare and bony man, with a dead white and not unhandsome face and small dark eyes that glowed with a fanatic ardor. He sheltered a shock of crisp black

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 hair under a black fedora hat worn without its accustomed crease in the crown; this making him look taller than he was, at the same time that it imparted an eccentric air. Close about him were grouped two bent and gnarled old Indians and four or five in the vigorous forties and fiftics, all wearing dingy frock coats as denoting some official garb, which was entirely proper since these were the chiefs of the tribe. But they were also elders of a Presbyterian church. From time to time they looked up reverently into the face of their tall white leader as to a missionary Moses.

A cry was raised: "The Salisheuttes! . . . The Salisheuttes!"

People heard and turned and stood to gaze at this nondescript group of human mongrels—the remnant of a once considerable tribe, owners by the treaty of 1855 of all "that certain tract of land between the west shore of Harper's Basin and the South Inlet thereto and the said east shore of the Pacific Ocean."

The Salisheuttes! Seventy-one of them in all! The Supreme Court, by its decision, had made them rich. Yet they did not look so very opulent now. In their awkward garments, with their curious, awed manner, they looked contemptible.

A crowd gathered quickly. Acid phrases, unflattering comments, and outraged exclamations were tossed from mouth to mouth with bleacher-like indifference to the feelings of those of whom they spoke.

"Here, you Siwashes!" bawled a sergeant of M.P.'s. "Head in there!" He waved his hand and the Reverend Jedediah Collins meekly led his charges into an avenue formed by two short rows of unoccupied conical tents, a score of which now dotted the courthouse grounds.

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 "All same your tepees," encouraged the sergeant; and with a large gesture bade them take possession, then marked with satisfied eye while one of his sentries took up his march between them and the gaping crowd.

"Make yourselves comfortable, brethren," said the Reverend Jedediah to Chief Skookum Charlie, the ancient and time-withered chief of the Salisheuttes and the ruling elder of that congregation into which this missionary's spiritual labors had wrought these people. "I will go in and consult the young white chief."

He went into the courthouse and inquired his way to the jail. For there had been Salisheutte boys also in Henry Harrington's platoon, and this tribe had learned through them to trust Henry Harrington as they trusted no other white man save only Jedediah Collins; and it was a rock-rooted, storm-proof trust, entirely unaffected by such trifles as had turned the populace of Edgewater to frothing at the mouth against its former idol.

With their pastor departed, Chief Skookum Charlie squatted upon his heels on the lawn, with his six cochiefs dropping to their haunches round him. Chief Charlie lighted his pipe, a stubby, unbcautiful affair with a huge bowl and a thick stem from which old Charlie sucked contentment at so short a range that the tips of his eyelashes must have been singed had not time already denuded his lids of such a valance. His colleagues produced pipes also; some modern as the corner cigar store purveys, some as native and aged as themselves.

Rumor of the arrival of the Salisheuttes came quickly to John Boland, brooding in his den upon the hill. He started at the news. The inevitable had come nearer

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 —and he had not found the man who he felt could be trusted with negotiations so important and delicate; yet they must be entered upon at once; and he was temperamentally unfitted for the task himself; accustomed to command, he would not be good at supplication. Yet there was no one else he trusted this morning so much as he trusted himself.

True if he appeared among them suddenly, the people of Edgewater might leap upon him and tear him to pieces; yet Old Two Blades was not a coward. He took the chance. He ordered his car and descended for the first time into the smoldering city, daring the temper of the crowds.

Entirely alone, as advertising either his courage or his faith in his fellow citizens, he stepped out of his car at the courthouse—standing tall and nearly as erect, nearly as immaculate as ever. His manner was a bit complex—properly restrained as acknowledging sympathy with these victims of his, slightly humbled acknowledging that he himself had encountered bitter disaster; yet somehow dauntless besides, as insistent that though battered he was not broken, that he staggered but stood up. This manner was meant to show that he confessed a fault but that his will was still indomitable—that people, if they would be lenient and trust him once more, might yet have cause to be grateful to him.

And strangely the gathered throng neither spat upon him, nor spoke to him. It reviled him with silence. It did not clamor for his arrest for the gigantic fraud he had practiced. The people thought that would take care of itself. Their chief concern was in their own distresses and distractions. They wanted to know

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 what they were going to do about everything—their homes—their losses, their bread and butter—their landlords, these squatting Siwashes here. Perhaps if any gave thought, they marveled at their own moderation; not realizing that as a community they had been purged by fire; that they were under a sort of moral conviction; that they had seen into their own hearts by the light of their own blazing homes; seen themselves as corrupted and debauched by this John Boland, with his cunning appeals to self-interest, until they had lost their sense of true values, till they had become petulant and self-willed as babies; until they had cried: "Away! Away with this assemblyman from the seventy-first! Release unto us Barabbas!"

But now Barabbas stepped out of his limousine and they felt only aversion for him. They let him pass—and the sergeant let him cross the open space to where the Salisheuttes were squatted.

"I am Mr. Boland," he announced gravely to Skookum Charlie.

The wrinkled old chief never budged from where he squatted on his haunches. There was merely curiosity in his glance, as at a potentate of yesterday.

"You Boland? . . . Humph!" Skookum Charlie grimaced, and flexed his wrinkles. "Skinny man—ugh!" He grunted contemptuously and glanced around the circle at his co-chicfs as asking them to note how a man who must have been able to buy so much to eat had profited so little from his opportunities. To be treated so objectively was an unusual experience for Mr. Boland, but he was prepared to endure much today and he knew the value of directness and felt it was called for here—he began promptly:

title: Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/370