"I ain't followin' you because it's worth while, but because I want to, Chief."

"I know; but a man—every man—likes the counters for the game." He turned to the table, opened a drawer, and took out a folded paper. He looked it through carefully, wrote a name on it, and handed it to Jowett.

"There's a hundred shares in the Northwest Railway, with my regards, Jowett. Some of the counters of the game."

Jowett handed it back at once with a shake of the head. "I don't live in Manitou," he said. "I'm almost white, Chief. I've never made a deal with you, and don't want to. I'm your man for the fun of it, and because I'd give my life to have your head on my shoulders for one year."

"I'd feel better if you'd take the shares, Jowett. You've helped me, and I can't let you do it for nothing."

"Then I can't do it at all. I'm discharged." Suddenly, however, a humorous, eager look shot into Jowett's face. "Will you toss for it?" he blurted out. "Certainly, if you like," was the reply.

"Heads I win, tails it's yours?"

"Good."

Ingolby took a silver dollar from his pocket, and tossed. It came down tails. Ingolby had won.

"My corner lot against double the shares?" Jowett asked sharply, his face flushed with eager pleasure. He was a born gambler.

"As you like," answered Ingolby with a smile. Ingolby tossed, and they stooped over to look at the dollar on the floor. It had come up heads. "You win," said Ingolby, and turning to the table, took out another hundred shares. In a moment they were handed over.

"You're a wonder, Jowett," he said. "You risked a lot of money. Are you satisfied?"

"You bet, Chief. I come by these shares honestly now."

He picked up the silver dollar from the floor, and was about to put it in his pocket.

"Wait—that's my dollar," said Ingolby.

"By gracious, so it is!" said Jowett, and handed it over reluctantly.

Ingolby pocketed it with satisfaction.

Neither dwelt on the humour of the situation. They were only concerned for the rules of the game, and both were gamesters in their way.

After a few brief instructions to Jowett, and a message for Osterhaut concerning a suit of workman's clothes, Ingolby left his offices and walked down the main street of the town with his normal rapidity, responding cheerfully to the passers-by, but not encouraging evident desire for talk with him. Men half-started forward to him, but he held them back with a restraining eye. They knew his ways. He was responsive in a brusque, inquisitive, but good-humoured and sometimes very droll way; but there were times when men said to themselves that he was to be left alone; and he was so much master of the place that, as Osterhaut and Jowett frequently remarked, "What he says goes!" It went even with those whom he had passed in the race of power.

He had had his struggles to be understood in his first days in Lebanon. He had fought intrigue and even treachery, had defeated groups which were the forces at work before he came to Lebanon, and had compelled the submission of others. All these had vowed to "get back at him," but when it became a question of Lebanon against Manitou they swung over to his side and acknowledged him as leader. The physical collision between the rougher elements of the two towns had brought matters to a head, and nearly every man in Lebanon felt that his honour was at stake, and was ready "to have it out with Manitou."

As he walked along the main street after his interview with Jowett, his eyes wandered over the buildings rising everywhere; and his mind reviewed as in a picture the same thinly inhabited street five years ago when he first came. Now farmers' wagons clacked and rumbled through the prairie dust, small herds of cattle jerked and shuffled their way to the slaughter-yard, or out to the open prairie, and caravans of settlers with their effects moved sturdily forward to the trails which led to a new life beckoning from three points of the compass. That point which did not beckon was behind them. Flaxen-haired Swedes and Norwegians; square- jawed, round-headed North Germans; square-shouldered, loose-jointed Russians with heavy contemplative eyes and long hair, looked curiously at each other and nodded understandingly. Jostling them all, with a jeer and an oblique joke here and there, and crude chaff on each other and everybody, the settler from the United States asserted himself. He invariably obtruded himself, with quizzical inquiry, half contempt and half respect, on the young Englishman, who gazed round with phlegm upon his fellow adventurers, and made up to the sandy-faced Scot or the cheerful Irishman with his hat on the back of his head, who showed in the throng here and there. This was one of the days when the emigrant and settlers' trains arrived both from the East and from "the States," and Front Street in Lebanon had, from early morning, been alive with the children of hope and adventure.

With hands plunged deep in the capacious pockets of his grey jacket, Ingolby walked on, seeing everything; yet with his mind occupied intently, too, on the trouble which must be faced before Lebanon and Manitou would be the reciprocating engines of his policy. Coming to a spot where a great gap of vacant land showed in the street-land which he had bought for the new offices of his railway combine—he stood and looked at it abstractedly. Beyond it, a few blocks away, was the Sagalac, and beyond the Sagalac was Manitou, and a little way to the right was the bridge which was the symbol of his policy. His eyes gazed almost unconsciously on the people and the horses and wagons coming and going upon the bridge. Then they were lifted to the tall chimneys rising at two or three points on the outskirts of Manitou.

"They don't know a good thing when they get it," he said to himself. "A strike—why, wages are double what they are in Quebec, where most of 'em come from! Marchand—"

A hand touched his arm. "Have you got a minute to spare, kind sir?" a voice asked.

Ingolby turned and saw Nathan Rockwell, the doctor. "Ah, Rockwell," he responded cheerfully, "two minutes and a half, if you like! What is it?"

The Boss Doctor, as he was familiarly called by every one, to identify him from the newer importations of medical men, drew from his pocket a newspaper.

"There's an infernal lie here about me," he replied. "They say that I—"

He proceeded to explain the misstatement, as Ingolby studied the paper carefully, for Rockwell was a man worth any amount of friendship.

"It's a lie, of course," Ingolby said firmly as he finished the paragraph. "Well?"

"Well, I've got to deal with it."

"You mean you're going to deny it in the papers?"

"Exactly."

"I wouldn't, Rockwell."

"You wouldn't?"

"No. You never can really overtake a newspaper lie. Lots of the people who read the lie don't see the denial. Your truth doesn't overtake the lie—it's a scarlet runner."

"I don't see that. When you're lied about, when a lie like that—"

"You can't overtake it, Boss. It's no use. It's sensational, it runs too fast. Truth's slow-footed. When a newspaper tells a lie about you, don't try to overtake it, tell another."

He blinked with quizzical good-humour. Rockwell could not resist the audacity. "I don't believe you'd do it just the same," he retorted decisively, and laughing.

"I don't try the overtaking anyhow; I get something spectacular in my own favour to counteract the newspaper lie."

"In what way?"

"For instance, if they said I couldn't ride a moke at a village steeplechase, I'd at once publish the fact that, with a jack-knife, I'd killed two pumas that were after me. Both things would be lies, but the one would neutralize the other. If I said I could ride a moke, nobody would see it, and if it were seen it wouldn't make any impression; but to say I killed two mountain-lions with a jack-knife on the edge of a precipice, with the sun standing still to look at it, is as good as the original lie and better; and I score. My reputation increases."

Nathan Rockwell's equilibrium was restored. "You're certainly a wonder," he declared. "That's why you've succeeded."

"Have I succeeded?"

"Thirty-three-and what you are!"

"What am I?"

"Pretty well master here."

"Rockwell, that'd do me a lot of harm if it was published. Don't say it again. This is a democratic country. They'd kick at my being called master of anything, and I'd have to tell a lie to counteract it."

"But it's the truth, and it hasn't to be overtaken."

A grim look came into Ingolby's face. "I'd like to be master-boss of life and death, holder of the sword and balances, the Sultan, here just for one week. I'd change some things. I'd gag some people that are doing terrible harm. It's a real bad business. The scratch-your-face period is over, and we're in the cut-your-throat epoch."

Rockwell nodded assent, opened the paper again, and pointed to a column. "I expect you haven't seen that. To my mind, in the present state of things, it's dynamite."

Ingolby read the column hastily. It was the report of a sermon delivered the evening before by the Rev. Reuben Tripple, the evangelical minister of Lebanon. It was a paean of the Scriptures accompanied by a crazy charge that the Roman Church forbade the reading of the Bible. It had a tirade also about the Scarlet Woman and Popish idolatry.

Ingolby made a savage gesture. "The insatiable Christian beast!" he growled in anger. "There's no telling what this may do. You know what those fellows are over in Manitou. The place is full of them going to the woods, besides the toughs at the mills and in the taverns. They're not psalm-singing, and they don't keep the Ten Commandments, but they're savagely fanatical, and—"

"And there's the funeral of an Orangeman tomorrow. The Orange Lodge attends in regalia."

Ingolby started and looked at the paper again. "The sneaking, praying liar," he said, his jaw setting grimly. "This thing's a call to riot. There's an element in Lebanon as well that'd rather fight than eat. It's the kind of lie that—"

"That you can't overtake," said the Boss Doctor appositely; "and I don't know that even you can tell another that'll neutralize it. Your prescription won't work here."

An acknowledging smile played at Ingolby's mouth. "We've got to have a try. We've got to draw off the bull with a red rag somehow."

"I don't see how myself. That Orange funeral will bring a row on to us. I can just see the toughs at Manitou when they read this stuff, and know about that funeral."

"It's announced?"

"Yes, here's an invitation in the Budget to Orangemen to attend the funeral of a brother sometime of the banks of the Boyne!"

"Who's the Master of the Lodge?" asked Ingolby. Rockwell told him, urging at the same time that he see the Chief Constable as well, and Monseigneur Lourde at Manitou.

"That's exactly what I mean to do—with a number of other things. Between ourselves, Rockwell, I'd have plenty of lint and bandages ready for emergencies if I were you."

"I'll see to it. That collision the other day was serious enough, and it's gradually becoming a vendetta. Last night one of the Lebanon champions lost his nose."

"His nose—how?"

"A French river-driver bit a third of it off."

Ingolby made a gesture of disgust. "And this is the twentieth century!"

They had moved along the street until they reached a barber-shop, from which proceeded the sound of a violin. "I'm going in here," Ingolby said. "I've got some business with Berry, the barber. You'll keep me posted as to anything important?"

"You don't need to say it. Shall I see the Master of the Orange Lodge or the Chief Constable for you?" Ingolby thought for a minute. "No, I'll tackle them myself, but you get in touch with Monseigneur Lourde. He's grasped the situation, and though he'd like to have Tripple boiled in oil, he doesn't want broken heads and bloodshed."

"And Tripple?"

"I'll deal with him at once. I've got a hold on him. I never wanted to use it, but I will now without compunction. I have the means in my pocket. They've been there for three days, waiting for the chance."

"It doesn't look like war, does it?" said Rockwell, looking up the street and out towards the prairie where the day bloomed like a flower. Blue above—a deep, joyous blue, against which a white cloud rested or slowly travelled westward; a sky down whose vast cerulean bowl flocks of wild geese sailed, white and grey and black, while the woods across the Sagalac were glowing with a hundred colours, giving tender magnificence to the scene. The busy eagerness of a pioneer life was still a quiet, orderly thing, so immense was the theatre for effort and movement. In these wide streets, almost as wide as a London square, there was room to move; nothing seemed huddled, pushing, or inconvenient. Even the disorder of building lost its ugly crudity in the space and the sunlight.

"The only time I get frightened in life is when things look like that," Ingolby answered. "I go round with a life-preserver on me when it seems as if 'all's right with the world.'"

The violin inside the barber-shop kept scraping out its cheap music—a coon-song of the day.

"Old Berry hasn't much business this morning," remarked Rockwell. "He's in keeping with this surface peace."

"Old Berry never misses anything. What we're thinking, he's thinking. I go fishing when I'm in trouble; Berry plays his fiddle. He's a philosopher and a friend."

"You don't make friends as other people do."

"I make friends of all kinds. I don't know why, but I've always had a kind of kinship with the roughs, the no-accounts, and the rogues."

"As well as the others—I hope I don't intrude!"

Ingolby laughed. "You? Oh, I wish all the others were like you. It's the highly respectable members of the community I've always had to watch."

The fiddle-song came squeaking out upon the sunny atmosphere. It arrested the attention of a man on the other side of the street— a stranger in strange Lebanon. He wore a suit of Western clothes as a military man wears mufti, if not awkwardly, yet with a manner not wholly natural—the coat too tight across the chest, too short in the body. However, the man was handsome and unusual in his leopard way, with his brown curling hair and well-cared-for moustache. It was Jethro Fawe.

Attracted by the sound of the violin, he stayed his steps and smiled scornfully. Then his look fell on the two figures at the door of the barber-shop, and his eyes flashed.

Here was the man he wished to see—Max Ingolby, the man who stood between him and his Romany lass. Here was a chance of speaking face to face with the man who was robbing him. What he should do when they met must be according to circumstances. That did not matter. There was the impulse storming in his brain, and it drove him across the street as the Boss Doctor walked away, and Ingolby entered the shop. All Jethro realized was that the man who stood in his way, the big, rich, masterful Gorgio was there.

He entered the shop after Ingolby, and stood for an instant unseen. The old negro barber with his curly white head, slave-black face, and large, shrewd, meditative eyes was standing in a corner with a violin under his chin, his cheek lovingly resting against it, as he drew his bow through the last bars of the melody. He had smiled in welcome as Ingolby entered, instantly rising from his stool, but continuing to play. He would not have stopped in the middle of a tune for an emperor, and he put Ingolby higher than an emperor. For one who had been born a slave, and had still the scars of the overseer's whip on his back, he was very independent. He cut everybody's hair as he wanted to cut it, trimmed each beard as he wished to trim it, regardless of its owner's wishes. If there was dissent, then his customer need not come again, that was all. There were other barbers in the place, but Berry was the master barber. To have your head massaged by him was never to be forgotten, especially if you found your hat too small for your head in the morning. Also he singed the hair with a skill and care, which had filled many a thinly covered scalp with luxuriant growth, and his hair-tonic, known as "Smilax," gave a pleasant odour to every meeting-house or church or public hall where the people gathered. Berry was an institution even in this new Western town. He kept his place and he forced the white man, whoever he was, to keep his place.

When he saw Jethro Fawe enter the shop he did not stop playing, but his eyes searched the newcomer. Following his glance, Ingolby turned round and saw the Romany. His first impression was one of admiration, but suspicion was quickly added. He was a good judge of men, and there was something secluded about the man which repelled him. Yet he was interested. The dark face had a striking racial peculiarity.

The music died away, and old Berry lowered the fiddle from his chin and gave his attention to the Romany.

"Yeth-'ir?" he said questioningly.

For an instant Jethro was confused. When he entered the shop he had not made up his mind what he should do. It had been mere impulse and the fever of his brain. As old Berry spoke, however, his course opened out.

"I heard. I am a stranger. My fiddle is not here. My fingers itch for the cat-gut. Eh?"

The look in old Berry's face softened a little. His instinct had been against his visitor, and he had been prepared to send him to another shop-besides, not every day could he talk to the greatest man in the West.

"If you can play, there it is," he said after a slight pause, and handed the fiddle over.

It was true that Jethro Fawe loved the fiddle. He had played it in many lands. Twice, in order to get inside the palace of a monarch for a purpose—once in Berlin and once in London—he had played the second violin in a Tzigany orchestra. He turned the fiddle slowly round, looking at it with mechanical intentness. Through the passion of emotion the sure sense of the musician was burning. His fingers smoothed the oval brown breast of the instrument with affection. His eyes found joy in the colour of the wood, which had all the graded, merging tints of Autumn leaves.

"It is old—and strange," he said, his eyes going from Berry to Ingolby and back again with a veiled look, as though he had drawn down blinds before his inmost thoughts. "It was not made by a professional."

"It was made in the cotton-field by a slave," observed old Berry sharply, yet with a content which overrode antipathy to his visitor.

Jethro put the fiddle to his chin, and drew the bow twice or thrice sweepingly across the strings. Such a sound had never come from Berry's violin before. It was the touch of a born musician who certainly had skill, but who had infinitely more of musical passion.

"Made by a slave in the cotton-fields!" Jethro said with a veiled look, and as though he was thinking of something else: "'Dordi', I'd like to meet a slave like that!"

At the Romany exclamation Ingolby swept the man with a searching look. He had heard the Romany wife of Ruliff Zaphe use the word many years ago when he and Charley Long visited the big white house on the hill. Was the man a Romany, and, if so, what was he doing here? Had it anything to do with Gabriel Druse and his daughter? But no—what was there strange in the man being a Romany and playing the fiddle? Here and there in the West during the last two years, he had seen what he took to be Romany faces. He looked to see the effect of the stranger's remark on old Berry.

"I was a slave, and I was like that. My father made that fiddle in the cotton-fields of Georgia," the aged barber said.

The son of a race which for centuries had never known country or flag or any habitat, whose freedom was the soul of its existence, if it had a soul; a freedom defying all the usual laws of social order—the son of that race looked at the negro barber with something akin to awe. Here was a man who had lived a life which was the staring antithesis of his own, under the whip as a boy, confined to compounds; whose vision was constricted to the limits of an estate; who was at the will of one man, to be sold and trafficked with like a barrel of herrings, to be worked at another's will—and at no price! This was beyond the understanding of Jethro Fawe. But awe has the outward look of respect, and old Berry who had his own form of vanity, saw that he had had a rare effect on the fellow, who evidently knew all about fiddles. Certainly that was a wonderful sound he had produced from his own cotton-field fiddle.

In the pause Ingolby said to Jethro Fawe, "Play something, won't you? I've got business here with Mr. Berry, but five minutes of good music won't matter. We'd like to hear him play—wouldn't we, Berry?"

The old man nodded assent. "There's plenty of music in the thing," he said, "and a lot could come out in five minutes, if the right man played it."

His words were almost like a challenge, and it reached to Jethro's innermost nature. He would show this Gorgio robber what a Romany could do, and do as easily as the birds sing. The Gorgio was a money-master, they said, but he would find that a Romany was a master, too, in his own way. He thought of one of the first pieces he had ever heard, a rhapsody which had grown and grown, since it was first improvised by a Tzigany in Hungary. He had once played it to an English lady at the Amphitryon Club in London, and she had swooned in the arms of her husband's best friend. He had seen men and women avert their heads when he had played it, daring not to look into each other's eyes. He would play it now—a little of it. He would play it to her—to the girl who had set him free in the Sagalac woods, to the ravishing deserter from her people, to the only woman who had told him the truth in all his life, and who insulated his magnetism as a ground-wire insulates lightning. He would summon her here by his imagination, and tell her to note how his soul had caught the music of the spheres. He would surround himself with an atmosphere of his own. His rage, his love, and his malignant hate, his tenderness and his lust should fill the barber's shop with a flood which would drown the Gorgio raider. He laughed to himself, almost unconsciously. Then suddenly he leaned his cheek to the instrument and drew the bow across the strings with a savage softness. The old cottonfield fiddle cried out with a thrilling, exquisite pain, but muffled, as a hand at the lips turns agony into a tender moan. Some one—some spirit—in the fiddle was calling for its own.

Five minutes later-a five minutes in which people gathered at the door of the shop, and heads were thrust inside in ravished wonder—the palpitating Romany lowered the fiddle from his chin, and stood for a minute looking into space, as though he saw a vision.

He was roused by old Berry's voice. "Das a fiddle I wouldn't sell for a t'ousand dollars. If I could play like dat I wouldn't sell it for ten t'ousand. You kin play a fiddle to make it worth a lot—you."

The Romany handed back the instrument. "It's got something inside it that makes it better than it is. It's not a good fiddle, but it has something—ah, man alive, it has something!" It was as though he was talking to himself.

Berry made a quick, eager gesture. "It's got the cotton-fields and the slave days in it. It's got the whip and the stocks in it; it's got the cry of the old man that'd never see his children ag'in. That's what the fiddle's got in it."

Suddenly, in an apparent outburst of anger, he swept down on the front door and drove the gathering crowd away.

"Dis is a barber-shop," he said with an angry wave of his hand; "it ain't a circuse."

One man protested. "I want a shave," he said. He tried to come inside, but was driven back.

"I ain't got a razor that'd cut the bristle off your face," the old barber declared peremptorily; "and, if I had, it wouldn't be busy on you. I got two customers, and that's all I'm going to take befo' I have my dinner. So you git away. There ain't goin' to be no more music."

The crowd drew off, for none of them cared to offend this autocrat of the shears and razor.

Ingolby had listened to the music with a sense of being swayed by a wind which blew from all quarters of the compass at once. He loved music; it acted as a clearing-house to his mind; and he played the piano himself with the enthusiasm of a wilful amateur, who took liberties with every piece he essayed. There was something in this fellow's playing which the great masters, such as Paganini, must have had. As the music ceased, he did not speak, but remained leaning against the great red-plush barber's chair looking reflectively at the Romany. Berry, however, said to the still absorbed musician: "Where did you learn to play?"

The Romany started, and a flush crossed his face. "Everywhere," he answered sullenly.

"You've got the thing Sarasate had," Ingolby observed. "I only heard him play but once—in London years ago: but there's the same something in it. I bought a fiddle of Sarasate. I've got it now."

"Here in Lebanon?" The eyes of the Romany were burning. An idea had just come into his brain. Was it through his fiddling that he was going to find a way to deal with this Gorgio, who had come between him and his own?

"Only a week ago it came," Ingolby replied. "They actually charged me Customs duty on it. I'd seen it advertised, and I made an offer and got it at last."

"You have it here—at your house here?" asked old Berry in surprise.

"It's the only place I've got. Did you think I'd put it in a museum? I can't play it, but there it is for any one that can play. How would you like to try it?" he added to Jethro in a friendly tone. "I'd give a good deal to see it under your chin for an hour. Anyhow, I'd like to show it to you. Will you come?"

It was like him to bring matters to a head so quickly.

The Romany's eyes glistened. "To play the Sarasate alone to you?" he asked.

"That's it-at nine o'clock to-night, if you can."

"I will come—yes, I will come," Jethro answered, the lids drooping over his eyes in which were the shadows of the first murder of the created world.

"Here is my address, then." Ingolby wrote something on his visiting- card. "My man'll let you in, if you show that. Well, good-bye."

The Romany took the card, and turned to leave. He had been dismissed by the swaggering Gorgio, as though he was a servant, and he had not even been asked his name, of so little account was he! He could come and play on the Sarasate to the masterful Gorgio at the hour which the masterful Gorgio fixed—think of that! He could be—a servant to the pleasure of the man who was stealing from him the wife sealed to him in the Roumelian country. But perhaps it was all for the best—yes, he would make it all for the best! As he left the shop, however, and passed down the street his mind remained in the barber-shop. He saw in imagination the masterful Gorgio in the red-plush chair, and the negro barber bending over him, with black fingers holding the Gorgio's chin, and an open razor in the right hand lightly grasped. A flash of malicious desire came into his eyes as the vision shaped itself in his imagination, and he saw himself, instead of the negro barber, holding the Gorgio chin and looking down at the Gorgio throat with the razor, not lightly, but firmly grasped in his right hand. How was it that more throats were not cut in that way? How was it that while the scissors passed through the beard of a man's face the points did not suddenly slip up and stab the light from helpless eyes? How was it that men did not use their chances? He went lightly down the street, absorbed in a vision which was not like the reality; but it was evidence that his visit to Max Ingolby's house was not the visit of a virtuoso alone, but of an evil spirit.

As the Romany disappeared, Max Ingolby had his hand on the old barber's shoulder. "I want one of the wigs you made for that theatrical performance of the Mounted Police, Berry," he said. "Never mind what it's for. I want it at once—one with the long hair of a French-Canadian coureur-de-bois. Have you got one?"

"Suh, I'll send it round-no, I'll bring it round as I come from dinner. Want the clothes, too?"

"No. I'm arranging for them with Osterhaut. I've sent word by Jowett."

"You want me to know what it's for?"

"You can know anything I know—almost, Berry. You're a friend of the right sort, and I can trust you."

"Yeth-'ir, I bin some use to you, onct or twict, I guess."

"You'll have a chance to be of use more than ever presently."

"Suh, there's gain' to be a bust-up, but I know who's comin' out on the top. That Felix Marchand and his roughs can't down you. I hear and see a lot, and there's two or three things I was goin' to put befo' you; yeth-'ir."

He unloaded his secret information to his friend, and was rewarded by Ingolby suddenly shaking his hand warmly.

"That's the line," Ingolby said decisively. "When do you go over to Manitou again to cut old Hector Marchand's hair? Soon?"

"To-day is his day—this evening," was the reply.

"Good. You wanted to know what the wig and the habitant's clothes are for, Berry—well, for me to wear in Manitou. In disguise I'm going there tonight among them all, among the roughs and toughs. I want to find out things for myself. I can speak French as good as most of 'em, and I can chew tobacco and swear with the best."

"You suhly are a wonder," said the old man admiringly. "How you fin' the time I got no idee."

"Everything in its place, Berry, and everything in its time. I've got a lot to do to-day, but it's in hand, and I don't have to fuss. You'll not forget the wig—you'll bring it round yourself?"

"Suh. No snoopin' into the parcel then. But if you go to Manitou to-night, how can you have that fiddler?"

"He comes at nine o'clock. I'll go to Manitou later. Everything in its own time."

He was about to leave the shop when some one came bustling in. Berry was between Ingolby and the door, and for an instant he did not see who it was. Presently he heard an unctuous voice: "Ah, good day, good day, Mr. Berry. I want to have my hair cut, if you please," it said.

Ingolby smiled. The luck was with him to-day so far. The voice belonged to the Rev. Reuben Tripple, and he would be saved a journey to the manse. Accidental meetings were better than planned interviews. Old Berry's grizzled beard was bristling with repugnance, and he was about to refuse Mr. Tripple the hospitality of the shears when Ingolby said: "You won't mind my having a word with Mr. Tripple first, will you, Berry? May we use your back parlour?"

A significant look from Ingolby's eyes gave Berry his cue.

"Suh, Mr. Ingolby. I'm proud." He opened the door of another room.

Mr. Tripple had not seen Ingolby when he entered, and he recognized him now with a little shock of surprise. There was no reason why he should not care to meet the Master Man, but he always had an uncanny feeling when his eye met that of Ingolby. His apprehension had no foundation in any knowledge, yet he had felt that Ingolby had no love for him, and this disturbed the egregious vanity of a narrow nature. His slouching, corpulent figure made an effort to resist the gesture with which Ingolby drew him to the door, but his will succumbed, and he shuffled importantly into the other room.

Ingolby shut the door quietly behind him, and motioned the minister to a chair beside the table. Tripple sank down, mechanically smiling, placed his hat on the floor, and rested his hands on the table. Ingolby could not help but notice how coarse the hands were—with fingers suddenly ending as though they had been cut off, and puffy, yellowish skin that suggested fat foods, or worse.

Ingolby came to grips at once. "You preached a sermon last night which no doubt was meant to do good, but will only do harm," he said abruptly.

The flabby minister flushed, and then made an effort to hold his own.

"I speak as I am moved," he said, puffing out his lips. "You spoke on this occasion before you were moved—just a little while before," answered Ingolby grimly. "The speaking was last night, the moving comes today."

"I don't get your meaning," was the thick rejoinder. The man had a feeling that there was some real danger ahead.

"You preached a sermon last night which might bring riot and bloodshed between these two towns, though you knew the mess that's brewing."

"My conscience is my own. I am responsible to my Lord for words which I speak in His name, not to you."

"Your conscience belongs to yourself, but your acts belong to all of us. If there is trouble at the Orange funeral to-morrow it will be your fault. The blame will lie at your door."

"The sword of the Spirit—"

"Oh, you want the sword, do you? You want the sword, eh?" Ingolby's jaw was set now like a millstone. "Well, you can have it, and have it now. If you had taken what I said in the right way, I would not have done what I'm going to do. I'm going to send you out of Lebanon. You're a bad and dangerous element here. You must go."

"Who are you to tell me I must go?"

The fat hands quivered on the table with anger and emotion, but also with fear of something. "You may be a rich man and own railways, but—"

"But I am not rich and I don't own railways. Lately bad feeling has been growing on the Sagalac, and only a spark was needed to fire the ricks. You struck the spark in your sermon last night. I don't see the end of it all. One thing is sure—you're not going to take the funeral service to-morrow."

The slack red lips of the man of God were gone dry with excitement, the loose body swayed with the struggle to fight it out.

"I'll take no orders from you," the husky voice protested. "My conscience alone will guide me. I'll speak the truth as I feel it, and the people will stand by me."

"In that case you WILL take orders from me. I'm going to save the town from what hurts it, if I can. I've got no legal rights over you, but I have moral rights, and I mean to enforce them. You gabble of conscience and truth, but isn't it a new passion with you—conscience and truth?"

He leaned over the table and fastened the minister's eyes with his own. "Had you the same love of conscience and truth at Radley?"

A whiteness passed over the flabby face, and the beady eyes took on a glazed look. Fight suddenly died out of them.

"You went on a missionary tour on the Ottawa River. At Radley you toiled and rested from your toil—and feasted. The girl had no father or brother, but her uncle was a railway-man. He heard where you were, and he hired with my company to come out here as a foreman. He came to drop on you. The day after he came he had a bad accident. I went to see him. He told me all; his nerves were unstrung, you observe. He meant to ruin you, as you ruined the girl. He had proofs enough. The girl herself is in Winnipeg. Well, I know life, and I know man and man's follies and temptations. I thought it a pity that a career and a life like yours should be ruined—"

A groan broke from the twitching lips before him, and a heavy sweat stood out on the round, rolling forehead.

"If the man spoke, I knew it would be all up with you, for the world is very hard on men of God who fall. I've seen men ruined before this, because of an hour's passion and folly. I said to myself that you were only human, and that maybe you had paid heavy in remorse and fear. Then there was the honour of the town of Lebanon. I couldn't let the thing take its course. I got the doctor to tell the man that he must go for special treatment to a hospital in Montreal, and I—well, I bought him off on his promising to keep his mouth shut. He was a bit stiff in terms, because he said the girl needed the money. The child died, luckily for you. Anyhow I bought him off, and he went. That was a year ago. I've got all the proofs in my pocket, even to the three silly letters you wrote her when your senses were stronger than your judgment. I was going to see you about them to-day."

He took from his pocket a small packet, and held them before the other's face. "Have a good look at your own handwriting, and see if you recognize it," Ingolby continued.

But the glazed, shocked eyes did not see. Reuben Tripple had passed the several stages of horror during Ingolby's merciless arraignment, and he had nearly collapsed before he heard the end of the matter. When he knew that Ingolby had saved him, his strength gave way, and he trembled violently. Ingolby looked round and saw a jug of water. Pouring out a glassful, he thrust it into the fat, wrinkled fingers.

"Drink and pull yourself together," he said sternly. The shaken figure straightened itself, and the water was gulped down. "I thank you," he said in a husky voice.

"You see I treated you fairly, and that you've been a fool?" Ingolby asked with no lessened determination.

"I have tried to atone, and—"

"No, you haven't had the right spirit to atone. You were fat with vanity and self-conceit. I've watched you."

"In future I will—"

"Well, that rests with yourself, but your health is bad, and you're not going to take the funeral tomorrow. You've had a sudden breakdown, and you're going to get a call from some church in the East—as far East as Yokohama or Bagdad, I hope; and leave here in a few weeks. You understand? I've thought the thing out, and you've got to go. You'll do no good to yourself or others here. Take my advice, and wherever you go, walk six miles a day at least, work in a garden, eat half as much as you do, and be good to your wife. It's bad enough for any woman to be a parson's wife, but to be a parson's wife and your wife, too, wants a lot of fortitude."

The heavy figure lurched to the upright, and steadied itself with a force which had not yet been apparent.

"I'll do my best—so help me God!" he said and looked Ingolby squarely in the face for the first time.

"All right, see you keep your word," Ingolby replied, and nodded good- bye.

The other went to the door, and laid a hand on the knob.

Suddenly Ingolby stopped him, and thrust a little bundle of bills into his hand. "There's a hundred dollars for your wife. It'll pay the expense of moving," he said.

A look of wonder, revelation and gratitude crept into Tripple's face. "I will keep my word, so help me God!" he said again.

"All right, good-bye," responded Ingolby abruptly, and turned away.

A moment afterwards the door closed behind the Rev. Reuben Tripple and his influence in Lebanon. "I couldn't shake hands with him," said Ingolby to himself, "but I'm glad he didn't sniffle. There's some stuff in him—if it only has a chance."

"I've done a good piece of business, Berry," he said cheerfully as he passed through the barber-shop. "Suh, if you say so," said the barber, and they left the shop together.



CHAPTER IX

MATTER AND MIND AND TWO MEN

Promptly at nine o'clock Jethro Fawe knocked at Ingolby's door, and was admitted by the mulatto man-servant Jim Beadle, who was to Ingolby like his right hand. It was Jim who took command of his house, "bossed" his two female servants, arranged his railway tours, superintended his kitchen—with a view to his own individual tastes; valeted him, kept his cigars within a certain prescribed limit by a firm actuarial principle which transferred any surplus to his own use; gave him good advice, weighed up his friends and his enemies with shrewd sense; and protected him from bores and cranks, borrowers and "dead-beats."

Jim was accustomed to take a good deal of responsibility, and had more than once sent people to the right-about who had designs on his master, even though they came accredited. On such occasions he did not lie to protect himself when called to account, but told the truth pertinaciously. He was obstinate in his vanity, and carried off his mistakes with aplomb. When asked by Ingolby what he called the Governor General when he took His Excellency over the new railway in Ingolby's private car, he said, "I called him what everybody called him. I called him 'Succelency.'" And "Succelency" for ever after the Governor General was called in the West. Jim's phonetic mouthful gave the West a roar of laughter and a new word to the language. On another occasion Jim gave the West a new phrase to its vocabulary which remains to this day. Having to take the wife of a high personage of the neighbouring Republic over the line in the private car, he had astounded his master by presenting a bill for finger-bowls before the journey began. Ingolby said to him, "Jim, what the devil is this—finger-bowls in my private car? We've never had finger-bowls before, and we've had everybody as was anybody to travel with us." Jim's reply was final. "Say," he replied, "we got to have 'em. Soon's I set my eyes on that lady I said: 'She's a finger-bowl lady.'"

"'Finger-bowl lady' be hanged, Jim, we don't—" Ingolby protested, but Jim waved him down.

"Say," he said decisively, "she'll ask for them finger-bowls—she'll ask for 'em, and what'd I do if we hadn't got 'em."

She did ask for them; and henceforth the West said of any woman who put on airs and wanted what she wasn't born to: "She's a finger-bowl lady."

It was Jim who opened the door to Jethro Fawe, and his first glance was one of prejudice. His quick perception saw that the Romany wore clothes not natural to him. He felt the artificial element, the quality of disguise. He was prepared to turn the visitor away, no matter what he wanted, but Ingolby's card handed to him by the Romany made him pause. He had never known his master give a card like that more than once or twice in the years they had been together. He fingered the card, scrutinized it carefully, turned it over, looked heavenward reflectively, as though the final permission for the visit remained with him, and finally admitted the visitor.

"Mr. Ingolby ain't in," he said. "He went out a little while back. You got to wait," he added sulkily, as he showed the Romany into Ingolby's working-room.

As Jim did so, he saw lying on a chair a suit of clothes on top of which were a wig and false beard and moustache. Instantly he got between the visitor and the make-up. The parcel was closed when he was in the room a half-hour before. Ingolby had opened it since, had been called out, and had forgotten to cover the things up or put them away.

"Sit down," Jim said to the Romany, still covering the disguise. Then he raised them in his arms, and passed with them into another room, muttering angrily to himself.

The Romany had seen, however. They were the first things on which his eyes had fallen when he entered the room. A wig, a false beard, and workman's clothes! What were they for? Were these disguises for the Master Gorgio? Was he to wear them? If so, he—Jethro Fawe—would watch and follow him wherever he went. Had these disguises to do with Fleda— with his Romany lass?

His pulses throbbed; he was in an overwrought mood. He was ready for any illusion, susceptible to any vagary of the imagination.

He looked round the room. So this was the way the swaggering, masterful Gorgio lived?

Here were pictures and engravings which did not seem to belong to a new town in a new land, where everything was useful or spectacular. Here was a sense of culture and refinement. Here were finished and unfinished water-colours done by Ingolby's own hand or bought by him from some hard- up artist earning his way mile by mile, as it were. Here were books, not many, but well-bound and important-looking, covering fields in which Jethro Fawe had never browsed, into which, indeed, he had never entered. If he had opened them he would have seen a profusion of marginal notes in pencil, and slips of paper stuck in the pages to mark important passages.

He turned from them to the welcome array of weapons on the walls-rifles, shotguns, Indian bows, arrows and spears, daggers, and great sheath- knives such as are used from the Yukon to Bolivia, and a sabre with a faded ribbon of silk tied to the handle. This was all that Max Ingolby had inherited from his father—that artillery sabre which he had worn in the Crimea and in the Indian Mutiny. Jethro's eyes wandered eagerly over the weapons, and, in imagination, he had each one in his hand. From the pained, angry confusion he felt when he looked at the books had emerged a feeling of fanaticism, of feud and war, in which his spirit regained its own kind of self-respect. In looking at the weapons he was as good a man as any Gorgio. Brains and books were one thing, but the strong arm, the quick eye, and the deft lunge home with the sword or dagger were better; they were of a man's own skill, not the acquired skill of another's brains which books give. He straightened his shoulders till he looked like a modern actor playing the hero in a romantic drama, and with quick vain motions he stroked and twisted his brown moustache, and ran his fingers through his curling hair. In truth he was no coward; and his conceit would not lessen his courage when the test of it came.

As his eyes brightened from gloom and sullenness to valiant enmity, they suddenly fell on a table in a corner where lay a black coffin-shaped thing of wood. In this case, he knew, was the Sarasate violin. Sarasate—once he had paid ten lira to hear Sarasate play the fiddle in Turin, and the memory of it was like the sun on the clouds to him now. In music such of him as was real found a home. It fed everything in him —his passion, his vanity; his vagabond taste, his emotions, his self- indulgence, his lust. It was the means whereby he raised himself to adventure and to pilgrimage, to love and license and loot and spying and secret service here and there in the east of Europe. It was the flagellation of these senses which excited him to do all that man may do and more.

He was going to play to the masterful Gorgio, and he would play as he had never played before. He would pour the soul of his purpose into the music—to win back or steal back, the lass sealed to him by the Starzke River.

"Kismet!" he said aloud, and he rose from the chair to go to the violin, but as he did so the door opened and Ingolby entered.

"Oh, you're here, and longing to get at it," he said pleasantly.

He had seen the look in the eyes of the Romany as he entered, and noted which way his footsteps were tending. "Well, we needn't lose any time, but will you have a drink and a smoke first?" he added.

He threw his hat in a corner, and opened a spirittable where shone a half dozen cut-glass, tumblers and several well-filled bottles, while boxes of cigars and cigarettes flanked them. It was the height of modern luxury imported from New York, and Jethro eyed it with envious inward comment. The Gorgio had the world on his key-chain! Every door would open to him —that was written on his face—unless Fate stepped in and closed all doors!

The door of Fleda's heart had already been opened, but he had not yet made his bed in it, and there was still time to help Fate, if her mystic finger beckoned.

Jethro nodded in response to Ingolby's invitation to drink. "But I do not drink much when I play," he remarked. "There's enough liquor in the head when the fiddle's in the hand. 'Dadia', I do not need the spirit to make the pulses go!"

"As little as you like then, if you'll only play as well as you did this afternoon," Ingolby said cheerily. "I will play better," was the reply.

"On Sarasate's violin—well, of course."

"Not only because it is Sarasate's violin, 'Kowadji'!" "Kowadji! Oh, come now, you may be a Gipsy, but that doesn't mean that you're an Egyptian or an Arab. Why Arabic—why 'kowadji'?"

The other shrugged his shoulders. "Who can tell I speak many languages. I do not like the Mister. It is ugly in the ear. Monsieur, signor, effendi, kowadji, they have some respect in them."

"You wanted to pay me respect, eh?"

"You have Sarasate's violin!"

"I have a lot of things I could do without."

"Could you do without the Sarasate?"

"Long enough to hear you play it, Mr.—what is your name, may I ask?"

"My name is Jethro Fawe."

"Well, Jethro Fawe, my Romany 'chal', you shall show me what a violin can do."

"You know the Romany lingo?" Jethro asked, as Ingolby went over to the violin-case.

"A little—just a little."

"When did you learn it?" There was a sudden savage rage in Jethro's heart, for he imagined Fleda had taught Ingolby.

"Many a year ago when I could learn anything and remember anything and forget anything." Ingolby sighed. "But that doesn't matter, for I know only a dozen words or so, and they won't carry me far."

He turned the violin over in his hands. "This ought to do a bit more than the cotton-field fiddle," he said dryly.

He snapped the strings, looking at it with the love of the natural connoisseur. "Finish your drink and your cigarette. I can wait," he added graciously. "If you like the cigarettes, you must take some away with you. You don't drink much, that's clear, therefore you must smoke. Every man has some vice or other, if it's only hanging on to virtue too tight."

He laughed eagerly. Strange that he should have a feeling of greater companionship for a vagabond like this than for most people he met. Was it some temperamental thing in him? "Dago," as he called the Romany inwardly, there was still a bond between them. They understood the glory of a little instrument like this, and could forget the world in the light on a great picture. There was something in the air they breathed which gave them easier understanding of each other and of the world.

Suddenly with a toss Jethro drained the glass of spirit, though he had not meant to do so. He puffed the cigarette an instant longer, then threw it on the floor, and was about to put his foot on it, when Ingolby stopped him.

"I'm a slave," he said. "I've got a master. It's Jim. Jim's a hard master, too. He'd give me fits if we ground our cigarette ashes into the carpet."

He threw the refuse into a flower-pot.

"That squares Jim. Now let's turn the world inside out," he proceeded. He handed the fiddle over. "Here's the little thing that'll let you do the trick. Isn't it a beauty, Jethro Fawe?"

The Romany took it, his eyes glistening with mingled feelings. Hatred was in his soul, and it showed in the sidelong glance as Ingolby turned to place a chair where he could hear and see comfortably; yet he had the musician's love of the perfect instrument, and the woods and the streams and the sounds of night and the whisperings of trees and the ghosts that walked in lonely places and called across the glens—all were pouring into his brain memories which made his pulses move far quicker than the liquor he had drunk could do.

"What do you wish?" he asked as he tuned the fiddle.

Ingolby laughed good-humouredly. "Something Eastern; something you'd play for yourself if you were out by the Caspian Sea. Something that has life in it."

Jethro continued to tune the fiddle carefully and abstractedly. His eyes were half-closed, giving them a sulky look, and his head was averted. He made no reply to Ingolby, but his head swayed from side to side in that sensuous state produced by self-hypnotism, so common among the half- Eastern races. By an effort of the will they send through the nerves a flood of feeling which is half-anaesthetic, half-intoxicant. Carried into its fullest expression it drives a man amok or makes of him a howling dervish, a fanatic, or a Shakir. In lesser intensity it produces the musician of the purely sensuous order, or the dancer that performs prodigies of abandoned grace. Suddenly the sensuous exaltation had come upon Jethro Fawe. It was as though he had discharged into his system from some cells of his brain a flood which coursed like a stream of soft fire.

In the pleasurable pain of such a mood he drew his bow across the strings with a sweeping stroke, and then, for an instant, he ran hither and thither on the strings testing the quality and finding the range and capacity of the instrument. It was a scamper of hieroglyphics which could only mean anything to a musician.

"Well, what do you think of him?" Ingolby asked as the Romany lowered the bow. "Paganini—Joachim—Sarasate—any one, it is good enough," was the half-abstracted reply.

"It is good enough for you—almost, eh?"

Ingolby meant his question as a compliment, but an evil look shot into the Romany's face, and the bow twitched in his hand. He was not Paganini or Sarasate, but that was no reason why he should be insulted.

Ingolby's quick perception saw, however, what his words had done, and he hastened to add: "I believe you can get more out of that fiddle than Sarasate ever could, in your own sort of music anyhow. I've never heard any one play half so well the kind of piece you played this afternoon. I'm glad I didn't make a fool of myself buying the fiddle. I didn't, did I? I gave five thousand dollars for it."

"It's worth anything to the man that loves it," was the Romany's response. He was mollified by the praise he had received.

He raised the fiddle slowly to his chin, his eyes wandering round the room, then projecting themselves into space, from which they only returned to fix themselves on Ingolby with the veiled look which sees but does not see—such a look as an oracle, or a death-god, or a soulless monster of some between-world, half-Pagan god would wear. Just such a look as Watts's "Minotaur" wears in the Tate Gallery in London.

In an instant he was away in a world which was as far off from this world as Jupiter is from Mars. It was the world of his soul's origin—a place of beautiful and yet of noisome creations also; of white mountains and green hills, and yet of tarns in which crawled evil things; a place of vagrant, hurricanes and tidal-waves and cloud-bursts, of forests alive with quarrelling! and affrighted beasts. It was a place where birds sang divinely, yet where obscene fowls of prey hovered in the blue or waited by the dying denizens of the desert or the plain; where dark-eyed women heard, with sidelong triumph, the whispers of passion; where sweet- faced children fled in fear from terrors undefined; where harpies and witch-women and evil souls waited in ambush; or scurried through the coverts where men brought things to die; or where they fled for futile refuge from armed foes. It was a world of unbridled will, this, where the soul of Jethro Fawe had its origin; and to it his senses fled involuntarily when he put Sarasate's fiddle to his chin this Autumn evening.

From that well of the First Things—the first things of his own life, the fount from which his forebears drew, backwards through the centuries, Jethro Fawe quickly drank his fill; and then into the violin he poured his own story—no improvisation, but musical legends and classic fantasies and folk-breathings and histories of anguished or joyous haters or lovers of life; treated by the impressionist who made that which had been in other scenes to other men the thing of the present and for the men who are. That which had happened by the Starzke River was now of the Sagalac River. The passions and wild love and irresponsible deeds of the life he had lived in years gone by were here.

It was impossible for Ingolby to resist the spell of the music. Such abandonment he had never seen in any musician, such riot of musical meaning he had never heard. He was conscious of the savagery and the bestial soul of vengeance which spoke through the music, and drowned the joy and radiance and almost ghostly and grotesque frivolity of the earlier passages; but it had no personal meaning to him, though at times it seemed when the Romany came near and bent over him with the ecstatic attack of the music, as though there was a look in the black eyes like that of a man who kills. It had, of course, nothing to do with him; it was the abandonment of a highly emotional nature, he thought.

It was only after he had been playing, practically without ceasing, for three-quarters of an hour, that there came to Ingolby the true interpretation of the Romany mutterings through the man's white, wolf- like teeth. He did not shrink, however, but kept his head and watched.

Once, as the musician flung his body round in a sweep of passion, Ingolby saw the black eyes flash to the weapons on the wall with a malign look which did not belong to the music alone, and he took a swift estimate of the situation. Why the man should have any intentions against him, he could not guess, except that he might be one of the madmen who have a vendetta against the capitalist. Or was he a tool of Felix Marchand? It did not seem possible, and yet if the man was penniless and an anarchist maybe, there was the possibility. Or—the blood rushed to his face—or it might be that the Gipsy's presence here, this display of devilish antipathy, as though it were all part of the music, was due, somehow, to Fleda Druse.

The music swelled to a swirling storm, crashed and flooded the feelings with a sense of shipwreck and chaos, through which a voice seemed to cry- the quiver and delicate shrillness of one isolated string—and then fell a sudden silence, as though the end of all things had come; and on the silence the trembling and attenuated note which had quivered on the lonely string, rising, rising, piercing the infinite distance and sinking into silence again.

In the pause which followed the Romany stood panting, his eyes fixed on Ingolby with an evil exaltation which made him seem taller and bigger than he was, but gave him, too, a look of debauchery like that on the face of a satyr. Generations of unbridled emotion, of license of the fields and the covert showed in his unguarded features.

"What did the single cry—the motif—express?" Ingolby asked coolly. "I know there was catastrophe, the tumblings of avalanches, but the voice that cried-the soul of a lover, was it?"

The Romany's lips showed an ugly grimace. "It was the soul of one that betrayed a lover, going to eternal tortures."

Ingolby laughed carelessly. "It was a fine bit of work. Sarasate would have been proud of his fiddle if he could have heard. Anyhow he couldn't have played that. Is it Gipsy music?"

"It is the music of a 'Gipsy,' as you call it."

"Well, it's worth a year's work to hear," Ingolby replied admiringly, yet acutely conscious of danger. "Are you a musician by trade?" he asked.

"I have no trade." The glowing eyes kept scanning the wall where the weapons hung, and as though without purpose other than to get a pipe from the rack on the wall, Ingolby moved to where he could be prepared for any rush. It seemed absurd that there should be such a possibility; but the world was full of strange things.

"What brought you to the West?" he asked as he filled a pipe, his back almost against the wall.

"I came to get what belonged to me."

Ingolby laughed ironically. "Most of us are here for that purpose. We think the world owes us such a lot."

"I know what is my own."

Ingolby lit his pipe, his eyes reflectively scanning the other.

"Have you got it again out here—your own?"

"Not yet, but I will."

Ingolby took out his watch, and looked at it. "I haven't found it easy getting all that belongs to me."

"You have found it easier getting what belongs to some one else," was the snarling response.

Ingolby's jaw hardened. What did the fellow mean? Did he refer to money, or—was it Fleda Druse? "See here," he said, "there's no need to say things like that. I never took anything that didn't belong to me, that I didn't win, or earn or pay for—market price or 'founder's shares'"—he smiled grimly. "You've given me the best treat I've had in many a day. I'd walk fifty miles to hear you play my Sarasate—or even old Berry's cotton-field fiddle. I'm as grateful as I can be, and I'd like to pay you for it; but as you're not a professional, and it's one gentleman to another as it were, I can only thank you—or maybe help you to get what's your own, if you're really trying to get it out here. Meanwhile, have a cigar and a drink."

He was still between the Romany and the wall, and by a movement forward sought to turn Jethro to the spirit-table. Probably this manoeuvring was all nonsense, that he was wholly misreading the man; but he had always trusted his instincts, and he would not let his reason rule him entirely in such a situation. He could also ring the bell for Jim, or call to him, for while he was in the house Jim was sure to be near by; but he felt he must deal with the business alone.

The Romany did not move towards the spirit-table, and Ingolby became increasingly vigilant.

"No, I can't pay you anything, that's clear," he said; "but to get your own—I've got some influence out here—what can I do? A stranger is up against all kinds of things if he isn't a native, and you're not. Your home and country's a good way from here, eh?"

Suddenly the Romany faced him. "Yes. I come from places far from here. Where is the Romany's home? It is everywhere in the world, but it is everywhere inside his tent. Because his country is everywhere and nowhere, his home is more to him than it is to any other. He is alone with his wife, and with his own people. Yes, and by long and by last, he will make the man pay who spoils his home. It is all he has. Good or bad, it is all he has. It is his own."

Ingolby had a strange, disturbing premonition that he was about to hear what would startle him, but he persisted. "You said you had come here to get your own—is your home here?"

For a moment the Romany did not answer. He had worked himself into a great passion. He had hypnotized himself, he had acted for a while as though he was one of life's realities; but suddenly there passed through his veins the chilling sense of the unreal, that he was only acting a part, as he had ever done in his life, and that the man before him could, with a wave of the hand, raise the curtain on all his disguises and pretences. It was only for an instant, however, for there swept through him the feeling that Fleda had roused in him—the first real passion, the first true love—if what such as he felt can be love—that he had ever known; and he saw her again as she was in the but in the wood defying him, ready to defend herself against him. All his erotic anger and melodramatic fervour were alive in him once more.

He was again a man with a wrong, a lover dispossessed. On the instant his veins filled with passionate blood. The Roscian strain in him had its own tragic force and reality.

"My home is where my own is, and you, have taken my own from me, as I said," he burst out. "There was all the world for you, but I had only my music and my wife, and you have taken my wife from me. 'Mi Duvel', you have taken, but you shall give back again, or there will be only one of us in the world! The music I have played for you—that has told you all: the thing that was music from the beginning of Time, the will of the First of All. Fleda Druse, she was mine, she is my wife, and you, the Gorgio, come between, and she will not return to me."

A sudden savage desire came to Ingolby to strike the man in the face— this Gipsy vagabond the husband of Fleda Druse! It was too monstrous. It was an evil lie, and yet she had said she was a Romany, and had said it with apparent shame or anxiety. She had given him no promise, had pledged no faith, had admitted no love, and yet already in his heart of hearts he thought upon her as his own. Ever since the day he had held her in his arms at the Carillon Rapids her voice had sounded in his ears, and a warmth was in his heart which had never been there in all his days. This waif of barbarism even to talk of Fleda Druse as though he was of the same sphere as herself invited punishment-but to claim her as his wife! It was shameless. An ugly mood came on him, the force that had made him what he was filled all his senses. He straightened himself; contempt of the Ishmael showed at his lips.

"I think you lie, Jethro Fawe," he said quietly, and his eyes were hard and piercing. "Gabriel Druse's daughter is not—never was—any wife of yours. She never called you husband. She does not belong to the refuse of the world."

The Romany made a sudden rush towards the wall where the weapons hung, but two arms of iron were flung out and caught him, and he was hurled across the room. He crashed against a table, swayed, missed a chair where rested the Sarasate violin, then fell to the floor; but he staggered to his feet again, all his senses in chaos.

"You almost fell on the fiddle. If you had hurt it I'd have hurt you, Mr. Fawe," Ingolby said with a grim smile. "That fiddle's got too much in it to waste it."

"Mi Duvel! Mi Duvel!" gasped the Romany in his fury.

"You can say that as much as you like, but if you play any more of your monkey tricks here, my Paganini, I will wring your neck," Ingolby returned, his six feet of solid flesh making a movement of menace.

"And look," he added, "since you are here, and I said what I meant, that I'd help you to get your own, I'll keep my word. But don't talk in damned riddles. Talk white men's language. You said that Gabriel Druse's daughter was your wife. Explain what you meant, and no nonsense."

The Romany made a gesture of acquiescence. "She was made mine according to Romany law by the River Starzke seventeen years ago. I was the son of Lemuel Fawe, rightful King of all the Romanys. Gabriel Druse seized the headship, and my father gave him three thousand pounds that we should marry, she and I, and so bring the headship to the Fawes again when Gabriel Druse should die; and so it was done by the River Starzke in the Roumelian country."

Ingolby winced, for the man's words rang true. A cloud came over his face, but he said nothing. Jethro saw the momentary advantage. "You did not know?" he asked. "She did not tell you she was made my wife those years ago? She did not tell you she was the daughter of the Romany King? So it is, you see, she is afraid to tell the truth."

Ingolby's knitted bulk heaved with desire to injure. "Your wife—you melodious sinner! Do you think such tomfoolery has any effect in this civilized country? She is about as much your wife as I am your brother. Don't talk your heathenish rot here. I said I'd help you to get your own, because you played the fiddle as few men can play it, and I owe you a lot for that hour's music; but there's nothing belonging to Gabriel Druse that belongs to you, and his daughter least of all. Look out— don't sit on the fiddle, damn you!"

The Romany had made a motion as if to sit down on the chair where the fiddle was, but stopped short at Ingolby's warning. For an instant Jethro had an inclination to seize the fiddle and break it across his knees. It would be an exquisite thing to destroy five thousand dollars' worth of this man's property at a single wrench and blow. But the spirit of the musician asserted itself before the vengeful lover could carry out his purpose; as Ingolby felt sure it would. Ingolby had purposely given the warning about the fiddle, in the belief that it might break the unwelcome intensity of the scene. He detested melodrama, and the scene came precious near to it. Men had been killed before his eyes more than once, but there had been no rodomontade even when there had been a woman in the case.

This Romany lover, however, seemed anxious to make a Sicilian drama out of his preposterous claim, and it sickened him. Who was the fellow that he should appear in the guise of a rival to himself! It was humiliating and offensive. Ingolby had his own kind of pride and vanity, and they were both hurt now. He would have been less irritable if this rival had been as good a man as himself or better. He was so much a gamester that he would have said, "Let the best man win," and have taken his chances.

His involuntary strategy triumphed for the moment. The Romany looked at the fiddle for an instant with murderous eyes, but the cool, quiet voice of Ingolby again speaking sprayed his hot virulence.

"You can make a good musician quite often, but a good fiddle is a prize- packet from the skies," Ingolby said. "When you get a good musician and a good fiddle together it's a day for a salute of a hundred guns."

Half-dazed with unregulated emotion, Jethro acted with indecision for a moment, and the fiddle was safe. But he had suffered the indignity of being flung like a bag of bones across the room, and the microbe of insane revenge was in him. It was not to be killed by the cold humour of the man who had worsted him. He returned to the attack.

"She is mine, and her father knows it is so. I have waited all these years, and the hour has come. I will—"

Ingolby's eyes became hard and merciless again. "Don't talk your Gipsy rhetoric. I've had enough. No hour has come that makes a woman do what she doesn't want to do in a free country. The lady is free to do what she pleases here within British law, and British law takes no heed of Romany law or any other law. You'll do well to go back to your Roumelian country or whatever it is. The lady will marry whom she likes."

"She will never marry you," the Romany said huskily and menacingly.

"I have never asked her, but if I do, and she said yes, no one could prevent it."

"I would prevent it."

"How?"

"She is a Romany: she belongs to the Romany people; I will find a way."

Ingolby had a flash of intuition.

"You know well that if Gabriel Druse passed the word, your life wouldn't be worth a day's purchase. The Camorra would not be more certain or more deadly. If you do anything to hurt the daughter of Gabriel Druse, you will pay the full price, and you know it. The Romanys don't love you better than their rightful chief."

"I am their rightful chief."

"Maybe, but if they don't say so, too, you might as well be their rightful slave. You are a genius in your way. Take my advice and return to the trail of the Gipsy. Or, there's many an orchestra would give you a good salary as leader. You've got no standing in this country. You can't do anything to hurt me except try to kill me, and I'll take my chance of that. You'd better have a drink now and go quietly home to bed. Try and understand that this is a British town, and we don't settle our affairs by jumping from a violin rhapsody to a knife or a gun." He jerked his head backwards towards the wall. "Those things are for ornament, not for use. Come, Fawe, have a drink and go home like a good citizen for one night only."

The Romany hesitated, then shook his head and muttered chaotically.

"Very well," was the decisive reply. Ingolby pressed a bell, and, in an instant, Jim Beadle was in the room. He had evidently been at the keyhole. "Jim," he said, "show the gentleman out."

But suddenly he caught up a box of cigars from the table and thrust it into the Romany's hands. "They're the best to be got this side of Havana," he said cheerily. "They'll help you put more fancy still into your playing. Good night. You never played better than you've done during the last hour, I'll stake my life on that. Good night. Show Mr. Fawe out, Jim."

The Romany had not time to thrust back the cigars upon his host, and dazed by the strategy of the thing, by the superior force and mind of the man who a moment ago he would have killed, he took the box and turned towards the door, taking his hat dazedly from Jim.

At the door, however, catching sight of the sly grin on the mulatto servant's face, his rage and understanding returned to him, and he faced the masterful Gorgio once again.

"By God, I'll have none of it!" he exclaimed roughly and threw the box of cigars on the floor of the room. Ingolby was not perturbed. "Don't forget there's an east-bound train every day," he said menacingly, and turned his back as the door closed.

In another minute Jim entered the room. "Get the clothes and the wig and things, Jim. I must be off," he said.

"The toughs don't get going till about this time over at Manitou," responded Jim. Then he told his master about the clothes having been exposed in the room when the Romany arrived. "But I don't think he seen them," Jim added with approval of his own conduct. "I got 'em out quick as lightning. I covered 'em like a blanket."

"All right, Jim; it doesn't matter. That fellow's got other things to think of than that."

He was wrong, however. The Romany was waiting outside in the darkness not far away—watching and waiting.



CHAPTER X

FOR LUCK

Felix Marchand was in the highest spirits. His clean-shaven face was wrinkled with smiles and sneers. His black hair was flung in waves of triumph over his heavily-lined forehead; one hand was on his hip with brave satisfaction, the other with lighted cigarette was tossed upwards in exultation.

"I've got him. I've got him—like that!" he said transferring the cigarette to his mouth, and clenching his right hand as though it could not be loosed by an earthquake. "For sure, it's a thing finished as the solder of a pannikin—like that."

He caught up a tin quart-pot from the bar-counter and showed the soldered bottom of it.

He was alone in the bar of Barbazon's Hotel except for one person—the youngest of the officials who had been retired from the offices of the railways when Ingolby had merged them. This was a man who had got his position originally by nepotism, and represented the worst elements of a national life where the spoils system is rooted in the popular mind. He had, however, a little residue of that discipline which, working in a great industrial organization, begets qualms as to extreme courses.

He looked reflectively at the leaden pot and said in reply: "I'd never believe in anything where that Ingolby is concerned till I had it in the palm of my hand. He's as deep as a well, and when he's quietest it's good to look out. He takes a lot of skinning, that badger."

"He's skinned this time all right," was Marchand's reply. "To-morrow'll be the biggest day Manitou's had since the Indian lifted his wigwam and the white man put down his store. Listen—hear them! They're coming!"

He raised a hand for silence, and a rumbling, ragged roar of voices could be heard without.

"The crowd have gone the rounds," he continued. "They started at Barbazon's and they're winding up at Barbazon's. They're drunk enough to-night to want to do anything, and to-morrow when they've got sore heads they'll do anything. They'll make that funeral look like a squeezed orange; they'll show Lebanon and Master Ingolby that we're to be bosses of our own show. The strike'll be on after the funeral, and after the strike's begun there'll be—eh, bien sur!"

He paused sharply, as though he had gone too far. "There'll be what?" whispered the other; but Marchand made no reply, save to make a warning gesture, for Barbazon, the landlord, had entered behind the bar.

"They're coming back, Barbazon," Marchand said to the landlord, jerking his head towards the front door. The noise of the crowd was increasing, the raucous shouts were so loud that the three had to raise their voices. "You'll do a land-office business to-night," he declared.

Barbazon had an evil face. There were rumours that he had been in gaol in Quebec for robbery, and that after he had served his time he had dug up the money he had stolen and come West. He had started the first saloon at Manitou, and had grown with the place in more senses than one. He was heavy and thick-set, with huge shoulders, big hands, and beady eyes that looked out of a stolid face where long hours, greed and vices other than drink had left their mark. He never drank spirits, and was therefore ready to take advantage of those who did drink. More than one horse and canoe and cow and ox, and acre of land, in the days when land was cheap, had come to him across the bar-counter. He could be bought, could Barbazon, and he sold more than wine and spirits. He had a wife who had left him twice because of his misdemeanours, but had returned and straightened out his house and affairs once again; and even when she went off with Lick Baldwin, a cattle-dealer, she was welcomed back without reproaches by Barbazon, chiefly because he had no morals, and her abilities were of more value to him than her virtue. On the whole, Gros Barbazon was a bad lot.

At Marchand's words Barbazon shrugged his shoulders. "The more spent to-night, the less to spend to-morrow," he growled.

"But there's going to be spending for a long time," Marchand answered. "There's going to be a riot to-morrow, and there's going to be a strike the next day, and after that there's going to be something else."

"What else?" Barbazon asked, his beady eyes fastened on Marchand's face.

"Something worth while-better than all the rest." Barbazon's low forehead seemed to disappear almost, as he drew the grizzled shock of hair down, by wrinkling his forehead with a heavy frown.

"It's no damn good, m'sieu'," he growled. "Am I a fool? They'll spend money to-night, and tomorrow, and the next day, and when the row is on; and the more they spend then, the less they'll have to spend by-and-by. It's no good. The steady trade for me—all the time. That is my idee. And the something else—what? You think there's something else that'll be good for me? Nom de Dieu, there's nothing you're doing, or mean to do, but'll hurt me and everybody."

"That's your view, is it, Barbazon?" exclaimed Marchand loudly, for the crowd was now almost at the door. "You're a nice Frenchman and patriot. That crowd'll be glad to hear you think they're fools. Suppose they took it into their heads to wreck the place?"

Barbazon's muddy face got paler, but his eyes sharpened, and he leaned over the bar-counter, and said with a snarl: "Go to hell, and say what you like; and then I'll have something to say about something else, m'sieu'."

Marchand was about to reply angrily, but he instantly changed his mind, and before Barbazon could stop him, he sprang over the counter and disappeared into the office behind the bar.

"I won't steal anything, Barbazon," he said over his shoulder as he closed the door behind him.

"I'll see to that," Barbazon muttered stolidly, but with malicious eyes.

The front door was flung open now, and the crowd poured into the room, boisterous, reckless, though some were only sullen, watchful and angry. These last were mostly men above middle age, and of a fanatical and racially bitter type. They were not many, but in one sense they were the backbone and force of the crowd, probably the less intelligent but the more tenacious and consistent. They were black spots of gathering storm in an electric atmosphere.

All converged upon the bar. Two assistants rushed the drinks along the counter with flourishes, while Barbazon took in the cash and sharply checked the rougher element, who were inclined to treat the bar as a place for looting. Most of them, however, had a wholesome fear of Barbazon, and also most of them wished to stand well with him—credit was a good thing, even in a saloon.

For a little time the room was packed, then some of the more restless spirits, their thirst assuaged, sallied forth to taste the lager and old rye elsewhere, and "raise Cain" in the streets. When they went, it became possible to move about more freely in the big bar-room, at the end of which was a billiard-table. It was notable, however, that the more sullen elements stayed. Some of them were strangers to each other. Manitou was a distributing point for all radiations of the compass, and men were thrown together in its streets who only saw one another once or twice a year-when they went to the woods in the Fall or worked the rivers in the Summer. Some were Mennonites, Doukhobors and Finlanders, some Swedes, Norwegians and Icelanders. Others again were birds of passage who would probably never see Manitou in the future, but they were mostly French, and mostly Catholic, and enemies of the Orange Lodges wherever they were, east or west or north or south. They all had a common ground of unity—half-savage coureurs-de-bois, river-drivers, railway-men, factory hands, cattlemen, farmers, labourers; they had a gift for prejudice, and taking sides on something or other was as the breath of the nostrils to them.

The greater number of the crowd were, however, excitable, good-natured men, who were by instinct friendly, save when their prejudices were excited; and their oaths and exclamations were marvels of droll ingenuity. Most of them were still too good-humoured with drink to be dangerous, but all hoped for trouble at the Orange funeral on principle, and the anticipated strike had elements of "thrill." They were of a class, however, who would swing from what was good-humour to deadly anger in a minute, and turn a wind of mere prejudice into a hurricane of life and death with the tick of a clock. They would all probably go to the Orange funeral to-morrow in a savage spirit. Some of them were loud in denunciation of Ingolby and "the Lebanon gang"; they joked coarsely over the dead Orangeman, but their cheerful violence had not yet the appearance of reality.

One man suddenly changed all that. He was a river-driver of stalwart proportions, with a red handkerchief round his neck, and with loose corded trousers tucked into his boots. He had a face of natural ugliness made almost repulsive by marks of smallpox. Red, flabby lips and an overhanging brow made him a figure which men would avoid on a dark night.

"Let's go over to Lebanon to-night and have it out," he said in French. "That Ingolby—let's go break his windows and give him a dip in the river. He's the curse of this city. Holy, once Manitou was a place to live in, now it's a place to die in! The factories, the mills, they're full of Protes'ants and atheists and shysters; the railway office is gone to Lebanon. Ingolby took it there. Manitou was the best town in the West; it's no good now. Who's the cause? Ingolby's the cause. Name of God, if he was here I'd get him by the throat as quick as winkin'."

He opened and shut his fingers with spasmodic malice, and glared round the room. "He's going to lock us out if we strike," he added. "He's going to take the bread out of our mouths; he's going to put his heel on Manitou, and grind her down till he makes her knuckle to Lebanon—to a lot of infidels, Protes'ants, and thieves. Who's going to stand it? I say-bagosh, I say, who's going to stand it!"

"He's a friend of the Monseigneur," ventured a factory-hand, who had a wife and children to support, and however partisan, was little ready for that which would stop his supplies.

"Sacre bapteme! That's part of his game," roared the big river-driver in reply. "I'll take the word of Felix Marchand about that. Look at him! That Felix Marchand doesn't try to take the bread out of people's mouths. He gives money here, he gives it there. He wants the old town to stay as it is and not be swallowed up."

"Three cheers for Felix Marchand !" cried some one in the throng. All cheered loudly save one old man with grizzled hair and beard, who leaned against the wall half-way down the room smoking a corncob pipe. He was a French Canadian in dress and appearance, and he spat on the floor like a navvy—he had filled his pipe with the strongest tobacco that one man ever offered to another. As the crowd cheered for Felix Marchand, he made his way up towards the bar slowly. He must have been tall when he was young; now he was stooped, yet there was still something very sinewy about him.

"Who's for Lebanon?" cried the big river-driver with an oath. "Who's for giving Lebanon hell, and ducking Ingolby in the river?"

"I am—I am—I am—all of us!" shouted the crowd. "It's no good waiting for to-morrow. Let's get the Lebs by the scruff to-night. Let's break Ingolby's windows and soak him in the Sagalac. Allons—allons gai!"

Uproar and broken sentences, threats, oaths, and objurgations sounded through the room. There was a sudden movement towards the door, but the exit of the crowd was stopped by a slow but clear voice speaking in French.

"Wait a minute, my friends!" it cried. "Wait a minute. Let's ask a few questions first."

"Who's he?" asked a dozen voices. "What's he going to say?" The mob moved again towards the bar.

The big river-driver turned on the grizzled old man beside the bar- counter with bent shoulders and lazy, drawling speech.

"What've you got to say about it, son?" he asked threateningly.

"Well, to ask a few questions first—that's all," the old man replied.

"You don't belong here, old cock," the other said roughly.

"A good many of us don't belong here," the old man replied quietly. "It always is so. This isn't the first time I've been to Manitou. You're a river-driver, and you don't live here either," he continued.

"What've you got to say about it? I've been coming and going here for ten years. I belong—bagosh, what do you want to ask? Hurry up. We've got work to do. We're going to raise hell in Lebanon."

"And give hell to Ingolby," shouted some one in the crowd.

"Suppose Ingolby isn't there?" questioned the old man.

"Oh, that's one of your questions, is it?" sneered the big river-driver. "Well, if you knew him as we do, you'd know that it's at night-time he sits studyin' how he'll cut Lebanon's throat. He's home, all right. He's in Lebanon anyhow, and we'll find him."

"Well, but wait a minute—be quiet a bit," said the old man, his eyes blinking slowly at the big riverdriver. "I've been 'round a good deal, and I've had some experience in the world. Did you ever give that Ingolby a chance to tell you what his plans were? Did you ever get close to him and try to figure what he was driving at? There's no chance of getting at the truth if you don't let a man state his case—but no. If he can't make you see his case then is the time to jib, not before."

"Oh, get out!" cried a rowdy English road-maker in the crowd. "We know all right what Ingolby's after."

"Eh, well, what is he after?" asked the old man looking the other in the eye.

"What's he after? Oof-oof-oof, that's what he's after. He's for his own pocket, he's for being boss of all the woolly West. He's after keeping us poor and making himself rich. He's after getting the cinch on two towns and three railways, and doing what he likes with it all; and we're after not having him do it, you bet. That's how it is, old hoss."

The other stroked his beard with hands which, somehow, gave little indication of age, and then, with a sudden jerk forward of his head, he said: "Oh, it's like that, eh? Is that what M'sieu' Marchand told you? That's what he said, is it?"

The big river-driver, eager to maintain his supreme place as leader, lunged forward a step, and growled a challenge.

"Who said it? What does it matter if M'sieu' Marchand said it—it's true. If I said it, it's true. All of us in this room say it, and it's true. Young Marchand says what Manitou says."

The old man's eyes grew brighter—they were exceedingly sharp for one so old, and he said quite gently now:

"M. Marchand said it first, and you all say it afterwards—ah, bah! But listen to me; I know Max Ingolby that you think is such a villain; I know him well. I knew him when he was a little boy and—"

"You was his nurse, I suppose!" cried the Englishman's voice amid a roar of laughter.

"Taught him his A-B-C-was his dear, kind teacher, eh?" hilariously cried another.

The old man appeared not to hear. "I have known him all the years since. He has only been in the West a few years, but he has lived in the world exactly thirty-three years. He never willingly did anybody harm—never. Since he came West, since he came to the Sagalac, he's brought work to Lebanon and to Manitou. There are hundreds more workmen in both the towns than there were when he came. It was he made others come with much money and build the factories and the mills. Work means money, money means bread, bread means life—so."

The big river-driver, seeing the effect of the old man's words upon the crowd, turned to them with an angry gesture and a sneer.

"I s'pose Ingolby has paid this old skeesicks for talking this swash. We know all right what Ingolby is, and what he's done. He's made war between the two towns—there's hell to pay now on both sides of the Sagalac. He took away the railway offices from here, and threw men out of work. He's done harm to Manitou—he's against Manitou every time."

Murmurs of approval ran through the crowd, though some were silent, looking curiously at the forceful and confident old man. Even his bent shoulders seemed to suggest driving power rather than the weight of years. He suddenly stretched out a hand in command as it were.

"Comrades, comrades," he said, "every man makes mistakes. Even if it was a mistake for Ingolby to take away the offices from Manitou, he's done a big thing for both cities by combining the three railways."

"Monopoly," growled a voice from the crowd. "Not monopoly," the old man replied with a ring to his voice, which made it younger, fresher. "Not monopoly, but better management of the railways, with more wages, more money to spend on things to eat and drink and wear, more dollars in the pocket of everybody that works in Manitou and Lebanon. Ingolby works, he doesn't loaf."

"Oh, gosh all hell, he's a dynamo," shouted a voice from the crowd. "He's a dynamo running the whole show-eh!"

The old man seemed to grow shorter, but as he thrust his shoulders forward, it was like a machine gathering energy and power.

"I'll tell you, friends, what Ingolby is trying to do," he said in a low voice vibrating with that force which belongs neither to age nor youth, but is the permanent activity uniting all ages of a man. "Of course, Ingolby is ambitious and he wants power. He tries to do the big things in the world because there is the big thing to do—for sure. Without such men the big things are never done, and other men have less work to do, and less money and poorer homes. They discover and construct and design and invent and organize and give opportunities. I am a working man, but I know what Ingolby thinks. I know what men think who try to do the big things. I have tried to do them."

The crowd were absolutely still now, but the big river-driver shook himself free of the eloquence, which somehow swayed them all, and said:

"You—you look as if you'd tried to do big things, you do, old skeesicks. I bet you never earned a hundred dollars in your life." He turned to the crowd with fierce gestures. "Let's go to Lebanon and make the place sing," he roared. "Let's get Ingolby out to talk for himself, if he wants to talk. We know what we want to do, and we're not going to be bossed. He's for Lebanon and we're for Manitou. Lebanon means to boss us, Lebanon wants to sit on us because we're Catholics, because we're French, because we're honest."

Again a wave of revolution swept through the crowd. The big river-driver represented their natural instincts, their native fanaticism, their prejudices. But the old man spoke once more.

"Ingolby wants Lebanon and Manitou to come together, not to fall apart," he declared. "He wants peace. If he gets rich here he won't get rich alone. He's working for both towns. If he brings money from outside, that's good for both towns. If he—"

"Shut your mouth, let Ingolby speak for himself," snarled the big river- driver. "Take his dollars out of your pocket and put them on the bar, the dollars Ingolby gives you to say all this. Put them dollars of Ingolby's up for drinks, or we'll give you a jar that'll shake you, old wart-hog."

At that instant a figure forced itself through the crowd, and broke into the packed circle which was drawing closer upon the old man.

It was Jethro Fawe. He flung a hand out towards the old man.

"You want Ingolby—well, that's Ingolby," he shouted.

Like lightning the old man straightened himself, snatched the wig and beard away from his head and face, and with quiet fearlessness said:

"Yes, I am Ingolby."

For an instant there was absolute silence, in which Ingolby weighed his chances. He was among enemies. He had meant only to move among the crowd to discover their attitude, to find things out for himself. He had succeeded, and his belief that Manitou could be swayed in the right direction if properly handled, was correct. Beneath the fanaticism and the racial spirit was human nature; and until Jethro Fawe had appeared, he had hoped to prevent violence and the collision at to-morrow's funeral.

Now the situation was all changed. It was hard to tell what sharp turn things might take. He was about to speak, but suddenly from the crowd there was spat out at him the words, "Spy! Sneak! Spy!"

Instantly the wave of feeling ran against him. He smiled frankly, however, with that droll twist of his mouth which had won so many, and the raillery of his eyes was more friendly than any appeal.

"Spy, if you like, my friends," he said firmly and clearly. "Moses sent spies down into the Land of Promise, and they brought back big bunches of grapes. Well, I've come down into a land of promise. I wanted to know just how you all feel without being told it by some one else. I knew if I came here as Max Ingolby I shouldn't hear the whole truth; I wouldn't see exactly how you see, so I came as one of you, and you must admit, my French is as good as yours almost."

He laughed and nodded at them.

"There wasn't one of you that knew I wasn't a Frenchman. That's in my favour. If I know the French language as I do, and can talk to you in French as I've done, do you think I don't understand the French people, and what you want and how you feel? I'm one of the few men in the West that can talk your language. I learned it when I was a boy, so that I might know my French fellow-countrymen under the same flag, with the same King and the same national hope. As for your religion, God knows, I wish I was as good a Protestant as lots of you are good Catholics. And I tell you this, I'd be glad to have a minister that I could follow and respect and love as I respect and love Monseigneur Lourde of Manitou. I want to bring these two towns together, to make them a sign of what this country is, and what it can do; to make hundreds like ourselves in Manitou and Lebanon work together towards health, wealth, comfort and happiness. Can't you see, my friends, what I'm driving at? I'm for peace and work and wealth and power—not power for myself alone, but power that belongs to all of us. If I can show I'm a good man at my job, maybe better than others, then I have a right to ask you to follow me. If I can't, then throw me out. I tell you I'm your friend—Max Ingolby is your friend."

"Spy! Spy! Spy!" cried a new voice.

It came from behind the bar. An instant after, the owner of the voice leaped up on the counter. It was Felix Marchand. He had entered by the door behind the bar into Barbazon's office.

"When I was in India," Marchand cried, "I found a snake in the bed. I killed it before it stung me. There's a snake in the bed of Manitou— what are you going to do with it?"

The men swayed, murmured, and shrill shouts of "Marchand! Marchand! Marchand !" went up. The crowd heaved upon Ingolby. "One minute!" he called with outstretched arm and commanding voice. They paused. Something in him made him master of them even then.

At that moment two men were fiercely fighting their way through the crowd towards where Ingolby was. They were Jowett and Osterhaut. Ingolby saw them coming.

"Go back—go back!" he called to them.

Suddenly a drunken navvy standing on a table in front of and to the left of Ingolby seized a horseshoe hanging on the wall, and flung it with an oath.

It caught Ingolby in the forehead, and he fell to the floor without a sound.

A minute afterwards the bar was empty, save for Osterhaut, Jowett, old Barbazon, and his assistants.