THE AIR TRUST (Part 1)

Originally published in 1915.

FOREWORD

This book is the result of an attempt to carry the monopolistic principle to its logical conclusion. For many years I have entertained the idea that if a monopoly be right in oil, coal, beef, steel or what not, it would also be right in larger ways involving, for example, the use of the ocean and the air itself. I believe that, had capitalists been able to bring the seas and the atmosphere under physical control, they would long ago have monopolized them. Capitalism has not refrained from laying its hand on these things through any sense of decency, but merely because the task has hitherto proved impossible.

Granting, then, the premise that some process might be discovered whereby the air-supply of the world could be controlled, the Air Trust logically follows. I have endeavored to show how such a Trust would inevitably lead to the utter enslavement of the human race, unless overthrown by the only means then possible, i.e., violence. This book is not a brief for “direct action.” Doubtless the capitalist press (if it indeed notice the work at all) will denounce it as a plea for “bomb-throwing” and apply the epithet of “Anarchist” to me; but at this the judicious and the intelligent will only smile; and as for our friends the enemy, we esteem their opinion at its precise real value, zero.

Given the conditions supposed in this book, I repeat—a complete monopoly of the air, with an absolute suppression of all political rights—no other outcomes are possible than slavery or violent, physical revolution. As I have made Gabriel Armstrong say: “The masters would have it so. Academic discussion becomes absurd, in the face of plutocratic savagery. And in a case of self-defense, no measures are unjustifiable.”

I believe in political action. I hope for a peaceful and bloodless revolution. But if that be impossible, then by all means let us have revolution in its other sense. And with the hope that this book may perhaps revive some fainting spirit or renew the vision of emancipation in some soul where it has dimmed, I give “The Air Trust” to the workers of America and of the world.

—George Allan England.

Boston, Mass., November 1, 1915.

CHAPTER I.

THE BIRTH OF AN IDEA.

Sunk far back in the huge leather cushions of his morris chair, old Isaac Flint was thinking, thinking hard. Between narrowed lids, his hard, gray eyes were blinking at the morning sunlight that poured into his private office, high up in the great building he had reared on Wall Street. From his thin lips now and then issued a coil of smoke from the costly cigar he was consuming. His bony legs were crossed, and one foot twitched impatiently. Now and again he tugged at his white mustache. A frown creased his hard brow; and, as he pondered, something of the glitter of a snake seemed reflected in his pupils.

“Not enough,” he muttered, harshly. “It’s not enough—there must be more, more, more! Some way must be found. Must be, and shall be!”

The sunlight of early spring, glad and warm over Manhattan, brought no message of cheer to the Billionaire. It bore no news of peace and joy to him. Its very brightness, as it flooded the metropolis and mellowed his luxurious inner office, seemed to offend the master of the world. And presently he arose, walked to the window and made as though to lower the shade. But for a moment he delayed this action. Standing there at the window, he peered out. Far below him, the restless, swarming life of the huge city crept and grovelled. Insects that were men and women crowded the clefts that were streets. Long lines of cars, toy-like, crept along the “L” structures. As far as the eye could reach, tufted plumes of smoke and steam wafted away on the April breeze. The East River glistened in the sunlight, its bosom vexed by myriad craft, by ocean liners, by tugs and barges, by grim warships, by sailing-vessels, whose canvas gleamed, by snow-white fruitboats from the tropics, by hulls from every port. Over the bridges, long slow lines of traffic crawled. And, far beyond to the dim horizon, stretched out the hives of men, till the blue depths of distance swallowed all in haze.

And as Flint gazed on this marvel, all created and maintained by human toil, by sweat and skill and tireless patience of the workers, a hard smile curved his lips.

“All mine, more or less,” said he to himself, puffing deep on his cigar. “All yielding tribute to me, even as the mines and mills and factories I cannot see yield tribute! Even as the oil-wells, the pipe-lines, the railroads and the subways yield—even as the whole world yields it. All this labor, all this busy strife, I have a hand in. The millions eat and drink and buy and sell; and I take toll of it—yet it is not enough. I hold them in my hand, yet the hand cannot close, completely. And until it does, it is not enough! No, not enough for me!”

He pondered a moment, standing there musing at the window, surveying “all the wonders of the earth” that in its fulness, in that year of grace, 1921, bore tribute to him who toiled not, neither spun; and though he smiled, the smile was bitter.

“Not enough, yet,” he reflected. “And how—how shall I close my grip? How shall I master all this, absolutely and completely, till it be mine in truth? Through light? The mob can do with less, if I squeeze too hard! Through food? They can economize! Transportation? No, the traffic will bear only a certain load! How, then? What is it they all must have, or die, that I can control? What universal need, vital to rich and poor alike? To great and small? What absolute necessity which shall make my rivals in the Game as much my vassals as the meanest slave in my steel mills? What can it be? For power I must have! Like Caesar, who preferred to be first in the smallest village, rather than be second at Rome, I can and will have no competitor. I must rule all, or the game is worthless! But how?”

Almost as in answer to his mental question, a sudden gust of air swayed the curtain and brushed it against his face. And, on the moment, inspiration struck him.

“What?” he exclaimed suddenly, his brows wrinkling, a strange and eager light burning in his hard eyes. “Eh, what? Can it—could it be possible? My God! If so—if it might be—the world would be my toy, to play with as I like!

“If that could happen, kings and emperors would have to cringe and crawl to me, like my hordes of serfs all over this broad land. Statesmen and diplomats, president and judges, lawmakers and captains of industry, all would fall into bondage; and for the first time in history one man would rule the earth, completely and absolutely—and that man would be Isaac Flint!”

Staggered by the very immensity of the bold thought, so vast that for a moment he could not realize it in its entirety, the Billionaire fell to pacing the floor of his office.

His cigar now hung dead and unnoticed between his thinly cruel lips. His hands were gripped behind his bent back, as he paced the priceless Shiraz rug, itself having cost the wage of a hundred workmen for a year’s hard, grinding toil. And as he trod, up and down, up and down the rich apartments, a slow, grim smile curved his mouth.

“What editor could withstand me, then?” he was thinking. “What clergyman could raise his voice against my rule? Ah! Their ‘high principles’ they prate of so eloquently, their crack-brained economics, their rebellions and their strikes—the dogs!—would soon bow down before that power! Men have starved for stiff-necked opposition’s sake, and still may do so—but with my hand at the throat of the world, with the world’s very life-breath in my grip, what then? Submission, or—ha! well, we shall see, we shall see!”

A subtle change came over his face, which had been growing paler for some minutes. Impatiently he flung away his cigar, and, turning to his desk, opened a drawer, took out a little vial and uncorked it. He shook out two small white tablets, on the big sheet of plate-glass that covered the desk, swallowed them eagerly, and replaced the vial in the desk again. For be it known that, master of the world though Flint was, he too had a master—morphine. Long years he had bowed beneath its whip, the veriest slave of the insidious drug. No three hours could pass, without that dosage. His immense native will power still managed to control the dose and not increase it; but years ago he had abandoned hope of ever diminishing or ceasing it. And now he thought no more of it than of—well, of breathing.

Breathing! As he stood up again and drew a deep breath, under the reviving influence of the drug, his inspiration once more recurred to him.

“Breath!” said he. “Breath is life. Without food and drink and shelter, men can live a while. Even without water, for some days. But without air—they die inevitably and at once. And if I make the air my own, then I am master of all life!”

And suddenly he burst into a harsh, jangling laugh.

“Air!” he cried exultantly, “An Air Trust! By God in Heaven, it can be! It shall be!—it must!”

His mind, somewhat sluggish before he had taken the morphine, now was working clearly and accurately again, with that fateful and undeviating precision which had made him master of billions of dollars and uncounted millions of human lives; which had woven his network of possession all over the United States, Europe and Asia and even Africa; which had drawn, as into a spider’s web, the world’s railroads and steamship lines, its coal and copper and steel, its oil and grain and beef, its every need—save air!

And now, keen on the track of this last great inspiration, the Billionaire strode to his revolving book-case, whirled it round and from its shelves jerked a thick volume, a smaller book and some pamphlets.

“Let’s have some facts!” said he, flinging them upon his desk, and seating himself before it in a costly chair of teak. “Once I get an outline of the facts and what I want to do, then my subordinates can carry out my plans. Before all, I must have facts!”

For half an hour he thumbed his references, noting all the salient points mentally, without taking a single note; for, so long as the drug still acted, his brain was an instrument of unsurpassed keenness and accuracy.

A sinister figure he made, as he sat there poring intently over the technical books before him, contrasting strangely with the beauty and the luxury of the office. On the mantel, over the fireplace of Carrara marble, ticked a Louis XIV clock, the price of which might have saved the lives of a thousand workingmen’s children during the last summer’s torment. Gold-woven tapestries from Rouen covered the walls, whereon hung etchings and rare prints. Old Flint’s office, indeed, had more the air of an art gallery than a place where grim plots and deals innumerable had been put through, lawmakers corrupted past counting, and the destinies of nations bent beneath his corded, lean and nervous hand. And now, as the Billionaire sat there thinking, smiling a smile that boded no good to the world, the soft spring air that had inspired his great plan still swayed the silken curtains.

Of a sudden, he slammed the big book shut, that he was studying, and rose to his feet with a hard laugh—the laugh that had presaged more than one calamity to mankind. Beneath the sweep of his mustache one caught the glint of a gold tooth, sharp and unpleasant.

A moment he stood there, keen, eager, dominant, his hands gripping the edge of the desk till the big knuckles whitened. He seemed the embodiment of harsh and unrelenting Power—power over men and things, over their laws and institutions; power which, like Alexander’s, sought only new worlds to conquer; power which found all metes and bounds too narrow.

“Power!” he whispered, as though to voice the inner inclining of the picture. “Life, air, breath—the very breath of the world in my hands—power absolutely, at last!”

CHAPTER II.

THE PARTNERS.

Then, as was his habit, translating ideas into immediate action, he strode to a door at the far end of the office, flung it open and said:

“See here a minute, Wally!”

“Busy!” came an answering voice, from behind a huge roll-top desk.

“Of course! But drop it, drop it. I’ve got news for you.”

“Urgent?” asked the voice, coldly.

“Very. Come in here, a minute. I’ve got to unload!”

From behind the big desk rose the figure of a man about five and forty, sandy-haired, long-faced and sallow, with a pair of the coldest, fishiest eyes—eyes set too close together—that ever looked out of a flat and ugly face. A man precisely dressed, something of a fop, with just a note of the “sport” in his get-up; a man to fear, a man cool, wary and dangerous—Maxim Waldron, in fact, the Billionaire’s right-hand man and confidant. Waldron, for some time affianced to his eldest daughter. Waldron the arch-corruptionist; Waldron, who never yet had been “caught with the goods,” but who had financed scores of industrial and political campaigns, with Flint’s money and his own; Waldron, the smooth, the suave, the perilous.

“What now?” asked he, fixing his pale blue eyes on the Billionaire’s face.

“Come in here, and I’ll tell you.”

“Right!” And Waldron, brushing an invisible speck of dust from the sleeve of his checked coat, strolled rather casually into the Billionaire’s office.

Flint closed the door.

“Well?” asked Waldron, with something of a drawl. “What’s the excitement?”

“See here,” began the great financier, stimulated by the drug. “We’ve been wasting our time, all these years, with our petty monopolies of beef and coal and transportation and all such trifles!”

“So?” And Waldron drew from his pocket a gold cigar-case, monogrammed with diamonds. “Trifles, eh?” He carefully chose a perfecto. “Perhaps; but we’ve managed to rub along, eh? Well, if these are trifles, what’s on?”

“Air!”

“Air?” Waldron’s match poised a moment, as with a slight widening of the pale blue eyes he surveyed his partner. “Why—er—what do you mean, Flint?”

“The Air Trust!”

“Eh?” And Waldron lighted his cigar.

“A monopoly of breathing privileges!”

“Ha! Ha!” Waldron’s laugh was as mirthful as a grave-yard raven’s croak. “Nothing to it, old man. Forget it, and stick to—”

“Of course! I might have expected as much from you!” retorted the Billionaire tartly. “You’ve got neither imagination nor—”

“Nor any fancy for wild-goose chases,” said Waldron, easily, as he sat down in the big leather chair. “Air? Hot air, Flint! No, no, it won’t do! Nothing to it nothing at all.”

For a moment the Billionaire regarded him with a look of intense irritation. His thin lips moved, as though to emit some caustic answer; but he managed to keep silence. The two men looked at each other, a long minute; then Flint began again:

“Listen, now, and keep still! The idea came to me not an hour ago, this morning, looking over the city, here. We’ve got a finger on everything but the atmosphere, the most important thing of all. If we could control that—”

“Of course, I understand,” interrupted the other, blowing a ring of smoke. “Unlimited power and so on. Looks very nice, and all. Only, it can’t be done. Air’s too big, too fluid, too universal. Human powers can’t control it, any more than the ocean. Talk about monopolizing the Atlantic, if you will, Flint. But for heaven’s sake, drop—”

“Can’t be done, eh?” exclaimed Flint, warmly, sitting down on the desk-top and levelling a big-jointed forefinger at his partner. “That’s what every new idea has had to meet. It’s no argument! People scoffed at the idea of gas lighting when it was new. Called it ‘burning smoke,’ and made merry over it. That was as recently as 1832. But ten years later, gas-illumination was in full sway.

“Electric lighting met the same objection. And remember the objection to the telephone? When Congress, in 1843, granted Morse an appropriation of $30,000 to run the first telegraph line from Baltimore to Washington, one would-be humorist in that supremely intelligent body tried to introduce an amendment that part of the sum should be spent in surveying a railroad to the moon! And—”

“Granted,” put in Waldron, “that my objection is futile, just what’s your idea?”

“This!” And Flint stabbed at him with his forefinger, while the other financier regarded him with a fishily amused eye. “Every human being in this world—and there are 1,900,000,000 of them now!—is breathing, on the average, 16 cubic feet of air every hour, or about 400 a day. The total amount of oxygen actually absorbed in the 24 hours by each person, is about 17 cubic feet, or over 30 billions of cubic feet of oxygen, each day, in the entire world. Get that?”

“Well?” drawled the other.

“Don’t you see?” snapped Flint, irritably. “Imagine that we extract oxygen from the air. Then—”

“You might as well try to dip up the ocean with a spoon,” said Waldron, “as try to vitiate the atmosphere of the whole world, by any means whatsoever! But even if you could, what then?”

“Look here!” exclaimed the Billionaire. “It only needs a reduction of 10 per cent. in the atmospheric oxygen to make the air so bad that nobody can breathe it without discomfort and pain. Take out any more and people will die! We don’t have to monopolize all the oxygen, but only a very small fraction, and the world will come gasping to us, like so many fish out of water, falling over each other to buy!”

“Possibly. But the details?”

“I haven’t worked them out yet, naturally. I needn’t. Herzog will take care of those. He and his staff. That’s what they’re for. Shall we put it up to him? What? My God, man! Think of the millions in it—the billions! The power! The—”

“Of course, of course!” interposed Waldron, calmly, eyeing his smoke. “Don’t get excited, Flint. Rome wasn’t built in a day. There may be something in this; possibly there may be the germ of an idea. I don’t say it’s impossible. It looks visionary to me; but then, as you well say, so has every new idea always looked. Let me think, now; let me think.”

“Go ahead and think!” growled the Billionaire. “Think and be hanged to you! I’m going to act!”

Waldron vouchsafed no reply, but merely eyed his partner with cold interest, as though he were some biological specimen under a lens, and smoked the while.

Flint, however, turned to his telephone and pulled it toward him, over the big sheet of plate glass. Impatiently he took off the receiver and held it up to his ear.

“Hello, hello! 2438 John!” he exclaimed, in answer to the query of “Number, please?”

Silence, a moment, while Waldron slowly drew at his cigar and while the Billionaire tugged with impatience at his gray mustache.

“Hello! That you, Herzog?”

“All right. I want to see you at once. Immediately, understand?”

“Very well. And say, Herzog!”

“Bring whatever literature you have on liquid air, nitrogen extraction from the atmosphere, and so on. Understand? And come at once!”

“That’s all! Good-bye!”

Smiling dourly, with satisfaction, he hung up and shoved the telephone away again, then turned to his still reflecting partner, who had now hoisted his patent leather boots to the window sill and seemed absorbed in regarding their gloss through a blue veil of nicotine.

“Herzog,” announced the Billionaire, “will be here in ten minutes, and we’ll get down to business.”

“So?” languidly commented the immaculate Waldron. “Well, much as I’d like to flatter your astuteness, Flint, I’m bound to say you’re barking up a false trail, this time! Beef, yes. Steel, yes. Railroads, steamships, coal, iron, wheat, yes. All tangible, all concrete, all susceptible of being weighed, measured, put in figures, fenced and bounded, legislated about and so on and so forth. But air—!”

He snapped his manicured fingers, to show his well-considered contempt for the Billionaire’s scheme, and, throwing away his smoked-out cigar, chose a fresh one.

Flint made no reply, but with an angry grunt flung a look of scorn at the calm and placid one. Then, furtively opening his desk drawer, he once more sought the little vial and took two more pellets—an action which Waldron, without moving his head, complacently observed in a heavily-bevelled mirror that hung between the windows.

“Air,” murmured Waldron, suavely. “Hot air, Flint?”

No answer, save another grunt and the slamming of the desk-drawer.

And thus, in silence, the two men, masters of the world, awaited the coming of the practical scientist, the proletarian, on whom they both, at last analysis, had to rely for most of their results.

CHAPTER III.

THE BAITING OF HERZOG.

Herzog was not long in arriving. To be summoned in haste by Isaac Flint, and to delay, was unthinkable. For eighteen years the chemist had lickspittled to the Billionaire. Keen though his mind was, his character and stamina were those of a jellyfish; and when the Master took snuff, as the saying is, Herzog never failed to sneeze.

He therefore appeared, now, in some ten minutes—a fat, rubicund, spectacled man, with a cast in his left eye and two fingers missing, to remind him of early days in experimental work on explosives. Under his arm he carried several tomes and pamphlets; and so, bowing first to one financier, then to the other, he stood there on the threshold, awaiting his masters’ pleasure.

“Come in, Herzog,” directed Flint. “Got some material there on liquid air, and nitrogen, and so on?”

“Yes, sir. Just what is it you want, sir?”

“Sit down, and I’ll tell you,”—for the chemist, hat in hand, ventured not to seat himself unbidden in presence of these plutocrats.

Herzog, murmuring thanks for Flint’s gracious permission, deposited his derby on top of the revolving book-case, sat down tentatively on the edge of a chair and clutched his books as though they had been so many shields against the redoubted power of his masters.

“See here, Herzog,” Flint fired at him, without any preliminaries or beating around the bush, “what do you know about the practical side of extracting nitrogen from atmospheric air? Or extracting oxygen, in liquid form? Can it be done—that is, on a commercial basis?”

“Why, no, sir—yes, that is—perhaps. I mean—”

“What the devil do you mean?” snapped Flint, while Waldron smiled maliciously as he smoked. “Yes, or no? I don’t pay you to muddle things. I pay you to know, and to tell me! Get that? Now, how about it?”

“Well, sir—hm!—the fact is,” and the unfortunate chemist blinked through his glasses with extreme uneasiness, “the fact of the matter is that the processes involved haven’t been really perfected, as yet. Beginnings have been made, but no large-scale work has been done, so far. Still, the principle—”

“Is sound?”

“Yes, sir. I imagine—”

“Cut that! You aren’t paid for imagining!” interrupted the Billionaire, stabbing at him with that characteristic gesture. “Just what do you know about it? No technicalities, mind! Essentials, that’s all, and in a few words!”

“Well, sir,” answered Herzog, plucking up a little courage under this pointed goading, “so far as the fixation of atmospheric nitrogen goes, more progress has been made in England and Scandinavia, than here. They’re working on it, over there, to obtain cheap and plentiful fertilizer from the air. Nitrogen can be obtained from the air, even now, and made into fertilizers even cheaper than the Chili saltpeter. Oxygen is liberated as a by-product, and—”

“Oh, it is, eh? And could it be saved? In liquid form for instance?”

“I think so, sir. The Siemens & Halske interests, in Germany, are doing it already, on a limited scale. In Norway and Austria, nitrogen has been manufactured from air, for some years.”

“On a paying, commercial basis?” demanded Flint, while Waldron, now a trifle less scornful, seemed to listen with more interest as his eyes rested on the rotund form of the scientist.

“Yes, sir, quite so,” answered Herzog. “It’s commercially feasible, though not a very profitable business at best. The gas is utilized in chemical combination with a substantial base, and—”

“No matter about that, just yet,” interrupted Flint. “We can have details later. Do you know of any such business as yet, in the United States?”

“Well, sir, there’s a plant building at Great Falls, South Carolina, for the purpose. It is to run by waterpower and will develop 5000 H.P.”

“Hear that, Waldron?” demanded the Billionaire. “It’s already beginning even here! But not one of these plants is working for what I see as the prime possibility. No imagination, no grasp on the subject! No wonder most inventors and scientists die poor! They incubate ideas and then lack the warmth to hatch them into general application. It takes men like us, Wally—practical men—to turn the trick!” He spoke a bit rapidly, almost feverishly, under the influence of the subtle drug. “Now if we take hold of this game, why, we can shake the world as it has never yet been shaken! Eh, Waldron? What do you think now?”

Waldron only grunted, non-committally. Flint with a hard glance at his unresponsive partner, once more turned to Herzog.

“See here, now,” directed he. “What’s the best process now in use?”

“For what, sir?” ventured the timid chemist.

“For the simultaneous production of nitrogen and oxygen, from the atmosphere!”

“Well, sir,” he answered, deprecatingly, as though taking a great liberty even in informing his master on a point the master had expressly asked about, “there are three processes. But all operate only on a small scale.”

“Who ever told you I wanted to work on a large scale?” demanded Flint, savagely.

“I—er—inferred—beg pardon, sir—I—” And Herzog quite lost himself and floundered hopelessly, while his mismated eyes wandered about the room as though seeking the assurance he so sadly lacked.

“Confine yourself to answering what I ask you,” directed Flint, crisply. “You’re not paid to infer. You’re paid to answer questions on chemistry, and to get results. Remember that!”

“Yes, sir,” meekly answered the chemist, while Waldron smiled with cynical amusement. He enjoyed nothing so delightedly as any grilling of an employee, whether miner, railroad man, clerk, ship’s captain or what-not. This baiting, by Flint, was a rare treat to him.

“Go on,” commanded the Billionaire, in a badgering tone. “What are the processes?” He eyed Herzog as though the man had been an ox, a dog or even some inanimate object, coldly and with narrow-lidded condescension. To him, in truth, men were no more than Shelley’s “plow or sword or spade” for his own purpose—things to serve him and to be ruled—or broken—as best served his ends. “Go on! Tell me what you know; and no more!”

“Yes, sir,” ventured Herzog. “There are three processes to extract nitrogen and oxygen from air. One is by means of what the German scientists call Kalkstickstoff, between calcium carbide and nitrogen, and the reaction-symbols are—”

“No matter,” Flint waived him, promptly. “I don’t care for formulas or details. What I want is results and general principles. Any other way to extract these substances, in commercial quantities, from the air we breathe?”

“Two others. But one of these operates at a prohibitive cost. The other—”

“Yes, yes. What is it?” Flint slid off the edge of the table and walked over to Herzog; stood there in front of him, and bored down at him with eager eyes, the pupils contracted by morphine, but very bright. “What’s the best way?”

“With the electric arc, sir,” answered the chemist, mopping his brow. This grilling method reminded him of what he had heard of “Third Degree” torments. “That’s the best method, sir.”

“Now in use, anywhere?”

“In Notodden, Norway. They have firebrick furnaces, you understand, sir, with an alternating current of 5000 volts between water-cooled copper electrodes. The resulting arc is spread by powerful electro-magnets, so.” And he illustrated with his eight acid-stained fingers. “Spread out like a disk or sphere of flame, of electric fire, you see.”

“Yes, and what then?” demanded Flint, while his partner, forgetting now to smile, sat there by the window scrutinizing him. One saw, now, the terribly keen and prehensile intellect at work under the mask of assumed foppishness and jesting indifference—the quality, for the most part masked, which had earned Waldron the nickname of “Tiger” in Wall Street.

“What then?” repeated Flint, once more levelling that potent forefinger at the sweating Herzog.

“Well, sir, that gives a large reactive surface, through which the air is driven by powerful rotary fans. At the high temperature of the electric arc in air, the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen dissociate into their atoms. The air comes out of the arc, charged with about one per cent. of nitric oxide, and after that—”

“Jump the details, idiot! Can’t you move faster than a paralytic snail? What’s the final result?”

“The result is, sir,” answered Herzog, meek and cowed under this harrying, “that calcium nitrate is produced, a very excellent fertilizer. It’s a form of nitrogen, you see, directly obtained from air.”

“At what cost?”

“One ton of fixed nitrogen in that form costs about $150 or $160.”

“Indeed?” commented Flint. “The same amount, combined in Chile saltpeter, comes to—?”

“A little over $300, sir.”

“Hear that, Wally?” exclaimed the Billionaire, turning to his now interested associate. “Even if this idea never goes a step farther, there’s a gold mine in just the production of fertilizer from air! But, after all, that will only be a by-product. It’s the oxygen we’re after, and must have!”

He faced Herzog again.

“Is any oxygen liberated, during the process?” he demanded.

“At one stage, yes, sir. But in the present process, it is absorbed, also.”

Flint’s eyebrows contracted nervously. For a moment he stood thinking, while Herzog eyed him with trepidation, and Waldron, almost forgetting to smoke, waited developments with interest. The Billionaire, however, wasted but scant time in consideration. It was not money now, he lusted for, but power. Money was, to him, no longer any great desideratum. At most, it could now mean no more to him than a figure on a check-book or a page of statistics in his private memoranda. But power, unlimited, indisputable power over the whole earth and the fulness thereof, power which none might dispute, power before which all humanity must bow—God! the lust of it now gripped and shook his soul.

Paling a little, but with eyes ablaze, he faced the anxious scientist.

“Herzog! See here!”

“Yes, sir?”

“I’ve got a job for you, understand?”

“Yes, sir. What is it?”

“A big job, and one on which your entire future depends. Put it through, and I’ll do well by you. Fail, and by the Eternal, I’ll break you! I can, and will, mark that! Do you get me?”

“I—yes, sir—that is, I’ll do my best, and—”

“Listen! You go to work at once, immediately, understand? Work out for me some process, some practicable method by which the nitrogen and oxygen can both be collected in large quantities from the air. Everything in my laboratories at Oakwood Heights is at your disposal. Money’s no object. Nothing counts, now, but results!

“I want the process all mapped out and ready for me, in its essential outlines, two weeks from today. If it isn’t—” His gesture was a menace. “If it is—well, you’ll be suitably rewarded. And no leaks, now. Not a word of this to any one, understand? If it gets out, you know what I can do to you, and will! Remember Roswell; remember Parker Hayes. They let news get to the Dillingham-Saunders people, about the new Tezzoni radio-electric system—and one’s dead, now, a suicide; the other’s in Sing-Sing for eighteen years. Remember that—and keep your mouth shut!”

“Yes, sir. I understand.”

“All right, then. A fortnight from today, report to me here. And mind you, have something to report, or—!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well! Now, go!”

Thus dismissed, Herzog gathered together his books and papers, blinked a moment with those peculiar wall-eyes of his, arose and, bowing first to Flint and then to the keenly-watching Waldron, backed out of the office.

When the door had closed behind him, Flint turned to his partner with a nervous laugh.

“That’s the way to get results, eh?” he exclaimed. “No dilly-dallying and no soft soap; but just lay the lash right on, hard—they jump then, the vermin! Results! That fellow will work his head off, the next two weeks; and there’ll be something doing when he comes again. You’ll see!”

Waldron laughed nonchalantly. Once more the mask of indifference had fallen over him, veiling the keen, incisive interest he had shown during the interview.

“Something doing, yes,” he drawled, puffing his cigar to a glow. “Only I advise you to choose your men. Some day you’ll try that on a real man—one of the rough-necks you know, and—”

Flint snapped his fingers contemptuously, gazed at Waldron a moment with unwinking eyes and tugged at his mustache.

“When I need advice on handling men, I’ll ask for it,” he rapped out. Then, glancing at the Louis XIV clock: “Past the time for that C.P.S. board-meeting, Wally. No more of this, now. We’ll talk it over at the Country Club, tonight; but for the present, let’s dismiss it from our minds.”

“Right!” answered the other, and arose, yawning, as though the whole subject were of but indifferent interest to him. “It’s all moonshine, Flint. All a pipe-dream. Defoe’s philosophers, who spent their lives trying to extract sunshine from cucumbers, never entertained any more fantastic notion than this of yours. However, it’s your funeral, not mine. You’re paying for it. I decline to put in any funds for any such purpose. Amuse yourself; you’ve got to settle the bill.”

Flint smiled sourly, his gold tooth glinting, but made no answer.

“Come along,” said his partner, moving toward the door. “They’re waiting for us, already, at the board meeting. And there’s big business coming up, today—that strike situation, you remember. Slade’s going to be on deck. We’ve got to decide, at once, whether or not we’re going to turn him loose on the miners, to smash that gang of union thugs and Socialist fanatics, and do it right. That’s a game worth playing, Flint; but this Air Trust vagary of yours—stuff and nonsense!”

Flint, for all reply, merely cast a strange look at his partner, with those strongly-contracted pupils of his; and so the two vultures of prey betook themselves to the board room where already, round the long rosewood table, Walter Slade of the Cosmos Detective Company was laying out his strike-breaking plans to the attentive captains of industry.

CHAPTER IV.

AN INTERLOPER.

On the eleventh day after this interview between the two men who, between them, practically held the whole world in their grasp, Herzog telephoned up from Oakwood Heights and took the liberty of informing Flint that his experiments had reached a point of such success that he prayed Flint would condescend to visit the laboratories in person.

Flint, after some reflection, decided he would so condescend; and forthwith ordered his limousine from his private garage on William Street. Thereafter he called Waldron on the ‘phone, at his Fifth Avenue address.

“Mr. Waldron is not up, yet, sir,” a carefully-modulated voice answered over the wire. “Any message I can give him, sir?”

“Oh, hello! That you, Edwards?” Flint demanded, recognizing the suave tones of his partner’s valet.

“Yes, sir.”

“All right. Tell Waldron I’ll call for him in half an hour with the limousine. And mind, now, I want him to be up and dressed! We’re going down to Staten Island. Got that?”

“Yes, sir. Any other message, sir?”

“No. But be sure you get him up, for me! Good-bye!”

Thirty minutes later, Flint’s chauffeur opened the door of the big limousine, in front of the huge Renaissance pile that Waldron’s millions had raised on land which had cost him more than as though he had covered it with double eagles; and Flint himself ascended the steps of Pentelican marble. The limousine, its varnish and silver-plate flashing in the bright spring sun, stood by the curb, purring softly to itself with all six cylinders, a thing of matchless beauty and rare cost. The chauffeur, on the driver’s seat, did not even bother to shut off the gas, but let the engine run, regardless. To have stopped it would have meant some trifling exertion, in starting again; and since Flint never considered such details as a few gallons of gasoline, why should he care? Lighting a Turkish cigarette, this aristocrat of labor lolled on the padded leather and indifferently—with more of contempt than of interest—regarded a swarm of iron-workers, masons and laborers at work on a new building across the avenue.

Flint, meanwhile, had entered the great mansion, its bronze doors—ravished from the Palazzo Guelfo at Venice—having swung inward to admit him, with noiseless majesty. Ignoring the doorman, he addressed himself to Edwards, who stood in the spacious, mahogany-panelled hall, washing both hands with imaginary soap.

“Waldron up, yet, Edwards?”

“No, sir. He—er—I have been unable—”

“The devil! Where is he?”

“In his apartments, sir.”

“Take me up!”

“He said, sir,” ventured Edwards, in his smoothest voice. “He said—”

“I don’t give a damn what he said! Take me up, at once!”

“Yes, sir. Immediately, sir!” And he gestured suavely toward the elevator.

Flint strode down the hall, indifferent to the Kirmanshah rugs, the rare mosaic floor and stained-glass windows, the Parian fountain and the Azeglio tapestries that hung suspended up along the stairway—all old stories to him and as commonplace as rickety odds and ends of furniture might be to any toiler “cribbed, cabin’d and confined” in fetid East Side tenement or squalid room on Hester Street.

The elevator boy bowed before his presence. Edwards hesitated to enter the private elevator, with this world-master; but Flint beckoned him to come along. And so, borne aloft by the smooth force of the electric motor, they presently reached the upper floor where “Tiger” Waldron laired in stately splendor, like the nabob that he was.

Without ceremony, Flint pushed forward into the bed-chamber of the mighty one—a chamber richly finished in panels of the rare sea-grape tree, brought from Pacific isles at great cost of money and some expenditure of human lives; but this latter item was, of course, beneath consideration.

By the softened light which entered through rich curtains, one saw the famous frieze of De Lussac, that banded the apartment, over the panelling—the frieze of Bacchantes, naked and unashamed, revelling with Satyrs in an abandon that bespoke the age when the world was young. Their voluptuous forms entwined with clustering grapes and leaves, they poured tipsy libations of red wine from golden chalices; while old Silenus, god of drink, astride a donkey, applauded with maudlin joy.

Flint, however, had no eyes for this scene which would have gladdened a voluptuary’s heart—and which, for that reason was dear to Waldron—but walked toward the huge, four-posted bed where Wally himself, now rather paler than usual, with bloodshot eyes, was lying. This bed, despite the fact that it had been transported all the way from Tours, France, and that it once had belonged to an archbishop, had only too often witnessed its owner’s insomnia.

“Hm! You’re a devil of a man to keep an appointment, aren’t you?” Flint sneered at the master of the house. “Eleven o’clock, and not up, yet!”

“Pardon me for remarking, my dear Flint,” replied Waldron, stretching himself between the silken sheets and reaching for a cigarette, “that the appointment was not of my making. Also that I was up, last night—this morning, rather—till three-thirty. And in the next place, that scoundrel Hazeltine, trimmed me out of eighty-six thousand in four hours—”

“Roulette again, you idiot?” demanded Flint.

“And in conclusion,” said Wally, “that the bigness of my head and the brown taste in my mouth are such as no ‘soda and sermons, the morning after’ can possibly alleviate. So you understand my dalliance.

“Damn those workmen!” he exclaimed, with sudden irritation, as a louder chattering of pneumatic riveters from the new building all at once clattered in at the window. “A free country, eh? And men are permitted to make that kind of a racket when a fellow wants to sleep! By God, if I—”

“Drop that, Wally, and get up!” commanded Flint. “There’s no time for this kind of thing today. Herzog has just informed me his experiments have brought results. We’re going down to Oakwood Heights to sea a few things for ourselves. And the quicker you get dressed and in your right mind, the better. Come along, I tell you!”

“Still chasing sunbeams from cucumbers, eh?” drawled the magnate, inhaling cigarette smoke and blowing a thin cloud toward the wanton Bacchantes. He affected indifference, but his dull eyes brightened a trifle in his wan face, deep-lined by the savage dissipations of the previous night. “And you insist on dragging me out on the same fatuous errand?”

“Don’t be an ass!” snapped the Billionaire. “Get up and come along. The sooner we have this thing under way, the better.”

“All right, anything to oblige,” conceded Waldron, inwardly stirred by an interest he took good care not to divulge in word or look. “Give me just time for a cold plunge, a few minutes with my masseur and my barber, a bite to eat and—”

Flint laid hold on his partner and shook him roughly.

“Move, you sluggard!” he commanded. And Tiger Waldron obeyed.

Forty-five minutes later, the two financiers were speeding down the asphalt of the avenue at a good round clip. Flint’s gleaming car formed one unit of the never-ending procession of motors which, day and night, year in and year out, spin unceasingly along the great, hard, splendid, cruel thoroughfare.

“I tell you,” Flint was asserting as they swung into Broadway, at Twenty-third Street, and headed for South Ferry, “I tell you, Wally, the thing is growing vaster and more potent every moment. The longer I look at it, the huger its possibilities loom up! With air under our control, as a source of manufacturing alone, we can pull down perfectly inconceivable fortunes. We shan’t have to send anywhere for our raw material. It will come to us; it’s everywhere. No cost for transportation, to begin with.

“With oxygen, nitrogen and liquid air as products, think of the possibilities, will you? Not an ice-plant in the country could compete with us, in the refrigerating line. With liquid air, we could sweep that market clean. By installing it on our fruit cars and boats, and our beef cars, the saving effected in many ways would run to millions. The sale of nitrogen, for fertilizer, would net us billions. And, above all, the control of the world’s air supply, for breathing, would make us the absolute, undisputed masters of mankind!

“We’d have the world by the windpipe. Its very life-breath would be at our disposal. Ha! What about revolution, then? What about popular discontent, and stiff-necked legislators, and cranky editors? What about commercial and financial rivals? What about these damned Socialists, with their brass-lunged bazoo, howling about monopoly and capitalism and all the rest of it? Eh, what? Just one squeeze,” here Flint closed his corded, veinous fingers, “just one tightening of the fist, and—all over! We win, hands down!”

“Like shutting the wind off from a runaway horse, eh?” suggested Waldron, squinting at his cigar as though to hide the involuntary gleam of light that sparkled in his narrow-set eyes.

“Precisely!” assented Flint, smiling his gold-toothed smile. “The wildest bolter has got to stop, or fall dead, once you close his nostrils. That’s what we’ll do to the world, Wally. We’ll get it by the throat—and there you are!”

“Yes, there we are,” repeated Waldron, “but—”

“But what, now?”

Waldron did not answer, for a moment, but squinted up at the tall buildings, temples of Mammon and of Greed, filled from pave to cornice with toiling, sweated hordes of men and women, all laboring for Capitalism; many of them, directly or indirectly, for him. Then, as the limousine slowed at Spring Street, to let a cross-town car pass—a car whose earnings he and Flint both shared, just as they shared those of every surface and subway and “L” car in the vast metropolis—he said:

“Have you weighed the consequences carefully, Flint? Quite carefully? This thing of cornering all the oxygen is a pretty big proposition. Do you think you really ought to undertake it?”

“Why not?”

“Have you considered the frightful suffering and loss of life it might entail? Almost certainly would entail? Are you quite sure you want to take the world by the throat and—and choke it? For money?”

“No, not for money, Waldron. We’re both staggering under money, as it is. But power! Ah, that’s different!”

“I know,” admitted Waldron. “But ought we—you—to attempt this, even for the sake of universal power? Your plan contemplates a monopoly such that everybody who refused or was unable to buy your product would, at best, have to get along with vitiated air, and at worst would have to stifle. Do you really think we ought to undertake this?”

Keenly he eyed Flint, as he thus sounded the elder man’s inhuman determination. Flint, fathoming nothing of his purpose, retorted with some heat:

“Ha! Getting punctilious, all at once, are you? Talk ethics, eh? Where were your scruples, a year ago, when people were paying 25 cents a loaf for bread, because of that big wheat pool you put through? How about the oil you’ve just lately helped me boost by a 20 per cent. increase? And when the papers—though mostly those infernal Socialist or Anarchist papers, or whatever they were—shouted that old men and women were freezing in attics, last winter, what then? Did you vote to arbitrate the D.K. coal strike? Not by a jugful! You stood shoulder to shoulder with me, then, Wally, while now—!”

“It’s a bit different, now,” interposed “Tiger,” with an evil smile, still leading his partner along. “Since then I’ve had the—ah—the extreme happiness to become engaged to your daughter, Catherine. New thoughts have entered my mind. I’ve experienced a—a—”

“You quitter!” burst out Flint. “No, by God! you aren’t going to put this thing over on me. I’ll have no quitter for my son-in-law! Wally, I’m astonished at you. Astonished and disappointed. You’re not yourself, this morning. That eighty-six thousand you dropped last night, has shaken your heart. Come, come, pull together! Where’s your nerve, man? Where’s your nerve?”

Waldron answered nothing. In silence the partners watched the press of traffic, each busy with his own thoughts, Waldron waiting for Flint to reopen fire on him, and the Billionaire decided to say no more till his associate should make some move. Thus the limousine reached the Staten Island ferry, that glorious monument of municipal ownership wrecked by Tammany grafting. In silence they smoked while the car rolled down the incline and out onto the huge ferry boat. Then, as the crowded craft got under way, a minute later, both men left the car and strolled to the rail to watch the glittering sparkle of the sunlight on the harbor; the teeming commerce of the port; the creeping liners and busy tugs; the towering figure of Liberty, her flameless torch held far aloft in mockery.

Suddenly Waldron spoke.

“You can’t do it, I tell you!” said he, waving an eloquent hand toward the sky. “It’s too big, the air is, as I said before. Too damned big! Own coal and copper, if you will, and steel and ships, here; own those buildings back there,” with a gesture at the frowning line of skyscrapers buttressing Manhattan, “but don’t buck the impossible! And incidentally, Flint, don’t misunderstand me, either. When I asked you if we ought to try it, I merely meant, would it be safe? The world, Flint, is a dangerous toy to play with, too hard. The people are perilous baubles, if you step on their corns a bit too often or too heavily. Every Caesar has a Brutus waiting for him somewhere, with a club.

“Once let the unwashed get an idea into their low brows, and you can’t tell where it may lead them. Even a rat fights, in its last corner. These human rats of ours have been getting a bit nasty of late. True, they swallowed the Limited Franchise Bill, three years ago, with only a little futile protest, so that now we’ve got them politically hamstrung. True, there’s the Dick Military Bill, recently enlarged and perfected, so they can’t move a hand without falling into treason and court-martial. True again, they’ve stood for the Censorship and the National Mounted Police—the Grays—all in the last year. But how much more will they stand, eh? You close your hand on their windpipes, and by God! something may happen even yet, after all!”

Flint snapped his fingers with contempt.

“Machine guns!” was all he said.

“Yes, of course,” answered Waldron. “But there may be life in the old beast yet. They may yet kick the apple cart over—and us with it. You never can tell. And those infernal Socialists, always at it, night and day, never letting up, flinging firebrands into the powder magazine! Sometime there’s going to be one hell of a bang, Flint! And when it comes, suave qui peut! So go slow, old man—go damned slow, that’s all I’ve got to say!”

“On the contrary,” said Flint, blinking in the golden spring sunshine as he peered out over the swashing brine at a raucous knot of gulls, “on the contrary, Wally, I’m going to push it as fast as the Lord will let me. You can come in, or not, as you see fit—but remember this, no quitter ever gets a daughter of mine! And another thing; we’re in the year 1921, now, not 1910 or 1915. Developments, political and otherwise, have moved swiftly, these few years past. Then, there might have been trouble. To-day, there can’t be. We’ve got things cinched too tight for that!

“Ten years ago, they might have had our blood, the people might, or given us a hemp-tea party in Wall Street. today, all’s safe. Come, be a man and grip your courage! We can put the initial stages through in absolute secrecy—and then, once we get our clutch on the world’s breath, what have we to fear?”

“Go slow, Flint!”

“Nonsense! Oxygen is life itself. There’s no substitute. Vitiate the air by removing even 10 per cent. of it, and the world will lick our boots for a chance to breathe! Everybody’s got to have oxygen, all the way from kings and emperors down to the toiling cattle, the Henry Dubbs, as I believe they’re commonly called in vulgar speech. Shut off the air, and ‘the captains and the kings’ will run to heel like the rabble itself. Run to heel, and pay for the privilege of doing it! We’ve got the universities, press, churches, laws, judges, army and navy and everything already in our hands. We’ll be secure enough, no fear!”

“Shhhhh!” And Waldron nudged the Billionaire with his elbow.

In his excitement, Flint had permitted his voice to rise, a little. Not far from him, leaning on the rail, a stockily built young fellow in overalls, a cap pulled down firmly over his well-shaped head, was apparently watching the gulls and the passing boats, with eyes no less blue than the bay itself; eyes no less glinting than the sunlight on the waves. He seemed to be paying no heed to anything but what lay before him. But “Tiger” Waldron, possessed of something of the instinct of the beast whose name he bore, subconsciously sensed a peril in his nearness. The man’s ear—if unusually quick—might, just might possibly have caught a word or two meant for no interloper. And at that thought, Waldron once more nudged his partner.

“Shhh!” he repeated, “Enough. We can finish this, in the limousine.”

Flint looked at him a moment, in silence, then nodded.

“Right you are,” said he. And both men climbed back into the closed car.

“You never can tell what ears are primed for news,” said Waldron. “Better take no chances.”

“Before long, we can throw away all subterfuge,” the Billionaire replied as he shut the door. “But for now, well, you’re correct. Once our grasp tightens on the windpipe of the world, we’re safe. From our office in Wall Street you and I can play the keys of the world-machine as an organist would finger his instrument. But there must be no leak; no publicity; no suspicion aroused. We’ll play our music pianissimo, Wally, with rare accompaniments to the tune of ‘great public utility, benefit to the public health,’ and all that—the same old game, only on a vastly larger scale.

“Every modern composer in the field of Big Business knows that score and has played it many times. We will play it on a monstrous pipe organ, with the world’s lungs for bellows and the world’s breath to vibrate our reeds—and all paying tribute, night and day, year after year, all over the world, Wally, all over the world!

“God! What power shall be ours! What infinite power, such as, since time began, never yet lay in mortal hands! We shall be as gods, Waldron, you and I—and between us, we shall bring the human race wallowing to our feet in helpless bondage, in supreme abandon!”

The ferry boat, nearing the Staten Island landing, slowed its ponderous screws. The chauffeur flung away his cigarette, drew on his gauntlets and accelerated his engine. Forward the human drove began to press, under the long slave-driven habit of haste, of eagerness to do the masters’ bidding.

The young mechanic by the rail—he of the overalls and keen blue eyes—turned toward the bows, picked up a canvas bag of tools and stood there waiting with the rest.

For a moment his glance rested on the limousine and the two half-seen figures within. As it did so, a wanton breeze from off the Island flapped back the lapel of his jumper. In that brief instant one might have seen a button pinned upon his blue flannel shirt—clasped hands, surrounded by the legend: “Workers of the World, Unite!”

But neither of the plutocrats observed this; nor, had they seen, would they have understood.

And whether the sturdy toiler had overheard aught of their infernal conspiring—or, having heard it, grasped its dire and criminal significance—who, who in all this weary and toil-burdened world, could say?

CHAPTER V.

IN THE LABORATORY.

Half an hour’s run down Staten Island, along smooth roads lined with sleepy little towns and through sparse woods beyond which sparkled the shining waters of the harbor, brought the two plutocrats to the quiet settlement of Oakwood Heights.

Now the blasé chauffeur swung the car sharply to the left, past the aviation field, and so came to the wide-scattered settlement—almost a colony—which, hidden behind high, barb-wire-topped fences, carried on the many and complex activities of the partners’ experiment station. Here were the several laboratories where new products were evolved and old ones refined, for Flint’s and Waldron’s greater profit. Here stood a complete electric power plant, for lighting and heating the works, as well as for current to use in the retorts and many powerful machines of the testing works.

Here, again, were broad proving grounds, for fuel and explosives; and, at one side, stood a low, skylighted group of brick buildings, known as the electro-chemical station. Dormitories and boarding-houses for the small army of employees occupied the eastern end of the enclosure, nearest the sea. Over all, high chimney stacks and the aerials of a mighty wireless plant dominated the entire works. A private railroad spur pierced the western side of the enclosure, for food and coal supplies, as well as for the handling of the numerous imports and exports of this wonderfully complete feudal domain. As the colony lay there basking in the sunshine of early spring, under its drifting streamers of smoke, it seemed an ideal picture of peaceful activities. Here a locomotive puffed, shunting cars; there, a steam-jet flung its plumes of snowy vapor into air; yonder, a steam hammer thundered on a massive anvil. And forges rang, and through open windows hummed sounds of industry.

And yet, not one of all those sounds but echoed more bitter slavery for men. Not one of all those many activities but boded ill to humanity. For the whole plan and purpose of the place was the devising of still wider forms of human exploitation and enslavement. Its every motive was to serve the greed of Flint and Waldron. Outwardly honest and industrious, it inwardly loomed sinister and terrible, a type and symbol of its masters’ swiftly growing power. Such, in its essence, was the great experiment station of these two men who lusted for dominion over the whole world.

As the long, glittering car drew up at the main gate of the enclosure, a sharp-eyed watchman peered through a sliding wicket therein. Satisfied by his inspection, he withdrew; and at once the big gate rolled back, smoothly actuated by electricity. The car purred onward, into the enclosure. When the gate had closed noiselessly behind it, the chauffeur ran it down a splendidly paved roadway, swung to the right, past the machine shops, and drew it to a stand in front of the administration building.

Flint and his partner alighted, and stood for a moment surveying the scene with satisfaction. Then Flint turned to the chauffeur.

“Put the car in the garage,” he directed. “We may not want it till afternoon.”

The blasé one touched his cap and nodded, in obedience. Then, as the car withdrew, the partners ascended the broad steps.

“Good chap, that Herrick,” commented Waldron, casting a glance at the retreating chauffeur. “Quick-witted, and mum. Give me a man who knows how to mind and keep still about it, every time!”

“Right,” assented Flint. “Obedience is the first of all virtues, and the second is silence. Well, it looks to me as though we had the whole world coming our way, now, along that very same path of virtue. Once we get this air proposition really to working, the world will obey. It will have to! And as for silence, we can manage that, too. The mere turn of a valve, and—!”

Waldron smiled grimly, as though in derision of what he seemed to think his partner’s chimerical hopes, but made no answer. Together they entered the administration building. Five minutes later, Herzog, their servile experimenter, stood bowing and cringing before them.

“Got it, Herzog?” demanded Flint, while Waldron lighted still another of those costly cigars—each one worth a good mechanic’s daily wage.

“Yes, sir, I believe so, sir,” the scientist replied, depreciatingly. “That is, at least, on a small scale. Two weeks was the time you allowed me, sir, but—”

“I know. You’ve done it in eleven days,” interrupted, the Billionaire. “Very well. I knew you could. You’ll lose nothing by it. So no more of that. Show us what you’ve done. Everything all ready?”

“Quite ready, sir,” the other answered. “If you’ll be so good as to step into the electro-chemical building?”

Flint very graciously signified his willingness thus to condescend; and without delay, accompanied by the still incredulous Waldron, and followed by Herzog, he passed out of the administration building, through a covered passage and into the electro-chemical works.

A variety of strange odors and stranger sounds filled this large brick structure, windowless on every side and lighted only by broad skylights of milky wire-glass—this arrangement being due to the extreme secrecy of many processes here going forward. The partners had no intention that any spying eyes should ever so much as glimpse the work in this department; work involving foods, fuels, power, lighting, almost the entire range of the vast network of exploiting media they had already flung over a tired world.

“This way, gentlemen,” ventured Herzog, pointing toward a metal door at the left of the main room. He unlocked this, which was guarded by a combination lock, like that of a bank vault, and waited for them to enter; then closed it after them, and made quite sure the metal door was fast.

A peculiar, pungent smell greeted the partners’ nostrils as they glanced about the inner laboratory. At one side an electric furnace was glowing with graphite crucibles subjected to terrific heat. On the other a dynamo was humming. Before them a broad, tiled bench held a strange assortment of test tubes, retorts and complex apparatus of glass and gleaming metal. The whole was lighted by a strong white light from above, through the milk-hued glass—one of Herzog’s own inventions, by the way; a wonderful, light-intensifying glass, which would bend but not break; an invention which, had he himself profited by it, would have brought him millions, but which the partners had exploited without ever having given him a single penny above his very moderate salary.

“Is that it?” demanded Flint, a glitter lighting up his morphia-contracted pupils. He jerked his thumb at a complicated nexus of tubes, brass cylinders, coiled wires and glistening retorts which stood at one end of the broad work-bench.

“That is it, sir,” answered Herzog, apologetically, while “Tiger” Waldron’s hard face hardened even more. “Only an experimental model, you understand, sir, but—”

“It gets results?” queried Flint sharply. “It produces oxygen and nitrogen on a scale that indicates success, with adequate apparatus?”

“Yes, sir. I believe so, sir. No doubt about it; none whatever.”

“Good!” exclaimed the Billionaire. “Now show us!”

“With pleasure, sir. But first, let me explain, a little.”

“Well, what?” demanded Flint. His partner, meanwhile, had drawn near the apparatus, and was studying it with a most intense concentration. Plain to see, beneath this man’s foppish exterior and affected cynicism, dwelt powerful purposes and keen intelligence.

“Explain what?” repeated the Billionaire. “As far as details go, I’m not interested. All I want is results. Go ahead, Herzog; start your machine and let me see what it can do.”

“I will, sir,” acceded the scientist. “But first, with your permission, I’ll point out a few of its main features, and—”

“Damn the main features!” cried Flint. “Get busy with the demonstration!”

“Hold on, hold on,” now interrupted Waldron. “Let him discourse, if he wants to. Ever know a scientist who wasn’t primed to the muzzle with expositions? Here, Herzog,” he added, turning to the inventor, “I’ll listen, if nobody else will.”

Undecided, Herzog smiled nervously. Even Flint had to laugh at his indecision.

“All right, go on,” said the Billionaire. “Only for God’s sake, make it brief!”

Herzog, thus adjured, cleared his throat and blinked uneasily.

“Oxygen,” he said. “Yes, I can produce it quickly, easily and in large quantities. As a gas, or as a liquid, which can be shipped to any desired point and there transformed into gaseous form. Liquid air can also be produced by this same machine, for refrigerating purposes. You understand, of course, that when liquid air evaporates, it is only the nitrogen that goes back into the atmosphere at 313 degrees below zero. The residue is pure liquid oxygen. In other words, this apparatus will make money as a liquid air plant, and furnish you oxygen as a by-product.

“It will also turn out nitrogen, for fertilizing purposes. The income from a full-sized machine, on this pattern, from all three sources, should be very large indeed.”

“Good,” put in Waldron. “And liquid air, for example, would cost how much to produce?”

“With power-cost at half a cent per H.P. hour, about $2.50 a ton. The oxygen by-product alone will more than pay for that, in purifying and cooling buildings, or used to promote combustion in locomotives and other steam engines. The liquid air itself can be used as a motive power for a certain type of expansion engine, or—”

“There, there, that’s enough!” interposed Flint, brusquely. “We don’t need any of your advice or suggestions, Herzog. As far as the disposal of the product is concerned, we can take care of that. All we want from you is the assurance that that product can be obtained, easily and cheaply, and in unlimited quantities. Is that the case?”

“It is, sir.”

“All right. And can liquid oxygen be easily transported any considerable distance?”

“Yes, sir. In what is known as Place’s Vacuum-jacketed Insulated Container, it can be kept for weeks at a time without any appreciable loss.”

Flint pondered a moment, then asked, again:

“Could large tanks, holding say, a million gallons, be built on that principle, for wholesale storage? And could vacuum-jacketed pipes be laid, for conveying liquid oxygen or its gas?”

“No reason why not, sir. Yes, I may say all that is quite feasible.”

“Very well, then,” snapped Flint. “That’s enough for the present. Now, show us your machine at work! Start it Herzog. Let’s see what you can do!”

The Billionaire’s eyes glittered as Herzog laid a hand on a gleaming switch. Even Waldron forgot to smoke.

“Gentlemen, observe,” said Herzog, as he threw the lever.

CHAPTER VI.

OXYGEN, KING OF INTOXICATORS.

A soft humming note began to vibrate through the inner laboratory—a note which rose in pitch, steadily, as Herzog shoved the lever from one copper post to another, round the half-circle.

“I am now heating the little firebrick furnace,” said the scientist. “In Norway, they use an alternating current of only 5,000 volts, between water-cooled copper electrodes, as I have already told you. I am using 30,000 volts, and my electrodes, my own invention, are—”

“Never mind,” growled Flint. “Just let’s see some of the product—some liquid oxygen, that’s all. The why and wherefore is your job, not ours!”

Herzog, with a pained smile, bent and peered through a red glass bull’s-eye that now had begun to glow in the side of his apparatus.

“The arc is good,” he muttered, as to himself. “Now I will throw in the electro-magnets and spread it; then switch in my intensifying condenser, and finally set the turbine fans to work, to throw air through the field. Then we shall see, we shall see!”

Suiting the action to the words, he deftly touched here a button, there a lever; and all at once a shrill buzzing rose above the lower drone of the induction coils.

“Gentlemen,” said Herzog, straightening up and facing his employers, “the process is now already at work. In five minutes—yes, in three—I shall have results to show you!”

“Good!” grunted Waldron. “That’s all we’re after, results. That’s the only way you hold your job, Herzog, just getting results!”

He relighted his cigar, which had gone out during Herzog’s explanation—for “Tiger” Waldron, though he could drop thousands at roulette without turning a hair, never yet had been known to throw away a cigar less than half smoked. Flint, meanwhile, took out a little morocco-covered note book and made a few notes. In this book he had kept an outline of his plan from the very first; and now with pleasure he added some memoranda, based on what Herzog had just told him, as well as observations on the machine itself.

Thus two minutes passed, then three.

“Time’s up, Herzog!” exclaimed Waldron, glancing at the electric clock on the wall. “Where’s the juice?”

“One second, sir,” answered the scientist. Again he peeked through the glowing bull’s-eye. Then, his face slightly pale, his bulging eyes blinking nervously, he took two small flint glass bottles, set them under a couple of pipettes, and deftly made connections.

“Oxygen cocktail for mine,” laughed Waldron, to cover a certain emotion he could not help feeling at sight of the actual operation of a process which might, after all, open out ways and means for the utter subjugation of the world.

Neither Flint nor the inventor vouchsafed even a smile. The Billionaire drew near, adjusted a pair of pince-nez on his hawk-like nose, and peered curiously at the apparatus. Herzog, with a quick gesture, turned a small silver faucet.

“Oxygen! Unlimited oxygen!” he exclaimed. “I have found the process, gentlemen, commercially practicable. Oxygen!”

Even as he spoke, a lambent, sparkling liquid began to flow through the pipette, into the flask. At sight of it, the Billionaire’s eyes lighted up with triumph. Waldron, despite his assumed nonchalance, felt the hunting thrill of Wall street, the quick stab of exultation when victory seemed well in hand.

“These bottles,” said Herzog, “are double, constructed on the principle of the Thermos bottle. They will keep the liquid gases I shall show you, for days. Huge tanks could be built on the same principle. In a short time, gentlemen, you can handle tons of these gases, if you like—thousands of tons, unlimited tons.

“The Siemens and Halske people, and the Great Falls, S.C., plant, will be mere puttering experimenters beside you. For neither they nor any other manufacturers have any knowledge of the vital process—my secret, polarizing transformer, which does the work in one-tenth the time and at one-hundredth the cost of any other known process. For example, see here?”

He turned the faucet, disconnected the flask and handed it to Flint.

“There, sir,” he remarked, “is a half-pint of pure liquid oxygen, drawn from the air in less than eight minutes, at a cost of perhaps two-tenths of a cent. On a large scale the cost can be vastly reduced. Are you satisfied, sir?”

Flint nodded, curtly.

“You’ll do, Herzog,” he replied—his very strongest form of commendation. “You’re not half bad, after all. So this is liquid oxygen, eh? Very cheap, and very cold?”

His eyes gleamed with joy at sight of the translucent potent stuff—the very stuff of life, its essence and prime principle, without which neither plant nor animal nor man can live—oxygen, mother of all life, sustainer of the world.

“Very cheap, yes, sir,” answered the scientist. “And cold, enormously cold. The specimen you hold in your hand, in that vacuum-protected flask, is more than three hundred degrees below zero. One drop of it on your palm would burn it to the bone. Incidentally, let me tell you another fact—”

“And that is?”

“This specimen is the allotropic or condensed form of oxygen, much more powerful than the usual liquified gas.”

“Ozone, you mean?”

“Precisely. Would you like to sense its effect as a ventilating agent?”

“No danger?”

“None, sir. Here, allow me.”

Herzog took the flask, pressed a little spring and liberated the top. At once a whitish vapor began to coil from the neck of the bottle.

“Hm!” grunted Waldron, smiling. “Mountain winds and sea breezes have nothing on that!” He sniffed with appreciation. “Some gas, all right!”

“You’re right, Wally,” answered the Billionaire. “If this works out on a large scale, in all its details—well—I needn’t impress its importance on you!”

Yielding to the influence of the wonderful, life-giving gas, the rather close air of the laboratory, contaminated by a variety of chemical odors, and vitiated by its recent loss of oxygen, had begun to freshen and purify itself in an astonishing manner. One would have thought that through an open window, close at hand, the purest ocean breeze was blowing. A faint tinge of color began to liven the somewhat pasty cheek of the Billionaire. Waldron’s big chest expanded and his eye brightened. Even the meek Herzog stood straighter and looked more the man, under the stimulus of the life-giving ozone.

“Fine!” exclaimed Flint, with unwonted enthusiasm, and nearly yielded to a laugh. Waldron went so far as to slap Herzog on the shoulder.

“You’re some wizard, old man!” he exclaimed, with a warmth hitherto never known by him—for already the subtle gas was beginning to intoxicate his senses. “And you can handle nitrogen with the same ease and precision?”

“Exactly,” answered Herzog. “This other vial contains pure nitrogen. With enlarged apparatus, I can supply it by the trainload. The world’s fertilizer problem is solved!”

“Great work!” ejaculated Waldron, even more excited than before, but Flint, his natural sourness asserting itself, merely growled some ungracious remark.

“Nitrogen can go hang,” said he. “It’s oxygen we’re after, primarily. Once we get our grip on that, the world will be—”

Waldron checked him just in time.

“Enough of this,” he interrupted sharply. “I admit, I’m not myself, in this rich atmosphere. I know you’re feeling it, already, Flint. Come along out of this, where we can regain our aplomb. We’ve seen enough, for once.”

He turned to Herzog.

“For God’s sake, man,” cried he, “cork that magic bottle of yours, before all the oxygen-genii escape, or you’ll have us both under the table! And, see here,” he added, pulling out his check-book, while Flint stared in amazed disgust. “Here, take a blank check.” He took his fountain pen and scrawled his name on one. “The amount? That’s up to you. Now, let us out,” he bade, as Herzog stood there regarding the check with entire uncomprehension. “Out, I say, before I get extravagant!”

Herzog, perfectly comprehending the magnates’ unusual conduct as due to oxygen-intoxication in its initial stage, made no comment, but walked to the door, spun the combination and flung it open.

“Glad to have had the pleasure of demonstrating the process to you, gentlemen,” said he. “If you’re convinced it’s practicable, I’m at your orders for any larger extension of the work. Have you any other question or suggestion?”

Neither magnate answered. Flint was trying hard to hold his self-control. Waldron, red-faced now and highly stimulated, looked as though he had been drinking even more than usual.

Both passed out of the laboratory with rather unsteady steps. Together they retraced their way to the administration building; and there, safe at last in the private inner office, with the door locked, they sat down and stared at each other with expressions of amazement.

CHAPTER VII.

A FREAK OF FATE.

Waldron was the first to speak. With a sudden laugh, boisterous and wild, he cried:

“Flint, you old scoundrel, you’re drunk!”

“Drunk yourself!” retorted the Billionaire, half starting from his chair, his fist clenched in sudden passion. “How dare you—?”

“Dare? I dare anything!” exclaimed Waldron. “Yes, I admit it—I am half seas over. That ozone—God! what a stimulant! Must be some wonderfully powerful form. If we—could market it—”

Flint sank back in his chair, waving an extravagant hand.

“Market it?” he answered. “Of course we can market it, and will! Drunk or sober, Wally, I know what I’m talking about. The power now in our grasp has never yet been equalled on earth. On the one side, we can half-stifle every non-subscriber to our service, or wholly stifle every rebel against us. On the other, we can simply saturate every subscriber with health and energy, or even—if they want it—waft them to paradise on the wings of ozone. The old Roman idea of ‘bread and circus’ to rule the mob, was child’s play compared to this! Science has delivered the whole world into our hands. Power, man, power! Absolute, infinite power over every living, breathing thing!”

He fell silent, pondering the vast future; and Waldron, gazing at him with sparkling eyes, nodded with keen satisfaction. Thus for a few moments they sat, looking at each other and letting imagination ran riot; and as they sat, the sudden, stimulating effect of the condensed oxygen died in their blood, and calmer feelings ensued.

Presently Waldron spoke again.

“Let’s get down to brass tacks,” said he, drawing his chair up to the table. “I’m almost myself again. The subtle stuff has got out of my brain, at last. Generalities and day-dreams are all very well, Flint, but we’ve got to lay out some definite line of campaign. And the sooner we get to it the better.”

“Hm!” sneered Flint. “If it’s not more practical than your action in giving Herzog that blank check, it won’t be worth much. As an extravagant action, Wally, I’ve never seen it equalled. I’m astonished, indeed I am!”

Waldron laughed easily.

“Don’t worry,” he answered his partner. “That temporary aberration of judgment, due to oxygen-stimulus, will have no results. Herzog won’t dare fill out the check, anyhow, because he knows he’d get into trouble if he did; and even though he should, he can collect nothing. I’ll have payment stopped, at once, on that number. No danger, Flint!”

“I don’t know,” mused the Billionaire. “It may be that this man has us just a little under his thumb. He, and he alone, understands the process. We’ve got to treat him with due consideration, or he may leave us and carry his secret to others—to Masterson, for instance, or the Amalgamated people, or—”

“Nothing doing on that, old man!” interrupted “Tiger.” “Have no fear. The first move he makes, off to Sing Sing he goes, the way we jobbed Parker Hayes. Slade and the Cosmos Agency can take care of him, all right, if he asserts himself!”

“Very likely,” answered Flint, who had now at last entirely recovered his sang-froid. “But in that event, our work would be at a standstill. No, Waldron, we mustn’t oppose this fellow. Better let the check go through, if he has nerve enough to fill it out and cash it. He won’t dare gouge very deep; and no matter what he takes, it won’t be a drop in the ocean, compared to the golden flood now almost within our grasp!”

Waldron pondered a moment, then nodded assent.

“All right. Correct,” he finally answered. “So then, we can dismiss that trifle from our minds. Now, to work! We’ve got the process we were after. What next?”

“First of all,” answered the Billionaire, “we’ll let this Herzog understand that he’s to have a share in the results; that in this, as in everything so far, he’s merely a tool—and that when tools lose their cutting edge we break ‘em. He’s a meek devil. We can hold him easily enough.”

“Right. And then?” asked Waldron.

“Then? First of all, a good, big, wide-sweeping publicity campaign. That must begin today, to prepare opinion for the forthcoming development of the new idea.”

“Henderson can handle that, all right,” said Wally, leaning forward in his chair. “Give him the idea, and turn him loose, and he’ll get results. A clever dog, that. He and his press bureau, working through all the big dailies and many of the magazines, can turn this country upside down in six months. Let him get on this job, and before you know it the public will be demanding, be fighting for a chance to subscribe to the new ventilating-service. That part of it is easy!”

“Yes, you’re right,” replied Flint. “We’ll see Henderson no later than this afternoon. He and his writers can lay out a series of popular articles and advertisements, to be run as pure reading matter, with no distinguishing mark that they are ads, which will get the country—the whole world, in fact—coming our way.”

“Good,” the other assented. “Meantime, we can begin installing oxygen machines on a big scale, a huge scale, to supply the demand that’s bound to arise. Where do you think we’d best manufacture? Herzog says water power is the correct thing. We might use Niagara—use some of the surplus power we already own there.”

“Niagara would do, very well,” answered Flint. He had once more taken out his little morocco-covered note book, and was now jotting down some further memoranda. “It’s a good location. Pipe-lines could easily be extended, from it, to cover practically a quarter to a third of the United States. Eventually we’ll put in another plant in Chicago, one in Denver and one on the Pacific Coast. Then, in time, there must be distributing centers in Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. But for the present, we’ll begin with the Niagara plant. After we get that under full operation, the others will develop in due course of time.”

“Our charter covers this new line of work. There will be no need of any legal technicalities,” said Waldron, with a smile. “Some charter, if I do say it, who shouldn’t. I drew it, you remember. Nothing much in the way of possible business-extension got past me!”

Flint nodded.

“You’re right,” he answered. “Nothing stands in our way, now. Positively nothing. We have land, power and capital without limit. We have the process. We control press, law, courts, judges, military and every other form of government. All we need look out for is to secure public confidence and keep the bandage on the eyes of the world till our system is actually in operation—then there will be no redress, no come back, no possible rebellion. As I’ve already said, Wally, we’ll have the whole world by the windpipe; and let the mob howl then, if they dare!”

“Yes, let ‘em howl!” chimed in “Tiger,” with a snarl that proved his nickname no misnomer. “Inside of a year we’ll have them all where we want them. You were right, Flint, when you called oil, coal, iron and all the rest of it mere petty activities. Air—ah! that’s the talk! Once we get the air under our control, we’re emperors of all life!”

His words rang frank and bold, but something in his look, as he blinked at his partner, might have given Flint cause for uneasiness, had the Billionaire noticed that oblique and dangerous glance. One might have read therein some shifty and devious plan of Waldron’s to dominate even Flint himself, to rule the master or to wreck him, and to seize in his own hands the reins of universal power. But Flint, bending over his note-book and making careful memoranda, saw nothing of all this.

Waldron, an inveterate smoker, lighted a fresh cigar, leaned back, surveyed his partner and indulged in a short inner laugh, which hardly curved his cruel lips, but which hardened still more those pale-blue, steely eyes of his.

“All right,” said he, at last. “Enough of this, Flint. Let’s get back to town, now, and have a conference with Henderson. That’s the first step. By tonight, the whole campaign of publicity must be mapped out. Come, come; you can finish your memoranda later. I’m impatient to be back in Wall Street. Come along!”

Five minutes later, having left orders that Herzog was to attend upon them in their private offices, next morning, they had ordered the limousine and were making way along the hard road toward the gate of the enclosure.

The gate opened to let them pass, then swung and locked again, behind them. At a good clip, the powerful car picked up speed on the homeward way. The two magnates, exultant and flushed with the consciousness of coming victory, lolled in the deeply-cushioned seat and spoke of power.

As they swung past the aviation field and neared the Oakwood Heights station, a train pulled out. Down the road came tramping a workingman in overalls and jumper, with a canvas bag of tools swinging from his brawny right hand. As he walked, striding along with splendid energy, he whistled to himself—no cheap ragtime air, but Handel’s Largo, with an appreciation which bespoke musical feeling of no common sort.

The Billionaire caught sight of him, just as the car slowed to take the sharp turn by the station. Instant recognition followed. Flint’s eyes narrowed sharply.

“Hm! The same fellow,” he grunted to himself. “The same rascal who stood beside us on the ferry boat, as we were talking over our plans. Now, what the devil?”

Shadowed by a kind of instinctive uneasiness, not yet definite or clear but more in the nature of a premonition of trouble, Flint gazed fixedly at the mechanic as the car swung round the bend in the road. The glance was returned.

Yielding to some kind of imperative curiosity, the Billionaire leaned over the side of the car—leaned out, with his coat flapping in the stiff wind—and for a moment peered back at the disquieting workman.

Then the car swept him out of sight, and Flint resumed his seat again.

He did not know—for he had not seen it happen—that in that moment the slippery, leather-covered note-book had slid from his lolling coat pocket and had fallen with a sharp slap on the white macadam, skidded along and come to rest in the ditch.

The workingman, however, who had paused and turned to look after the speeding car, he had seen all this.

A moment he stood there, peering. Then, retracing his steps with resolution he picked up the little book and slid it into the pocket of his jeans.

Deserted was the road. Not a soul was to be seen, save the crossing flagman, musing in his chair beside his little hut, quite oblivious to everything but a rank cob pipe. The workman’s act had not been noticed.

Nobody had observed him. Nobody knew. Not a living creature had witnessed the slight deed on which, by a strange freak of fate, the history of the world was yet to turn.

CHAPTER VIII.

ONE UNBIDDEN, SHARES GREAT SECRETS.

Immediately on discovering his loss—which was soon after having reached his office—Flint, in something like a fright, telephoned down to the Oakwood Heights laboratory and instructed Herzog, in person, to make a careful search for it and to report results inside an hour. Even though some of the essentials of his plan were written in a code of his own devising, Flint paled before the possible results should the book fall into the hands of anybody intelligent enough to fathom its meaning.

“Damn the luck!” he ejaculated, pacing the office floor, his fists knotted. “If it had been a pocket book with a few thousand inside, that would have been a trifle. But to lose my plan of campaign—God grant no harm may come of it!”

Waldron, slyly observing him, could not suppress a smile.

“Calling on God, eh?” sneered he. “You must be agitated. I haven’t heard that kind of entreaty on your lips, Flint, since the year of the big coal strike, when you prayed God the gun-men might ‘get’ the strikers before they could organize. Come, come, man, brace up! Your book will turn up all right; and even if it doesn’t there’s no cause for alarm. It would take a man of extraordinary acumen to read your hieroglyphics! Cheer up, Flint. There’s really nothing to excite you.”

The Billionaire thus adjured, sat down and tried to calm his agitation.

“Rotten luck, eh?” he queried. “But after all, Herzog is likely to find the book. And even if he doesn’t, I guess we’re safe enough. The very boldness of the plan—supposing even that the finder could grasp it—would put it outside the seeming range of the possible. It’s hardly a hundred to one shot any harm may come of it.”

“All right, then, let it go at that,” said Waldron. “And now, to business. Suppose, for example, you’ve got a perfectly unlimited supply of oxygen-gas and liquid. How are you going to market it? Just what details have you worked out?”

Flint pondered a moment, before replying. At last he said:

“Of course you understand, Wally, I can’t give you every point. The whole thing will be an evolution, and new ideas and processes, new uses and demands will develop as time passes. But in the main, my idea is this: The big producing stations will steadily extract oxygen from the atmosphere, thus leaving the air increasingly poorer and less adapted to sustaining human life.

“I shall store the oxygen in vast tanks, like the ordinary gas-tanks to be found in every city, only much bigger. These tanks will be fed by pipe-lines from the central stations, thus.”

Flint drew toward him a sheet of his heavily embossed letter-paper, and, picking up a pencil, began to sketch a rough diagram. Waldron, making no comment, followed every stroke with keen interest.

“From these tanks,” the Billionaire continued, “smaller pipes will convey the gaseous oxygen to every house taking our service.”

“Just like ordinary gas?”

“Precisely. Each room will be fitted with an oxygen jet apparatus, something like a gas burner, with a safety device to prevent over supply and avoid the dangers of combustion.”

“Combustion?”

“Yes. In pure oxygen, a glowing bit of wire will burst into flame. Your cigar, there, would catch fire, from the merest spark in its inmost folds. Too much oxygen in a room not only intoxicates the occupants—we’ve already seen that effect—but also develops a great fire risk. So we shall have to make some provision for that, Wally. It will be absolutely essential.”

“All right. Allowing it’s been made, what then?” asked “Tiger,” with extraordinary interest.

“Can’t you see? We’ll have every household under our absolute thumb?” And Flint pressed his thumb on the table to illustrate. “My God, man, think of it! Every city honeycombed by our pipes—yes, and every village and hamlet too, and even every farm house that can afford it! At first, the cost will be very low, till people have become accustomed to ozone as they are to water. The whole ventilation problem will be solved, at once and for all time. Where we can’t pipe in the ozone, we can use portable vaporizers, to be supplied once a month, and of sufficient capacity to keep the air of an average-sized house perfectly pure for thirty days.

“Pure? More than pure! Exhilarating, life-giving, delicious! Under this system, Wally, the middle and upper classes will thrive as never before. They’ll grow in size and weight, in health and intelligence, under the steady influence of ozone, day and night. Every vital process will be stimulated. Our invention will mark a new era in the welfare of the world!”

“Bunk!” sneered Wally. “That’s all very well for your prospectuses and newspaper articles, old man, but the fact is we don’t give a damn whether it helps the world or wrecks it. We’re out for money and power. My motto is, Get ‘em and do good, if you can—but get ‘em anyhow! So you had better can the philanthropic part of it. Just show me the cash, and you can have all the credit!”

Flint shot a grim look at his partner, then continued:

“Don’t be flippant, Wally. This is a serious business and must be treated as such. In addition to the respiratory service, we can put in water-cooling and refrigerating services, at low cost, also cold-pipes for cooling houses in summer. In fine, we can immeasurably add to the health and comfort of the better classes; and can at last have everybody using our gas, which, registering through our own sealed meters, will flood us with wealth so vast as to make that of these Standard Oil pifflers look like the proverbial thirty cents!”

“Fine!” exclaimed Waldron, nodding approval. “Also, any time any rebellion develops we can merely shut off the supply in that quarter, and quickly reduce it. Or, again, we can increase the potency of the gas, and fairly intoxicate the people, till they stand for anything. Just fancy, now, our pipes connected with the sacred Halls of Congress and with the White House! Even if any difficulty could possibly be expected from these sources, just imagine how quickly we could nip it in the bud!”

“Quickly isn’t the word, Wally,” answered the Billionaire. “I tell you, old man, the world lies in our hands, today. And we have only to close our fingers, in order to possess it!”

He glanced at his own fingers, as though he visibly perceived the great world lying there for him to squeeze. Waldron’s eyes, following the Billionaire’s, saw that Flint’s hand was trembling, and understood the reason. More than three hours had passed—nay, almost four—since Flint had had any opportunity to take his necessary dose of morphia. Waldron arose, paced to the window and stood there looking out over the vast panorama of city, river and harbor, apparently absorbed in contemplation, but really keen to hear what Flint might do.

His expectations were not disappointed. Hardly had he turned his back, when he heard the desk-drawer open, furtively, and knew the Billionaire was taking out the little vial of white tablets, dearer to him than ever the caress of woman to a Don Juan. A moment later, the drawer closed again.

“He’ll do now, for a while,” thought Waldron, with satisfaction. “Let him go the limit, if he likes—the fool! The more he takes, the quicker I win. It’ll kill him yet, the dope will. And that means, my mastery of the world will be complete. Let him go it! The harder, the better!”

He turned back toward Flint, again, veiling in that impenetrable face of his the slightest hint or expression which might have told Flint that he understood the Billionaire’s vice. If Flint were Vulture, Waldron was Tiger, indeed. And so, for a brief moment, these two soulless men of gold and power stood eyeing each other, in silence.

Suddenly Waldron spoke.

“There’s one thing you’ve forgotten to speak of, Flint,” he said.

“And that is?” demanded the other, already calmed by the quick action of the subtle, enslaving drug.

“The effect on the world’s poor—on the toiling millions! The results of this innovation, in slum, and slave-quarter, and in the haunts of poverty. Your talk has all been of the middle and upper classes, and of the benefits accruing to them, from increased oxygen-consumption. But how about the others? Every ounce of oxygen you take out of the air, leaves it just so much poorer. Store thousands of tons of the life-giving gas, in monster tanks, and you vitiate the entire atmosphere. How about that? How can even the well-to-do breathe, then, out-doors, to say nothing of the poverty-stricken millions?”

Flint grimaced, showing a glint of his gold tooth—his substitute for a smile.

“That’s all reckoned for,” he answered. “I thought I made it quite clear, in our previous talk. To begin with, we will withdraw the oxygen from the atmosphere so slowly that at first there won’t be any noticeable effect on the out-door air. For a while, the only thing that will be noticed by the world will be that our gas service, to private residences and institutions, will result in greatly increased comfort and health to the better classes. And the cost will be so low—at first, mind you, only at first—that every family of any means at all can take it. In fact, Wally, we can afford practically to give away the service, for the first year, until we get our grip firmly fixed on the throat of the world. Do you get the idea?”

Waldron nodded, as he drew leisurely on his cigar.

“Practical to a degree,” he answered. “That is, until the poor begin to gasp for breath. But what then?”

“By the time the outer atmosphere really begins to show the effect of withdrawing a considerable percentage of the oxygen,” Flint answered, “we will have our pocket respirators on the market. Well-to-do people will as soon think of going out without their shoes, as they will with their respirators. No, there won’t be any visible tubes or attachments, Wally. Nothing of that kind. Only, each person will carry a properly insulated cake of solidified oxygen that will evaporate through the special apparatus and surround him with a normally rich atmosphere. And—”

“Yes, but the poor? The workers? What of them?”

“Devil take them, if it comes to that!” retorted Flint, with some heat. “Who ever gives them any serious attention, as it is? Who bothers about their health? They eat and drink and breathe the leavings, anyhow—eat the cheapest and most adulterated food, drink the vilest slop and breathe the most vitiated slum air. Nobody cares, except perhaps those crazy Socialists that once in a while get up on the street-corner and howl about the rights of man and all that rubbish! Working-class? What do I care about the cattle? Let them die, if they want to! D’you suppose, for one minute, I’m going to limit or delay this big innovation, because there’s a working-class that may suffer?”

“They’ll do more than suffer, Flint, if you seriously depreciate the atmosphere. They’ll die!”

“Well, let them, and be damned to them!” retorted Flint, already showing symptoms of drug-stimulation. Waldron, smoking meanwhile, eyed him with a dangerous smile lurking in his cold eyes. “Let them, I say! They die off, now, twice or thrice as fast as the better classes, but what difference does it make? Great breeders, those people are. The more they die, the faster they multiply. Let them go their way and do as they like, so long as they don’t interfere with us! The only really important factor to reckon on is this, that with an impoverished air to breathe, their rebellious spirit will die out—the dogs!—and we’ll have no more talk of social revolution. We’ll draw their teeth, all right enough; or rather, twist the bowstring round their damned necks so tight that all their energy, outside of work, will be consumed in just keeping alive. Revolution, then? Forget it, Waldron! We’ll kill that viper once and for all!”

“Good idea, Flint,” the other replied, with approbation. “Only a master-mind like yours could have conceived it. I’m with you, all right enough. Only, tell me—do you really believe we can put this whole program through, without a hitch? Without a leak, anywhere? Without barricades in the streets, wild-eyed agitators howling, machine-guns chattering, and Hell to pay?”

Flint smiled grimly.

“Wait and see!” he growled.

“Maybe you’re right,” his partner answered. “But slow and easy is the only way.”

“Slow and easy,” Flint assented. “Of course we can’t go too fast. In 1850, for example, do you suppose the public would have tolerated the sudden imposition of monopolies? Hardly! But now they lie down under them, and even vote and fight to keep them! So, too, with this Air Trust. Time will show you I’m right.”

Waldron glanced at his watch.

“Long past lunch-time, Flint,” said he. “Enough of this, for now. And this afternoon, I’ve got that D. K. & E. directors’ meeting on hand. When shall we go on with our plans, and get down to specific details?”

“This evening, say?”

“Very well. At my house?”

“No. Too noisy. Run out to Englewood, to mine. We’ll be quiet there. And come early, Waldron. We’ve no end of things to discuss. The quicker we get the actual work under way, now, the better. You can see Catherine, too. Isn’t that an inducement?”

Thus ended the conference. It resumed, that night, in Flint’s luxurious study at “Idle Hour,” his superb estate on the Palisades. Waldron paid only a perfunctory court to Catherine, who manifested her pleasure by studied indifference. Both magnates felt relieved when she withdrew. They had other and larger matters under way than any dealing with the amenities of life.

Until past midnight the session in the study lasted, under the soft glow of the Billionaire’s reading-light. And many choice cigars were smoked, many sheets of paper covered with diagrams and calculations, many vast schemes of conquest expanded, ere the two masters said good-night and separated.

At the very hour of Waldron’s leave-taking, another man was pondering deeply, studying the problem from quite another angle, and—no less earnestly, than the two magnates—laying careful plans.

This man, sturdy, well-built and keen, smoked an old briar as he worked. A flannel shirt, open at the throat, showed a well-sinewed neck and powerful chest. Under the inverted cone of a shaded incandescent in his room, at the electricians’ quarters of the Oakwood Heights enclosure, one could see the deep lines of thought and careful study crease his high and prominent brow.

From time to time he gazed out through the open window, off toward the whispering lines of surf on the eastern shores of Staten Island—the surf forever talking, forever striving to give its mystic message to the unheeding ear of man. And as he gazed, his blue eyes narrowed with the intensity of his thought. Once, as though some sudden understanding had come to him, he smote the pine table with a corded fist, and swore below his breath.

It was past two in the morning when he finally rose, stretched, yawned and made ready for sleep on his hard iron bunk.

“Can it be?” he muttered, as he undressed. “Can it be possible, or am I dreaming? No—this is no dream! This is reality; and thank God, I understand.”

Then, before he extinguished his light, he took from the table the material he had been studying over, and put it beneath his pillow, where he could guard it safe till morning.

The thing he thus protected was none other than a small note-book, filled with diagrams, jottings and calculations, and bound in red morocco covers.

That night, at Englewood—in the Billionaire’s home and in the workman’s simple room at Oakwood Heights—history was being made.

The outcome, tragic and terrible, who could have foreseen?

CHAPTER IX.

DISCHARGED.

Almost all the following morning, working at his bench in the electro-chemical laboratories of the great Oakwood Heights plant, Gabriel Armstrong pondered deeply on the problems and responsibilities now opening out before him.

The finding of that little red-leather note-book, he fully understood, had at one stroke put him in possession of facts more vital to the labor-movement and the world at large than any which had ever developed since the very beginning of Capitalism. A Socialist to the backbone, thoroughly class-conscious and dowered with an incisive intellect, Gabriel thrilled at thought that he, by chance, had been chosen as the instrument through which he felt the final revolution now must work. And though he remained outwardly calm, as he bent above his toil, inwardly he was aflame. His heart throbbed with an excitement he could scarce control. His brain seemed on fire; his soul pulsed with savage joy and magnificent inspiration. For he was only four-and-twenty, and the bitter grind of years and toil had not yet worn his spirit down nor quelled the ardor of his splendid strength and optimism.

Working at his routine labor, his mind was not upon it. No, rather it dwelt upon the vast discovery he had made—or seemed to have made—the night before. Clearly limned before his vision, he still saw the notes, the plans, the calculations he had been able to decipher in the Billionaire’s lost note-book—the note-book which now, deep in the pocket of his jumper that hung behind him on a hook against the wall, drew his every thought, as steel draws the compass-needle.

“Incredible, yet true!” he pondered, as he filed a brass casting for a new-type dynamo. “These men are plotting to strangle the world to death—to strangle, if they cannot own and rule it! And, what’s more, I see nothing to prevent their doing it. The plan is sound. They have the means. At this very moment, the whole human race is standing in the shadow of a peril so great, a slavery so imminent, that the most savage war of conquest ever waged would be a mere skirmish, by comparison!”

Mechanically he labored on and on, turning the tremendous problem in his brain, striving in vain for some solution, some grasp at effective opposition. And, as he thought, a kind of dumb hopelessness settled down about him, tangible almost as a curtain black and heavy.

“What shall I do?” he muttered to himself. “What can I do, to strike these devils from their villainous plan of mastery?”

As yet, he saw nothing clearly. No way seemed open to him. Alone, he knew he could do nothing; yet whither should he turn for help? To rival capitalist groups? They would not even listen to him; or, if they listened and believed, they would only combine with the plotters, or else, on their own hook, try to emulate them. To the labor movement? It would mock him as a chimerical dreamer, despite all his proofs. At best, he might start a few ineffectual strikes, petty and futile, indeed, against this vast, on-moving power. To the Socialists? They, through their press and speakers—in case they should believe him and co-operate with him—could, indeed, give the matter vast publicity and excite popular opposition; but, after all, could they abort the plan? He feared they could not. The time, he knew, was not yet ripe when Labor, on the political field, could meet and overthrow forces such as these.

And so, for all his fevered thinking, he got no radical, no practical solution of the terrible problem. More and more definitely, as he weighed the pros and cons, the belief was borne in upon him that in this case he must appeal to nobody but himself, count on nobody, trust in nobody save Gabriel Armstrong.

“I must play a lone hand game, for a while at least,” he concluded, as he finished his casting and took another. “Later, perhaps, I can enlist my comrades. But for now, I must watch, wait, work, all alone. Perhaps, armed with this knowledge—invaluable knowledge shared by no one—I can meet their moves, checkmate their plans and defeat their ends. Perhaps! It will be a battle between one man, obscure and without means, and two men who hold billions of dollars and unlimited resources in their grasp. A battle unequal in every sense; a battle to the death. But I may win, after all. Every probability is that I shall lose, lose everything, even my life. Yet still, there is a chance. By God, I’ll take it!”

The last words, uttered aloud, seemed to spring from his lips as though uttered by the very power of invincible determination. A sneer, behind him, brought him round with a start. His gaze widened, at sight of Herzog standing there, cold and dangerous looking, with a venomous expression in those ill-mated eyes of his.

“Take it, will you?” jibed the scientist. “You thief!”

Gabriel sprang up so suddenly that his stool clattered over backward on the red-tiled floor. His big fist clenched and lifted. But Herzog never flinched.

“Thief!” he repeated, with an ugly thrust of the jaw. Servile and crawling to his masters, the man was ever arrogant and harsh with those beneath his authority. “I repeat the word. Drop that fist, Armstrong, if you know what’s good for you. I warn you. Any disturbance, here, and—well, you know what we can do!”

The electrician paled, slightly. But it was not through cowardice. Rage, passion unspeakable, a sudden and animal hate of this lick-spittle and supine toady shook him to the heart’s core. Yet he managed to control himself, not through any personal apprehension, but because of the great work he knew still lay before him. At all hazards, come what might, he must stay on, there, at the Oakwood Heights plant. Nothing, now, must come between him and that one supreme labor.

Thus he controlled himself, with an effort so tremendous that it wrenched his very soul. This trouble, whatever it might be, must not be noised about. Already, up and down the shop, workers were peering curiously at him. He must be calm; must pass the insult, smooth the situation and remain employed there.

“I—I beg pardon,” he managed to articulate, with pale lips that trembled. He wiped the beaded sweat from his broad forehead. “Excuse me, Mr. Herzog. I—you startled me. What’s the trouble? Any complaint to make? If so, I’m here to listen.”

Herzog’s teeth showed in a rat-like grin of malice.

“Yes, you’ll listen, all right enough,” he sneered. “I’ve named you, and that goes! You’re a thief, Armstrong, and this proves it! Look!”

From behind his back, where he had been holding it, he produced the little morocco-covered book. Right in Armstrong’s face he shook it, with an oath.

“Steal, will you?” he jibed. “For it’s the same thing—no difference whether you picked it out of Mr. Flint’s pocket or found it on the floor here, and tried to keep it! Steal, eh? Hold it for some possible reward? You skunk! Lucky you haven’t brains enough to make out what’s in it! Thought you’d keep it, did you? But you weren’t smart enough, Armstrong—no, not quite smart enough for me! After looking the whole place over, I thought I’d have a go at a few pockets—and, you see? Oh, you’ll have to get up early to beat me at the game you—you thief!”

With the last word, he raised the book and struck the young man a blistering welt across the face with it.

Armstrong fell back, against the bench, perfectly livid, with the wale of the blow standing out red and distinct across his cheek. Then he went pale as death, and staggered as though about to faint.

“God—God in heaven!” he gasped. “Give me—strength—not to kill this animal!”

A startled look came into Herzog’s face. He recognized, at last, the nature of the rage he had awakened. In those twitching fists and that white, writhen face he recognized the signs of passion that might, on a second’s notice, leap to murder. And, shot through with panic, he now retreated, like the coward he was, though with the sneer still on his thin and cruel lips.

“Get your time!” he commanded, with crude brutality. “Go, get it at once. You’re lucky to get off so easily. If Flint knew this, you’d land behind bars. But we want no scenes here. Get your money from Sanderson, and clear out. Your job ended the minute my hand touched that book in your pocket!”

Still Armstrong made no reply. Still he remained there, dazed and stricken, pallid as milk, a wild and terrible light in his blue eyes.

An ugly murmur rose. Two or three of his fellow-workmen had come drifting down the shop, toward the scene of altercation. Another joined them, and another. Not one of them but hated Herzog with a bitter animosity. And now perhaps, the time was come to pay a score or two.

But Armstrong, suddenly lifting his head, faced them all, his comrades. His mind, quick-acting, had realized that, now his possession of the book had been discovered, his chances of discovering anything more, at the works, had utterly vanished. Even though he should remain, he could do nothing there. If he were to act, it must be from the outside, now, following the trend of events, dogging each development, striving in hidden, devious ways—violent ways, perhaps—to pull down this horrible edifice of enslavement ere it should whelm and crush the world.

So, acting as quickly as he had thought, and now ignoring the man Herzog as though he had never existed, Armstrong faced his fellows.

“It’s all right, boys,” said he, quite slowly, his voice seeming to come from a distance, his tones forced and unnatural. “It’s all right, every way. I’m caught with the goods. Don’t any of you butt in. Don’t mix with my trouble. For once I’m glad this is a scab shop, otherwise there might be a strike, here, and worse Hell to pay than there will be otherwise. I’m done. I’ll get my time, and quit. But—remember one thing, you’ll understand some day what this is all about.

“I’m glad to have worked with you fellows, the past few months. You’re all right, every one of you. Good-bye, and remember—”

“Here, you men, get back to work!” cried Herzog, suddenly. “No hand-shaking here, and no speech-making. This man’s a sneak-thief and he’s fired, that’s all there is to it. Now, get onto your job! The first man that puts up a complaint about it, can get through, too!”

For a moment they glowered at him, there in the white-lighted glare of the big shop. A fight, even then, was perilously near, but Armstrong averted it by turning away.

“I’m done.” he repeated. He gathered up a few tools that belonged to him, personally, gave one look at his comrades, waved a hand at them, and then, followed by Herzog, strode off down the long aisle, toward the door.

“Herzog,” said he, calmly and with cold emphasis, “listen to this.”

“Get out! Get your time, I tell you, and go!” repeated the bully. “To Hell with you! Clear out of here!”

“I’m going,” the young man answered. “But before I do, remember this; you grazed death, just now. Well for you, Herzog, almighty well for you, my temper didn’t best me. For remember, you struck me and called me ‘thief’—and that sort of thing can’t be forgotten, ever, even though we live a thousand years.

“Remember, Herzog—not now, but sometime. Remember that one word—sometime! That’s all!”

With no further speech, and while Herzog still stood there by the shop door, sneering at him, Armstrong turned and passed out. A few minutes later he had been paid off, had packed his knapsack with his few belongings, and was outside the big palisade, striding along the hard and glaring road toward the station.

“I did it,” his one overmastering thought was. “Thank heaven, I did it! I held my temper and my tongue, didn’t kill that spawn of Hell, and saved the whole situation. I’m out of a job, true enough, and out of the plant; but after all, I’m free—and I know what’s in the wind!

“There’s yet hope. There’ll be a way, a way to do this work! What a man must do, he can do!”

Up came Armstrong’s chin, as he walked. His shoulders squared, with strength and purpose, and his stride swung into the easy machine gait that had already carried him so many thousand miles along the hard and bitter highways of the world.

As he strode away, on the long road toward he knew not what, words seemed to form and shape in his strengthened and refortified mind—words for long years forgotten—words that he once had heard at his mother’s knee:

“He that ruleth his spirit is better than he that taketh a city!”

CHAPTER X.

A GLIMPSE AT THE PARASITES.

The Longmeadow Country Club, on the Saturday afternoon following Armstrong’s abrupt dismissal, was a scene of gaiety and beauty without compare. Set in broad acres of wood and lawn, the club-house proudly dominated far-flung golf-links and nearer tennis-courts. Shining motors stood parked on the plaza before the club garage, each valued at several years’ wages of a workingman. Men and women—exploiters all, or parasites—elegantly and coolly clad in white, smote the swift sphere upon the tennis-court, with jest and laughter. Others, attended by caddies—mere proletarian scum, bent beneath the weight of cleeks and brassies—moved across the smooth-cropped links, kept in condition by grazing sheep and by steam-rollers. On putting-green and around bunkers these idlers struggled with artificial difficulties, while in shops and mines and factories, on railways and in the blazing Hells of stoke-holes, men of another class, a slave-class, labored and agonized, toiled and died that these might wear fine linen and spend the long June afternoon in play.

From the huge, cobble-stone chimney of the Country Club, upwafting smoke told of the viands now preparing for the idlers’ dinner, after sport—rich meats and dainties of the rarest. In the rathskeller some of the elder and more indolent men were absorbing alcohol while music played and painted nymphs of abundant charms looked down from the wall-frescoes. Out on the broad piazzas, well sheltered by awnings from the rather ardent sun, men and women sat at spotless tables, dallying with drinks of rare hues and exalted prices. Cigarette-smoke wafted away on the pure breeze from over the Catskills, far to northwest, defiling the sweet breath of Nature, herself, with fumes of nicotine and dope. A Hungarian orchestra was playing the latest Manhattan ragtime, at the far end of the piazza. It was, all in all, a scene of rare refinement, characteristic to a degree of the efflorescence of American capitalism.

At one of the tables, obviously bored, sat Catherine Flint, only daughter of the Billionaire. A rare girl, she, to look upon—deep-bosomed and erect, dressed simply in a middy-blouse with a blue tie, a khaki skirt and low, rubber-soled shoes revealing a silk-stockinged ankle that would have attracted the enthusiastic attention of gentlemen in any city of the world. No hat disfigured the coiled and braided masses of coppery hair that circled her shapely head. A healthy tan on face and arms and open throat bespoke her keen devotion to all outdoor life. Her fingers, lithe and strong, were graced by but two rings—a monogram, of gold, and the betrothal ring that Maxim Waldron had put there, only three weeks before.

Impatience dominated her. One could see that, in the nervous tapping of her fingers on the cloth; the slight swing of her right foot as she sat there, one knee crossed over the other; the glance of her keen, gray eyes down the broad drive-way that led from the huge stone gates up to the club-house.

Beside her sat a nonentity in impeccable dress, dangling a monocle and trying to make small-talk, the while he dallied with a Bronx cocktail, costing more than a day’s wage for a childish flower-making slave of the tenements, and inhaled a Rotten Row cigarette, the “last word” from London in the tobacco line. To the sallies of this elegant, the girl replied by only monosyllables. Her glass was empty, nor would she have it filled, despite the exquisite’s entreaties. From time to time she glanced impatiently at the long bag of golf-sticks leaning against the porch rail; and, now and then, her eyes sought the little Cervine watch set in a leather wristlet on her arm.

“Inconsiderate of him, I’m sure—ah—to keep so magnificent a Diana waiting,” drawled her companion, blowing a lungful of thin blue smoke athwart the breeze. “Especially when you’re so deuced keen on doing the course before dinner. Now if I were the favored swain, wild horses wouldn’t keep me away.”

She made no answer, but turned a look of indifference on the shrimp beside her. Had he possessed the soul of a real man, he would have shriveled; but, being oblivious to all things save the pride of wealth and monstrous self-conceit, he merely snickered and reached for his cocktail—which, by the way, he was absorbing through a straw.

“I say, Miss Flint?” he presently began again, stirring the ice in the cocktail.

“Well?” she answered, curtly.

“If you—er—are really very, very impatient to have a go at the links, why wait for Wally? I—I should be only too glad to volunteer my services as your knight-errant, and all that sort of thing.”

“Thanks, awfully,” she answered, “but Mr. Waldron promised to go round the course with me, this afternoon, and I’ll wait.”

The impeccable one grinned fatuously, invited her again to have a drink—which she declined—and ordered another for himself, with profuse apologies for drinking alone; apologies which she hardly seemed to notice.

“Deuced bad form of Wally, I must say,” the gilded youth resumed, trying to make capital for himself, “to leave you in the lurch, this way!”

Silence from Catherine. The would-be interloper, feeling that he was on the wrong track, took counsel with himself and remained for a moment immersed in what he imagined to be thought. At last, however, with an oblique glance at his indifferent companion, he remarked.

“Devilish hard time women have in this world, you know! Don’t you sometimes wish you were a man?”

Her answer flashed back like a rapier:

“No! Do you wish you were?”

Stunned by this “facer,” Reginald Van Slyke gasped and stared. That he, a scion of the Philadelphia Van Slykes, in his own right worth two hundred million dollars—dollars ground out of the Kensington carpet-mill slaves by his grandfather—should be thus flouted and put upon by the daughter of Flint, that parvenu, absolutely floored him. For a moment he sat there speechless, unable even to reach for his drink; but presently some coherence returned. He was about to utter what he conceived to be a strong rejoinder, when the girl suddenly standing up, turned her back upon him and ignored him as completely as she might have ignored any of the menials of the club.

His irritated glance followed hers. There, far down the drive, just rounding the long turn by the artificial lake, a big blue motor car was speeding up the grade at a good clip. Van Slyke recognized it, and swore below his breath.

“Wally, at last, damn him!” he muttered. “Just when I was beginning to make headway with Kate!”

Vexed beyond endurance, he drummed on the cloth with angry fingers; but Catherine was oblivious. Unmindful of the merry-makers at the other tables, the girl waved her handkerchief at the swiftly-approaching motor. Waldron, from the back seat, raised an answering hand—though without enthusiasm. Above all things he hated demonstration, and the girl’s frank manner, free, unconventional and not yet broken to the harness of Mrs. Grundy, never failed to irritate him.

“Very incorrect for people in our set,” he often thought. “But for the present I can do nothing. Once she is my wife, ah, then I shall find means to curb her. For the present, however, I must let her have her head.”

Such was now his frame of mind as the long car slid under the porte-cochère and came to a stand. He would have infinitely preferred that the girl should wait his coming to her, on the piazza; but already she had slung her bag of sticks over her strong shoulder, and was down the steps to meet him. Her leave-taking of the incensed Van Slyke had been the merest nod.

“You’re late, Wally,” said she, smiling with her usual good humor, which had already quite dissipated her impatience. “Late, but I’ll forgive you, this time. I’m afraid we won’t have time to do all eighteen holes round. What kept you?”

“Business, business!” he answered, frowning. “Always the same old grind, Kate. You women don’t understand. I tell you, this slaving in Wall Street isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. I couldn’t get away till 11:30. Then, just had a quick bite of lunch, and broke every speed law in New York getting here. Do you forgive me?”

He had descended from the car, in speaking. They shook hands, while the chauffeur stood at attention and all the gossips on the piazza, scenting the possibility of a disagreement, craned discreetly eager necks and listened intently.

“Forgive you? Of course—this time, but never again,” the girl laughed. “Now, run along and get into your flannels. I’ll meet you on the driving green, in ten minutes. Not another second, mind, or—”

“I’ll be on the dot,” he answered. “Here, boy,” beckoning a caddy, “take Miss Flint’s sticks. And have mine carried to the green. Look sharp, now!”

Then, with a nod at the girl, he ran up the steps and vanished in the club-house, bound for the locker-room.

Fifteen minutes the girl waited on the green, watching others drive off from the little tees and inwardly chafing to be in action. Fifteen, and then twenty, before Waldron finally appeared, immaculate in white, bare-armed and with a loose, checked cap shading his close-set eyes. The fact was, in addition to having changed his clothes, he had felt obliged to linger in the bar for a little Scotch; and one drink had meant another; and thus precious moments had sped.

But his smile was confident as he approached the green. Women, after all, he reflected, were meant to be kept waiting. They never appreciated a man who kept appointments exactly. Not less fatuous at heart, in truth, was he, than the unfortunate Van Slyke. But his manner was perfection as he saluted her and bade the caddy build their tees.

The girl, however, was now plainly vexed. Her mouth had drawn a trifle tight and the tilt of her chin was determined. Her eyes were far from soft, as she surveyed this delinquent fiancé.

“I don’t like you a bit, today, Wally,” said she, as he deliberated over the club-bag, choosing a driver. “This makes twice you’ve kept me waiting. I warn you don’t let it happen again!”

Under the seeming banter of her tone lurked real resentment. But he, with a smile—partly due to a finger too much Scotch—only answered, in a low tone:

“You’re adorable, today, Kate! The combination of fresh air and annoyance has painted the most wonderful roses on your cheeks!”

She shrugged her shoulders with a little motion she had inherited from French ancestry, stooped, set her golf ball on the little mound of sand, exactly to suit her, and raised her driver on high.

“Nine holes,” said she, “and I’m going to beat you, today!”

He frowned a little at the spirit of the threat, for any self-assertion in a woman crossed his grain; but soon forgot his pique in admiration of the drive.

Swishing, her club flashed down in a quick circle. Crack! It struck the gutta-percha squarely. The little white sphere zipped away like a rocket, rose in a far trajectory, up, up, toward the water-hazard at the foot of the grassy slope, then down in a long curve.

Even while the girl’s cry of “Fore!” was echoing across the green, the ball struck earth, ricochetted and sped on, away, across the turf, till it came to rest not twenty yards from the putting green of the first hole.

“Wheeoo!” whistled Waldron. “Some drive. I guess you’re going to make good your threat, today, Kate of my heart!”

The smile she flashed at him showed that her resentment had, for the moment, been forgotten.

“Come on, Wally, now let’s see what you can do,” said she, starting off down the slope, while her meek caddy tagged at a respectful distance.

Waldron, thus adjured, teed up and swung at the ball. But the Scotch had by no means steadied his aim. He foozled badly and broke his pet driver, into the bargain. The steel head of it flew farther even than the ball, which moved hardly ten yards.

“Damn!” he muttered, under his breath, choosing another stick and glancing with real irritation at Catherine’s lithe, splendidly poised figure already some distance down the slope.

His second stroke was more successful, nearly equalling hers. But her advantage, thus early won, was not destined to be lost again. And as the game proceeded, Waldron’s temper grew steadily worse and worse.

Thus began, for these two people, an hour destined to be fraught with such pregnant developments—an hour which, in its own way, vitally bore on the great loom now weaving warp and woof of world events.

CHAPTER XI.

THE END OF TWO GAMES.

Trivial events sometimes precipitate catastrophies. It has been said that had James MacDonald not left the farm gate open, at Hugomont, Waterloo might have ended otherwise. So now, the rupture between Catherine Flint and Maxim Waldron was precipitated by a single unguarded oath.

It was at the ninth hole, down back of the Terrace Woods bunker. Waldron, heated by exercise and the whiskey he had drunk, had already dismissed the caddies and had undertaken to carry the clubs, himself, hoping—man-fashion—to steal a kiss or two from Catherine, along the edge of the close-growing oaks and maples. But all his plans went agley, for Catherine really made good and beat him, there, by half a dozen strokes; and as her little sphere, deftly driven by the putting-iron gripped in her brown, firm hands, rolled precisely over the cropped turf and fell into the tinned hole, the man ejaculated a perfectly audible “Hell!”

She stood erect and faced him, with a singular expression in those level gray eyes—eyes the look of which could allure or wither, could entice or command.

“Wally,” said she, “did you swear?”

“I—er—why, yes,” he stammered, taken aback and realizing, despite his chagrin, how very poor and unsportsmanlike a figure he was cutting.

“I don’t like it,” she returned. “Not a little bit, Wally. It isn’t game, and it isn’t manly. You must respect me, now and always. I can’t have profanity, and I won’t.”

He essayed lame apologies, but a sudden, hot anger seemed to have possessed him, in presence of this free, independent, exacting woman—this woman who, worst of all, had just beaten him at the game of all games he prided himself on playing well. And despite his every effort, she saw through the veil of sheer, perfunctory courtesy; and seeing, flushed with indignation.

“Wally,” she said in a low, quiet tone, fixing a singular gaze upon him, “Wally, I don’t know what to make of you lately. The other night at Idle Hour, you hardly looked at me. You and father spent the whole evening discussing some business or other—”

“Most important business, my dear girl, I do assure you,” protested Waldron, trying to steady his voice. “Most vitally—”

“No matter about that,” she interposed. “It could have been abridged, a trifle. I barely got six words out of you, that evening; and let me tell you, Wally, a woman never forgets neglect. She may forgive it; but forget it, never!”

“Oh, well, if you put it that way—” he began, but checked himself in time to suppress the cutting rejoinder he had at his tongue’s end.

“I do, and it’s vital, Wally,” she answered. “It’s all part and parcel of some singular kind of change that’s been coming over you, lately, like a blight. You haven’t been yourself, at all, these few days past. Something or other, I don’t know what, has been coming between us. You’ve got something else on your mind, beside me—something bigger and more important to you than I am—and—and—”

He pulled out his gold cigar-case, chose and lighted a cigar to steady his nerve, and faced her with a smile—the worst tactic he could possibly have chosen in dealing with this woman. Supremely successful in handling men, he lacked finesse and insight with the other sex; and now that lack, in his moment of need, was bringing him moment by moment nearer the edge of catastrophe.

“I don’t like it at all, Waldron,” she resumed, again. “You were late, the other night, in taking me to the Flower Show. You were late, today, for our appointment here; and the ten minutes I gave you to get ready in, stretched out to twenty before you—”

He interrupted her with a gesture of uncontrollable vexation.

“Really, my dear Kate,” he exclaimed, “if you—er—insist on holding me to account for every moment—”

“You’ve been drinking, too, a little,” she kept on. “And you know I detest it! And just now, when I beat you in a square game, you so far forgot yourself as to swear. Now, Waldron—”

“Oh, puritanical, eh?” he sneered, ignoring the danger signals in her eyes. Even yet there might have been some chance of avoiding shipwreck, had he heeded those twin beacons, humbled himself, made amends by due apology and promised reformation. For though Catherine never had truly loved this man, some years older than herself and of radically different character, still she liked and respected him, and found him—by his very force and dominance—far more to her taste than the insipid hangers-on, sons of fortune or fortune-hunters, who, like the sap-brained Van Slyke, made up so great a part of her “set.”

So, all might yet have been amended; but this was not to be. Never yet had “Tiger” Waldron bowed the neck to living man or woman. Dominance was his whole scheme of life. Though he might purr, politely enough, so long as his fur was smoothed the right way, a single backward stroke set his fangs gleaming and unsheathed every sabre-like claw. And now this woman, his fiancée though she was, her beauty dear to him and her charm most fascinating, her fortune much desired and most of all, an alliance with her father—now this woman, despite all these considerations, had with a few incisive words ruffled his temper beyond endurance.

So great was his agitation that, despite his strongest instinct of saving, he flung away the scarcely-tasted cigar.

“Kate,” he exclaimed, his very tongue thick with the rage he could not quell, “Kate, I can’t stand this! You’re going too far. What do you know of men’s work and men’s affairs? Who are you, to judge of their times of coming and going, their obligations, their habits and man of life? What do you understand—?”

“It’s obvious,” she replied with glacial coldness, “that I don’t understand you, and never have. I have been living in a dream, Wally; seeing you through the glass of illusion; not reality. After all, you’re like all men—just the same, no different. Idealism, self-sacrifice, con true nobility of character, where are these, in you? What is there but the same old selfishness, the same innate masculine conceit and—”

“No more of this, Kate!” cried the financier, paling a little. “No more! I can’t have it! I won’t—it’s impossible! You—you don’t understand, I tell you. In your narrow, untrained, woman’s way, you try to set up standards for me; try to judge me, and dictate to me. Some old puritanical streak in you is cropping out, some blue-law atavism, some I know not what, that rebels against my taking a drink—like every other man. That cries out against my letting slip a harmless oath—again, like every other man that lives and breathes. Every man, that is, who is a man, a real man, not a dummy! If you’ve been mistaken in me, how much more have I, in you! And so—”

“And so,” she took the very words from his pale lips, “we’ve both been mistaken, that’s all. No, no,” she forbade him with raised hand, as he would have interrupted with protests. “No, you needn’t try to convince me otherwise, now. A thousand volumes of speeches, after this, couldn’t do it. An hour’s insight into the true depths of a man’s character—yes, even a moment’s—perfectly suffices to show the truth. You’ve just drawn the veil aside, Wally, for me, and let me look at the true picture. All that I’ve known and thought of you, so far, has been sham and illusion. Now, I know you!”

“You—you don’t, Catherine!” he exclaimed, half in anger, half contrition, terrified at last by the imminent break between them, by the thought of losing this rich flower from the garden of womanhood, this splendid financial and social prize. “I—I’ve done wrong, Kate. I admit it. But, truly—”

“No more,” said she, and in her voice sounded a command he knew, at last, was quite inexorable. “I’m not like other women of our set, perhaps. I can’t be bought and sold, Wally, with money and position. I can’t marry a man, and have to live with him, if he shows himself petty, or small, or narrow in any way. I must be free, free as air, as long as I live. Even in marriage, I must be free. Freedom can only come with the union of two souls that understand and help and inspire each other. Anything else is slavery—and worse!”

She shuddered, and for a moment turned half away from him, as, now contrite enough for the minute, he stood there looking at her with dazed eyes. For a second the idea came to him that he must take her in his arms, there in the edge of the woods, burn kisses on her ripe mouth, win her back to him by force, as he had won all life’s battles. He would not, could not, let this prize escape him now. A wave of desire surged through his being. He took a step toward her, his trembling arms open to seize her lithe, seductive body. But she, retreating, held him away with repellant palms.

“No, no, no!” she cried. “Not now—never that, any more! I must be free, Wally—free as air!”

She raised her face toward the vast reaches of the sky, breathed deep and for a moment closed her eyes, as though bathing her very soul in the sweet freedom of the out-of-doors.

“Free as air!” she whispered. “Let me go!”

He started violently. Her simile had struck him like a lash.

“Free—as what?” he exclaimed hoarsely. “As air? But—but there’s no such freedom, I tell you! Air isn’t free any more—or won’t be, soon! It will be everything, anything but free, before another year is gone! Free as air? You—you don’t understand! Your father and I—we shall soon own the air. Free as air? Yes, if you like! For that—that means you, too, must belong to me!”

Again he sought to take her, to hold her and overmaster her. But she, now wide-eyed with a kind of sudden terror at this latest outbreak, this seeming madness on his part, which she could nowise fathom or comprehend, retreated ever more and more, away from him.

Then suddenly with a quick effort, she stripped off the splendid, blazing diamond from her finger, and held it out to him.

“Wally,” said she, calm now and quite herself again, “Wally, let’s be friends. Just that and nothing more. Dear, good, companionable friends, as we used to be, long years ago, before this madness seized us—this chimera of—of love!”

As a bull charging, is struck to the heart by the sword of the matador, and stops in his tracks, motionless and dazed before he falls, so “Tiger” Waldron stopped, wholly stunned by this abrupt and crushing denouement.

For a moment, man and woman faced each other. Not a word was spoken. Catherine had no word to say; and Waldron, though his lips worked, could bring none to utterance. Then their eyes met; and his lowered.

“Good-bye,” said she quietly. “Good-bye forever, as my betrothed. When we meet again, Wally, it will be as friends, and nothing more. And now, let me go. Don’t come with me. I prefer to be alone. I’d rather walk, a bit, and think—and then go back quietly to the club-house, and so home, in my car. Don’t follow me. Here—take this, and—good-bye.”

Mechanically he accepted the gleaming jewel. Mechanically, like a man without sense or reason, he watched her walk away from him, upright and strong and lithe, voluptuous and desirable in every motion of that splendid body, now lost to him forever. Then all at once, entering a woodland path that led by a short cut back to the club-house, she vanished from his sight.

Vanished, without having even so much as turned to look at him again, or wave that firm brown hand.

Then, seeming to waken from his daze, “Tiger” laughed, a terrible and cruel laugh; and then he flung a frightful blasphemy upon the still June air; and then he dashed the wondrous diamond to earth, and stamped and dug it with a perfect frenzy of rage into the soft mold.

And, last of all, with lowered head and lips that moved in fearful curses, he crashed away into the woods, away from the path where the girl was, away from the club-house, away, away, thirsting for solitude and time to quell his passion, salve his wounded pride and ponder measures of terrible revenge.

The diamond ring, crushed into the earth, and the golf clubs, lying where they had fallen from the disputants’ hands, now remained there as melancholy reminders of the double game—love and golf—which had so suddenly ended in disaster.

CHAPTER XII.

ON THE GREAT HIGHWAY.

As violently rent from his job as Maxim Waldron had been torn from his alliance with Catherine, Gabriel Armstrong met the sudden change in his affairs with far more equanimity than the financier could muster. Once the young electrician’s first anger had subsided—and he had pretty well mastered it before he had reached the Oakwood Heights station—he began philosophically to turn the situation in his mind, and to rough out his plans for the future.

“Things might be worse, all round,” he reflected, as he strode along at a smart pace. “During the seven months I’ve been working for these pirates, I’ve managed to pay off the debt I got into at the time of the big E. W. strike, and I’ve got eighteen dollars or a little more in my pocket. My clothes will do a while longer. Even though Flint blacklists me all over the country, as he probably will, I can duck into some job or other, somewhere. And most important of all, I know what’s due to happen in America—I’ve seen that note-book! Let them do what they will, they can’t take that knowledge away from me!”

The outlook, on the whole, was cheering. Gabriel broke into a whistle, as he swung along the highway, and slashed cheerfully with his heavy stick at the dusty bushes by the roadside. A vigorous, pleasing figure of a man he made, striding onward in his blue flannel shirt and corduroys, stout boots making light of distance, somewhat rebellious black hair clustering under his cap, blue eyes clear and steady as the sunlight itself. There must have been a drop of Irish blood somewhere or other in his veins, to have given him that ruddy cheek, those eyes, that hair, that quick enthusiasm and that swiftness to anger—then, by reaction, that quick buoyancy which so soon banished everything but courageous optimism from his hot heart.

Thus the man walked, all his few worldly belongings—most precious among them his union card and his red Socialist card—packed in the knapsack strapped to his broad shoulders. And as he walked, he formulated his plans.

“Niagara for mine,” he decided. “It’s there these hellions mean to start their devilish work of enslaving the whole world. It’s there I want to be, and must be, to follow the infernal job from the beginning and to nail it, when the right time comes. I’ll put in a day or two with my old friend, Sam Underwood, up in the Bronx, and maybe tell him what’s doing and frame out the line of action with him. But after that, I strike for Niagara—yes, and on foot!”

This decision came to him as strongly desirable. Not for some time, he knew, could the actual work of building the Air Trust plant be started at Niagara. Meanwhile, he wanted to keep out of sight, as much as possible. He wanted, also to save every cent. Again, his usual mode of travel had always been either to ride the rods or “hike” it on shanks’ mare. Bitterly opposed to swelling the railways’ revenues by even a penny, Armstrong in the past few years of his life had done some thousands of miles, afoot, all over the country. His best means of Socialist propaganda, he had found, was in just such meanderings along the highways and hedges of existence—a casual job, here or there, for a day, a week, a month—then, quick friendships; a little talk; a few leaflets handed to the intelligent, if he could find any. He had laced the continent with such peregrinations, always sowing the seed of revolution wherever he had passed; getting in touch with the Movement all over the republic; keeping his finger on the pulse of ever-growing, always-strengthening Socialism.

Such had his habits long been. And now, once more adrift and jobless, but with the most tremendous secret of the ages in his possession, he naturally turned to the comfort and the calming influence of the broad highway, in his long journey towards the place where he was to meet, in desperate opposition, the machinations of the Air Trust magnates.

“It’s the only way for me,” he decided, as he turned into the road leading toward Saint George and the Manhattan Ferry. “Flint and Herzog will be sure to put Slade and the Cosmos people after me. Blacklisting will be the least of what they’ll try to do. They’ll use slugging tactics, sure, if they get a chance, or railroad me to some Pen or other, if possible. My one best bet is to keep out of their way; and I figure I’m ten times safer on the open road, with a few dollars to stave off a vagrancy charge, and with two good fists and this stick to keep ‘em at a distance, than I would be on the railroads or in cheap dumps along the way.

“The last place they’ll ever think of looking for me will be the big outdoors. Their idea of hunting for a workman is to dragnet the back rooms of saloons—especially if they’re after a Socialist. That’s the limit of their intelligence, to connect Socialism and beer. I’ll beat ‘em; I’ll hike—and it’s a hundred to one I land in Niagara with more cash than when I started, with better health, more knowledge, and the freedom that, alone, can save the world now from the most damnable slavery that ever threatened its existence!”

Thus reasoning, with perfect clarity and a long-headedness that proved him a strategist at four-and-twenty, Gabriel Armstrong whistled a louder note as he tramped away to northward, away from the hateful presence of Herzog, away from the wage-slavery of the Oakwood Heights plant, away—with that precious secret in his brain—toward the far scene of destined warfare, where stranger things were to ensue than even he could possibly conceive.

Saturday morning found him, his visit with Underwood at an end, already twenty miles or more from the Bronx River, marching along through Haverstraw, up the magnificent road that fringes the Hudson—now hidden from the mighty river behind a forest-screen, now curving on bold abutments right above the sun-kissed expanses of Haverstraw Bay, here more than two miles from wooded shore to shore.

At eleven, he halted at a farm house, some miles north of the town, got a job on the woodpile, and astonished the farmer by the amount of birch he could saw in an hour. He took his pay in the shape of a bountiful dinner, and—after half an hour’s smoke and talk with the farmer, to whom he gave a few pamphlets from the store in his knapsack—said good-bye to all hands and once more set his face northward for the long hike through much wilder country, to West Point, where he hoped to pass the night.

Thus we must leave him, for a while. For now the thread of our narration, like the silken cord in the Labyrinth of Crete, leads us back to the Country Club at Longmeadow, the scene, that very afternoon, of the sudden and violent rupture between the financier and Catherine Flint.

Catherine, her first indignation somewhat abated, and now vastly relieved at the realization that she indeed was free from her loveless and long-since irksome alliance with Waldron, calmly enough returned to the club-house. Head well up, and eyes defiant, she walked up the broad steps and into the office. Little cared she whether the piazza gossips—The Hammer and Anvil Club, in local slang—divined the quarrel or not. The girl felt herself immeasurably indifferent to such pettinesses as prying small talk and innuendo. Let people know, or not, as might be, she cared not a whit. Her business was her own. No wagging of tongues could one hair’s breadth disturb that splendid calm of hers.

The clerk, behind the desk, smiled and nodded at her approach.

“Please have my car brought round to the porte-cochère, at once?” she asked. “And tell Herrick to be sure there’s plenty of gas for a long run. I’m going through to New York.”

“So soon?” queried the clerk. “I’m sure your father will be disappointed, Miss Flint. He’s just wired that he’s coming out tomorrow, to spend Sunday here. He particularly asks to have you remain. See here?”

He handed her a telegram. She glanced it over, then crumpled it and tossed it into the office fire-place.

“I’m sorry,” she answered. “But I can’t stay. I must get back, to-night. I’ll telegraph father not to come. A blank, please?”

The clerk handed her one. She pondered a second, then wrote:

Dear Father:

A change of plans makes me return home at once. Please wait and see me there. I’ve something important to talk over with you.

Affectionately,

Kate.

Ordinarily people try to squeeze their message to ten words, and count and prune and count again; but not so, Catherine. For her, a telegram had never contained any space limit. It meant less to her than a post-card to you or me. Not that the girl was consciously extravagant. No, had you asked her, she would have claimed rigid economy—she rarely, for instance, paid more than a hundred dollars for a morning gown, or more than a thousand for a ball-dress. It was simply that the idea of counting words had never yet occurred to her. And so now, she complacently handed this verbose message to the clerk, who—thoroughly well-trained—understood it was to be charged on her father’s perfectly staggering monthly bill.

“Very well, Miss Flint,” said he. “I’ll send this at once. And your car will be ready for you in ten minutes—or five, if you like?”

“Ten will do, thank you,” she answered. Then she crossed to the elevator and went up to her own suite of rooms on the second floor, for her motor-coat and veils.

“Free, thank heaven!” she breathed, with infinite relief, as she stood before the tall mirror, adjusting these for the long trip. “Free from that man forever. What a narrow escape! If things hadn’t happened just as they did, and if I hadn’t had that precious insight into Wally’s character—good Lord!—catastrophe! Oh, I haven’t been so happy since I—since—why, I’ve never been so happy in all my life!

“Wally, dear boy,” she added, turning toward the window as though apostrophizing him in reality, “now we can be good friends. Now all the sham and pretense are at an end, forever. As a friend, you may be splendid. As a husband—oh, impossible!”

Lighter of heart than she had been for years, was she, with the added zest of the long spin through the beauty of the June country before her—down among the hills and cliffs, among the forests and broad valleys—down to New York again, back to the father and the home she loved better than all else in the world.

In this happy frame of mind she presently entered the low-hung, swift-motored car, settled herself on the luxurious cushions and said “Home, at once!” to Herrick.

He nodded, but did not speak. He felt, in truth, somewhat incapable of quite incoherent speech. Not having expected any service till next day, he had foregathered with others of his ilk in the servants’ bar, below-stairs, and had with wassail and good cheer very effectively put himself out of commission.

But, somewhat sobered by this quick summons, he had managed to pull together. Now, drunk though he was, he sat there at the wheel, steady enough—so long as he held on to it—and only by the redness of his face and a certain glassy look in his eye, betrayed the fact of his intoxication. The girl, busy with her farewells as the car drew up for her, had not observed him. At the last moment Van Slyke waved a foppish hand at her, and smirked adieux. She acknowledged his good-bye with a smile, so happy was she at the outcome of her golf-game; then cast a quick glance up at the club windows, fearing to see the harsh face of Wally peeping down at her in anger.

But he was nowhere to be seen; and now, with a sudden acceleration of the powerful six-cylinder engine, the big gray car moved smoothly forward. Growling in its might, it swung in a wide circle round the sweep of the drive, gathered speed and shot away down the grade toward the stone gates of the entrance, a quarter mile distant.

Presently it swerved through these, to southward. Club-house, waving handkerchiefs and all vanished from Kate’s view.

“Faster, Herrick,” she commanded, leaning forward, “I must be home by half past five.”

Again he nodded, and notched spark and throttle down. The car, leaping like a wild creature, began to hum at a swift clip along the smooth, white road toward Newburgh on the Hudson.

Thirty miles an hour the speedometer showed, then thirty-five and forty. Again the drunken chauffeur, still master of his machine despite the poison pulsing in his dazed brain, snicked the little levers further down. Forty-five, fifty, fifty-five, the figures on the dial showed.

Now the exhaust ripped in a crackling staccato, like a machine gun, as the chauffeur threw out the muffler. Behind, a long trail of dust rose, whirling in the air. Catherine, a sportswoman born, leaned back and smiled with keen pleasure, while her yellow veil, whipping sharply on the wind, let stray locks of that wonderful red-gold hair stream about her flushed face.

Thus she sped homeward, driven at a mad race by a man whose every sense was numbed and stultified by alcohol—homeward, along a road up which, far, far away, another man, keen, sober and alert, was trudging with a knapsack on his broad back, swinging a stick and whistling cheerily as he went.

Fate, that strange moulder of human destinies, what had it in store for these two, this woman and this man? This daughter of a billionaire, and this young proletarian?

Who could foresee, or, foreseeing, could believe what even now stood written on the Book of Destiny?

CHAPTER XIII.

CATASTROPHE!

For a time no danger seemed to threaten. Kate was not only fearless as a passenger, but equally intrepid at the wheel. Many a time and oft she had driven her father’s highest-powered car at dizzying speeds along worse roads than the one her machine was now following. Velocity was to her a kind of stimulant, wonderfully pleasurable; and now, realizing nothing of the truth that Herrick was badly the worse for liquor, she leaned back in the tonneau, breathed the keen slashing air with delight, and let her eyes wander over the swiftly-changing panorama of forest, valley, lake and hill that, in ever new and more radiant beauty, sped away, away, as the huge car leaped down the smooth and rushing road.

Dust and pebbles flew in the wake of the machine, as it gathered velocity. Beneath it, the highway sped like an endless white ribbon, whirling back and away with smooth rapidity. No common road, this, but one which the State authorities had very obligingly built especially for the use of millionaires’ motor cars, all through the region of country-clubs, parks, bungalows and summer-resorts dotting the west shore region of the Hudson. Let the farmer truck his produce through mud and ruts, if he would. Let the country folk drive their ramshackle buggies over rocks and stumps, if they so chose. Nothing of that sort for millionaires! No, they must have macadam and smooth, long curves, easy grades and—where the road swung high above the gleaming river—retaining walls to guard them from plunging into the palisaded abyss below.

At just such a place it was, where the road made a sharper turn than any the drunken chauffeur had reckoned on, that catastrophe leaped out to shatter the rushing car.

Only a minute before, Kate—a little uneasy now, at the truly reckless speeding of the driver, and at the daredevil way in which he was taking curves without either sounding his siren or reducing speed—had touched him on the shoulder, with a command: “Not quite so fast, Herrick! Be careful!”

His only answer had been a drunken laugh.

“Careful nothing!” he slobbered, to himself. “You wanted speed—an’ now—hc!—b’Jesus, you get—hc!—speed! I ain’t ‘fraid—are—hc!—you?”

She had not heard the words, but had divined their meaning.

“Herrick!” she commanded sharply, leaning forward. “What’s the matter with you? Obey me, do you hear? Not so fast!”

A whiff of alcoholic breath suddenly told her the truth. For a second she sat there, as though petrified, with fear now for the first time clutching at her heart.

“Stop at once!” she cried, gripping the man by the collar of his livery. “You—you’re drunk, Herrick! I—I’ll have you discharged, at once, when we get home. Stop, do you hear me? You’re not fit to drive. I’ll take the wheel myself!”

But Herrick, hopelessly under the influence of the poison, which had now produced its full effect, paid no heed.

“Y’—can’t dri’ thish car!” he muttered, in maudlin accents. “Too big—too heavy for—hc!—woman! I—I dri’ it all right, drunk or sober! Good chauffeur—good car—I know thish car! You won’t fire me—hc!—for takin’ drink or two, huh? I drive you all ri’—drive you to New York or to—hc!—Hell! Same thing, no difference, ha! ha!—I—”

A sudden blaze of rage crimsoned the girl’s face. In all her life she never had been thus spoken to. For a second she clenched her fist, as though to strike down this sodden brute there in the seat before her—a feat she would have been quite capable of. But second thought convinced her of the peril of such an act. Ahead of them a long down-grade stretched away, away, to a turn half-hidden under the arching greenery. As the car struck this slope, it leaped into ever greater speed; and now, under the erratic guidance of the lolling wretch at the wheel, it began to sway in long, unsteady curves, first toward one ditch, then the other.

Another woman would have screamed; might even have tried to jump out. But Kate was not of the hysteric sort. More practical, she.

“I’ve got to climb over into the front seat,” she realized in a flash, “and shut off the current—cut the power off—stop the car!”

On the instant, she acted. But as she arose in the tonneau, Herrick, sensing her purpose, turned toward her in the sudden rage of complete intoxication.

“Naw—naw y’ don’t!” he shouted, his face perfectly purple with fury and drink. “No woman—he!—runs this old boat while I’m aboard, see? Go on, fire me! I don’t give—damn! But you don’t run—car! Sit down! I run car—New York or Hell—no matter which! I—”

Hurtling down the slope like a runaway comet, now wholly out of control, the powerful gray car leaped madly at the turn.

Catherine, her heart sick at last with terror, caught a second’s glimpse of forest, on one hand; of a stone wall with tree-tops on some steep abyss below, just grazing it, on the other. Through these trees she saw a momentary flash of water, far beneath.

Then the leaping front wheels struck a cluster of loose pebbles, at the bend.

Wrenched from the drunkard’s grip, the steering wheel jerked sharply round.

A skidding—a crash—a cry!

Over the roadway, vacant now, floated a tenuous cloud of dust and gasoline-vapor, commingled.

In the retaining-wall at the left, a jagged gap appeared. Suddenly, far below, toward the river, a crashing detonation shattered harsh echoes from shore to shore.

Came a quick flash of light; then thick, black, greasy smoke arose, and, wafting through the treetops, drifted away on the warm wind of that late June afternoon.

A man, some quarter of a mile to southward, on the great highway, paused suddenly at sound of this explosion.

For a moment he stood there listening acutely, a knotted stick in hand, his flannel shirt, open at the throat, showing a brown and corded neck. The heavy knapsack on his shoulders seemed no burden to that rugged strength, as he stood, poised and eager, every sense centered in keen attention.

“Trouble ahead, there, by the Eternal!” he suddenly exclaimed. His eye had just caught sight of the first trailing wreaths of smoke, from up the cliff. “An auto’s gone to smash, down there, or I’m a plute!”

He needed no second thought to hurl him forward to the rescue. At a smart pace he ran, halloo’ing loudly, to tell the victims—should they still live—that help was at hand. At his right, extended the wall. At his left, a grove of sugar-maples, sparsely set, climbed a long slope, over the ridge of which the descending sun glowed warmly. Somewhat back from the road, a rough shack which served as a sugar-house for the spring sap-boiling, stood with gaping door, open to all the winds that blew. These things he noted subconsciously, as he ran.

Then, all at once, as he rounded a sharp turn, he drew up with a cry.

“Down the cliff!” he exclaimed. “Knocked the wall clean out, and plunged! Holy Mackinaw, what a smash!”

In a moment he had reached the scene of the catastrophe. His quick eye took in, almost at a glance, the skidding mark of the wheels, the ragged rent in the wall, the broken limbs of trees below.

“Some wreck!” he ejaculated, dropping his stick and throwing off his knapsack. “Hello, Hello, down there!” he loudly hailed, scrambling through the gap.

From below, no answer.

A silence, as of death, broken only by the echo of his own voice, was all that greeted his wild cry.CHAPTER XIV.

THE RESCUE.

Gabriel Armstrong leaped, rather than clambered, through the gap in the wall, and, following the track of devastation through the trees, scrambled down the steep slope that led toward the Hudson.

The forest looked as though a car of Juggernaut had passed that way. Limbs and saplings lay in confusion, larger trees showed long wounds upon their bark, and here and there pieces of metal—a gray mud-guard, a car door, a wind-shield frame, with shattered plate glass still clinging to it—lay scattered on the precipitous declivity. Beside these, hanging to a branch, Gabriel saw a gaily-striped auto robe; and, further down, a heavy, fringed shawl.

Again he shouted, holding to a tree-trunk at the very edge of a cliff of limestone, and peering far down into the abyss where the car had taken its final plunge. Still no answer. But, from below, the heavy smoke still rose. And now, peering more keenly, Armstrong caught sight of the wreck itself.

“There it is, and burning like the pit of Hell!” he exclaimed. “And—what’s that, under it? A man?”

He could not distinctly make out, so thick the foliage was. But it seemed to him that, from under the jumbled wreckage of the blazing machine, something protruded, something that suggested a human form, horribly mangled.

“Here’s where I go down this cliff, whatever happens!” decided Gabriel. And, acting on the instant, he began swinging himself down from tree to bush, from shrub to tuft of grass, clinging wherever handhold or foothold offered, digging his stout boots into every cleft and cranny of the precipice.

The height could not have been less than a hundred and fifty feet. By dint of wonderful strength and agility, and at the momentary risk of falling, himself, to almost certain death, Gabriel descended in less than ten minutes. The last quarter of the distance he practically fell, sliding at a tremendous rate, with boulders and loose earth cascading all about him in a shower.

He landed close by the flaming ruin.

“Lucky this isn’t in the autumn, in the dry season!” thought he, as he approached. “If it were, this whole cliff-side, and the woods beyond, would be a roaring furnace. Some forest-fire, all right, if the woods weren’t wet and full of sap!”

Parting the brush, he made his way as close to the car as the intense heat would let him. The gasoline-tank, he understood, had burst with the shock, and, taking fire, had wrapped the car in an Inferno of unquenchable flame. Now, the woodwork was entirely gone; and of the wheels, as the long machine lay there on its back, only a few blazing spokes were left. The steel chassis and the engine were red-hot, twisted and broken as though a giant hammer had smitten them on some Vulcanic anvil.

“There’s a few thousand dollars gone to the devil!” thought he. But his mind did not dwell on this phase of the disaster. Still he was hoping, against hope, that human life had not been dashed and roasted out, in the wreck. And again he shouted, as he worked his way to the other side of the machine—to the side which, seen from the cliff above, had seemed to show him that inert and mangled body.

All at once he stopped short, shielding his face with his hands, against the blaze.

“Good God!” he exclaimed; and involuntarily took off his cap, there in the presence of death.

That the man was dead, admitted of no question. Pinned under the heavy, glowing mass of metal, his body must already have been roasted to a char. The head could not be seen; but part of one shoulder and one arm protruded, with the coat burned off and the flesh horribly crackled; while, nearer Gabriel, a leg showed, with a regulation chauffeur’s legging, also burned to a crisp.

“Nothing for me to do, here,” said Gabriel aloud. “He’s past all human help, poor chap. I don’t imagine there can be anybody else in this wreck. I haven’t seen anybody, and nobody has answered my shouts. What’s to be done next?”

He pondered a moment, then, looking at the license plate of the machine—its enamel now half cracked off, but the numbers still legible—drew out his note-book and pencil and made a memo of the figures.

“Four-six-two-two, N.Y.,” he read, again verifying his numbers. “That will identify things. And now—the quicker I get back on the road again, and reach a telephone at West Point, the better.”

Accordingly, after a brief search through the bushes near at hand, for any other victim—a search which brought no results—he set to work once more to climb the cliff above him.

The fire, though still raging, was obviously dying down. In half an hour, he knew, it would be dead. There was no use in trying to extinguish it, for gasoline defies water, and no sand was to be had along that rocky river shore.

“Let her burn herself out,” judged Gabriel. “She can’t do any harm, now. The road for mine!”

He found the upward path infinitely more difficult than the downward, and was forced to make a long detour and do some hard climbing that left him spent and sweating, before he again approached the gap in the wall. Pausing here to breathe, a minute or two, he once more peered down at the still-smoking ruin far below. And, as he stood there all at once he thought he heard a sound not very far away to his right.

A sound—a groan, a half-inchoate murmur—a cry!

Instantly his every sense grew keen. Holding his breath he listened intently. Was it a cry? Or had the breeze but swayed one tree limb against another; or did some boatman’s hail, from far across the river, but drift upward to him on the cliff?

“Hello! Hello!” he shouted again. “Anybody there?”

Once more he listened; and now, once more, he heard the sound—this time he knew it was a cry for help!

“Where are you?” shouted he, plunging forward along the steep side of the cliff. “Where?”

No answer, save a groan.

“Coming! Coming!” he hailed loudly. Then, guided as it seemed by instinct, almost as much as by the vague direction of the moaning call, he ploughed his way through brush and briar, on rescue bent.

All at once he stopped short in his tracks, wild-eyed, a stammering exclamation on his lips.

“A woman!” he cried.

True. There, lying as though violently flung, a woman was half-crouched, half-prone behind the roots of a huge maple that leaned out far above a sheer declivity.

He saw torn clothing, through the foliage; a white hand, out-stretched and bleeding; a mass of golden-coppery hair that lay dishevelled on the bed of moss and last autumn’s leaves.

“A woman! Dying?” he thought, with a sudden stab of pity in his heart.

Then, forcing his way along, he reached her, and fell upon his knees at her side.

“Not dead! Not dying! Thank God!” he exclaimed. One glance showed him she would live. Though an ugly gash upon her forehead had bathed her face in blood, and though he knew not but bones were broken, he recognized the fact that she was now returning, fast, to consciousness.

Already she had opened her eyes—wild eyes, understanding nothing—and was staring up at him in dazed, blank terror. Then one hand came up to her face; and, even as he lifted her in both his powerful arms, she began to sob hysterically.

He knew the value of that weeping, and made no attempt to stop it. The overwrought nerves, he understood, must find some outlet. Asking no question, speaking no word—for Gabriel was a man of action, not speech—he gathered her up as though she had been a child. A tall woman, she; almost as tall as he himself, and proportioned like a Venus. Yet to him her weight was nothing.

Sure-footed, now, and bursting through the brambles with fine energy, he carried her to the gap in the wall, up through it, and so to the roadway itself.

“Where—where am I?” the woman cried incoherently. “O—what—where—?”

“You’re all right!” he exclaimed. “Just a little accident, that’s all. Don’t worry! I’ll take care of you. Just keep quiet, now, and don’t think of anything. You’ll be all right, in no time!”

But she still wept and cried out to know where she might be and what had happened. Obviously, Gabriel saw, her reason had not yet fully returned. His first aim must be to bathe her wound, find out what damage had been done, and keeping her quiet, try to get help.

Swiftly he thought. Here he and the woman were, miles from any settlement or house, nearly in the middle of a long stretch of road that skirted the river through dense woods. At any time a motor might come along; and then again, one might not arrive for hours. No dependence could be put on this. There was no telephone for a long distance back; and even had one been near he would not have ventured to leave the girl.

Could he carry her back to Fort Clinton, the last settlement he had passed through? Impossible! No man’s strength could stand such a tremendous task. And even had it been within Gabriel’s means, he would have chosen otherwise. For most of all the girl needed rest and quiet and immediate care. To bear her all that distance in his arms might produce serious, even fatal results.

“No!” he decided. “I must do what I can for her, here and now, and trust to luck to send help in an auto, down this road!”

His next thought was that bandages and wraps would be needed for her cut and to make her a bed. Instantly he remembered the shawl and the big auto-robe that he had seen caught among the trees.

“I must have those at once!” he realized. “When the machine went over the edge, they were thrown out, just as the girl was. A miracle she wasn’t carried down, with the car, and crushed or burned to death down there by the river, with that poor devil of a chauffeur!”

Laying her down in the soft grass along the wall, he ran back to where the wraps were, and, detaching them from the branches, quickly regained the road once more.

“Now for the old sugar-house in the maple-grove,” said he. “Poor shelter, but the best to be had. Thank heaven it’s fair weather, and warm!”

The task was awkward, to carry both the girl and the bulky robes, but Gabriel was equal to it She had by now regained some measure of rationality; and though very pale and shaken, manifested her nerve and courage by no longer weeping or asking questions.

Instead, she lay in his arms, eyes closed, with the blood stiffening on her face; and let him bear her whither he would. She seemed to sense his strength and mastery, his tender care and complete command of the situation. And, like a hurt and tired child, outworn and suffering, she yielded herself, unquestioningly, to his ministrations.

Thus Gabriel, the discharged, blacklisted, outcast rebel and proletarian, bore in his arms of mercy and compassion the only daughter of old Isaac Flint, his enemy, Flint the would-be master of the world.

Thus he bore the woman who had been betrothed to “Tiger” Waldron, unscrupulous and cruel partner in that scheme of dominance and enslavement.

Such was the meeting of this woman and this man. Thus, in his arms, he carried her to the old sugar-house.

And far below, the mighty river gleamed, unheeding the tragedy that had been enacted on its shores, unmindful of the threads of destiny even now being spun by the swift shuttles of Fate.

In the branches, above Gabriel and Catherine, birdsong and golden sunlight seemed to prophesy. But what this message might be, neither the woman nor the man had any thought or dream.

CHAPTER XV.

AN HOUR AND A PARTING.

Arriving at the sugar-house, tired yet strong, Gabriel put the wounded girl down, quickly raked together a few armfuls of dead leaves, in the most sheltered corner of the ramshackle structure, and laid the heavy auto-robe upon this improvised bed. Then he helped his patient to lie down, there, and bade her wait till he got water to wash and dress her cut.

“Don’t worry about anything,” he reassured her. “You’re alive, and that’s the main thing, now. I’ll see you through with this, whatever happens. Just keep calm, and don’t let anything distress you!”

She looked at him with big, anxious eyes—eyes where still the full light of understanding had not yet returned.

“It—it all happened so suddenly!” she managed to articulate. “He was drunk—the chauffeur. The car ran away. Where is it? Where is Herrick—the man?”

“I don’t know,” Gabriel lied promptly and with force. Not for worlds would he have excited her with the truth. “Never you mind about that. Just lie still, now, till I come back!”

Already, among the rusty utensils that had served for the “sugaring-off,” the previous spring, he had routed out a tin pail. He kicked a quantity of leaves in under the sheet-iron open stove, flung some sticks atop of them, and started a little blaze. Warm water, he reflected, would serve better than cold in removing that clotting blood and dressing the hurt.

Then, saying no further word, but filled with admiration for the girl’s pluck, he seized the pail and started for water.

“Nerve?” he said to himself, as he ran down the road toward a little brook he remembered having crossed, a few hundred yards to southward. “Nerve, indeed! Not one complaint about her own injuries! Not a word of lamentation! If this isn’t a thoroughbred, whoever or whatever she is, I never saw one!”

He returned, presently, with the pail nearly full of cold and sparkling water. Ignoring rust, he made her drink as deeply as she would, and then set a dipperful of water on the now hot sheet-iron.

Then, tearing a strip off the shawl, he made ready for his work as an amateur physician.

“Tell me,” said he, kneeling there beside her in the hut which was already beginning to grow dusk, “except for this cut on your forehead, do you feel any injury? Think you’ve got any broken bones? See if you can move your legs and arms, all right.”

She obeyed.

“Nothing broken, I guess,” she answered. “What a miracle! Please leave me, now. I can wash my own hurt. Go—go find Herrick! He needs you worse than I do!”

“No he doesn’t!” blurted Gabriel with such conviction that she understood.

“You mean?” she queried, as he brought the dipper of now tepid water to her side. “He—he’s dead?”

He hesitated to answer.

“Dead! Yes, I understand!” she interpreted his silence. “You needn’t tell me. I know!”

He nodded.

“Yes,” said he. “Your chauffeur has paid the penalty of trying to drive a six-cylinder car with alcohol. Now, think no more of him! Here, let me see how badly you’re cut.”

“Let me sit up, first,” she begged. “I—I’m not hurt enough to be lying here like—like an invalid!”

She tried to rise, but with a strong hand on her shoulder he forced her back. She shuddered, with the horror of the chauffeur’s death strong upon her.

“Please lie still,” he begged. “You’ve had a terrific shock, and have lived through it by a miracle, indeed. You’re wounded and still bleeding. You must be quiet!”

The tone in his voice admitted no argument. Submissive now to his greater strength, this daughter of wealth and power lay back, closed her tired eyes and let the revolutionist, the proletarian, minister to her.

Dipping the piece of shawl into the warm water, he deftly moistened the dried blood on her brow and cheek, and washed it all away. He cleansed her sullied hair, as well, and laid it back from the wound.

“Tell me if I hurt you, now,” he bade, gently as a woman. “I’ve got to wash the cut itself.”

She answered nothing, but lay quite still. And so, hardly wincing, she let him lave the jagged wound that stretched from her right temple up into the first tendrils of the glorious red-gold hair.

“H’m!” thought Gabriel, as he now observed the cut with close attention. “I’m afraid there’ll have to be some stitches taken here!” But of this he said nothing. All he told her was: “Nothing to worry over. You’ll be as good as new in a few days. As a miracle, it’s some miracle!”

Having completed the cleansing of the cut, he fetched his knapsack and produced a clean handkerchief, which he folded and laid over the wound. This pad he secured in place by a long bandage cut from the edge of the shawl and tied securely round her shapely head.

“There,” said he, surveying his improvisation with considerable satisfaction. “Now you’ll do, till we can undertake the next thing. Sorry I haven’t any brandy to give you, or anything of that sort. The fact is, I don’t use it, and have none with me. How do you feel, now?”

She opened her eyes and looked up at him with the ghost of a smile on her pale lips.

“Oh, much, much better, thank you!” she answered. “I don’t need any brandy. I’m—awfully strong, really. In a little while I’ll be all right. Just give me a little more water, and—and tell me—who are you?”

“Who am I?” he queried, holding up her head while she drank from the tin cup he had now taken from his knapsack. “I? Oh, just an out-of-work. Nobody of any interest to you!”

A certain tinge of bitterness crept into his voice. In health, he knew, a woman of this class would not suffer him even to touch her hand.

“Don’t ask me who I am, please. And I—I won’t ask your name. We’re of different worlds, I guess. But for the moment, Fate has levelled the barriers. Just let it go at that. And now, if you can stay here, all right; perhaps I can hike back to the next house, below here, and telephone, and summon help.”

“How far is it?” she asked, looking at him with wonder in her lovely eyes—wonder, and new thoughts, and a strange kind of longing to know more of this extraordinary man, so strong, so gentle, so unwilling to divulge himself or ask her name.

“How far?” he repeated. “Oh, four or five miles. I can make it in no time. And with luck, I can have an auto and a doctor here before dark. Well, does that suit you?”

“Don’t go, please,” she answered. “I—I may be still a little weak and foolish, but—somehow, I don’t want to be left alone. I want to be kept from remembering, from thinking of those last, awful moments when the car was running away; when it struck the wall, at the turn; when I was thrown out, and—and knew no more. Don’t go just yet,” the girl entreated, covering her eyes with both hands, as though to shut out the horrible vision of the catastrophe.

“All right,” Gabriel answered. “Just as you please. Only, if I stay, you must promise to stop thinking about the accident, and try to pull together.”

“I promise,” she agreed, looking at him with strange eyes. “Oh dear,” she added, with feminine inconsequentiality, “my hair’s all down, and Lord knows where the pins are!”

He smiled to himself as she managed, with the aid of such few hairpins as remained, to coil the coppery meshes once more round her head and even somewhat over the bandage, and secure them in place.

At sight of his face as he watched her, she too smiled wanly—the first time he had seen a real smile on her mouth.

“I’m only a woman, after all,” she apologized. “You don’t understand. You can’t. But no matter. Tell me—why need you go, at all?”

“Why? For help, of course.”

“There’s sure to be a motor, or something, along this road, before very long,” she answered. “Put up some signal or other, to stop it. That will save you a long, long walk, and save me from—remembering! I need you here with me,” she added earnestly. “Don’t go—please!”

“All right, as you will,” the man made reply. “I’ll rig a danger-signal on the road; and then all we can do will be to wait.”

This plan he immediately put into effect, setting his knapsack in the middle of the road and piling up brush and limbs of trees about it.

“There,” he said to himself, as he surveyed the result, “no car will get by that, without noticing it!”

Then he returned to the sugar-house, some hundred yards back from the highway in the grove, now already beginning to grow dim with the shadows of approaching nightfall. The glowing coals of the fire gleamed redly, through the rough place. The girl, still lying on her bed of leaves and auto-robes, with the mutilated shawl drawn over her, looked up at him with an expression of trust and gratitude. For a second, only one, something quick and vital gripped at the wanderer’s heart—some vague, intangible longing for a home and a woman, a longing old as our race, deep-planted in the inmost citadel of every man’s soul. But, half-impatiently, he drove the thought away, dismissed it, and, smiling down at her with cheerful eyes and white, even teeth, said reassuringly:

“Everything’s all right now. The first machine that passes, will take you to civilization.”

“And you?” she asked. “What of you, then?”

“Me? Oh, I’ll hike,” he answered. “I’ll plug along just as I was doing when I found you.”

“Where to?”

“Oh, north.”

“What for?”

“Work. Please don’t question me. I’d rather you wouldn’t.”

She pondered a moment.

“Are you—what they call a—workingman?” she presently resumed.

“Yes,” said he. “Why?”

“And are you happy?”

“Yes. In a way. Or shall be, when I’ve done what I mean to do.”

“But—forgive me—you’re very poor?”

“Not at all! I have, at this present moment, more than eighteen dollars in my pocket, and I have these!”

He showed her his two hands, big and sinewed, capable and strong.

“Eighteen dollars,” she mused, half to herself. “Why, I have spent that, and more, for a single ounce of a new perfume—something very rare, you know, from Japan.”

“Indeed? Well, don’t tell me,” he replied. “I’m not interested in how you spend money, but how you get it.”

“Get it? Oh, father gives me my allowance, that’s all.”

“And he squeezes it out of the common people?”

She glanced at him quickly.

“You—you aren’t a Socialist, into the bargain, are you?” she inquired.

“At your service,” he bowed.

“This is strange, strange indeed,” she said. “Tell me your name.”

“No,” he refused. “I’d still rather not. Nor shall I ask yours. Please don’t volunteer it.”

Came a moment’s silence, there in the darkening hut, with the fire-glow red upon their faces.

“Happy,” said the girl. “You say you’re happy. While I—”

“Are not unhappy, surely?” asked Gabriel, leaning forward as he sat there beside her, and gazing keenly into her face.

“How should I know?” she answered. “Unhappy? No, perhaps not. But vacant—empty—futile!”

“Yes, I believe you,” Gabriel judged. “You tell me no news. And as you are, you will ever be. You will live so and die so. No, I won’t preach. I won’t proselytize. I won’t even explain. It would be useless. You are one pole, I the other. And the world—the whole wide world—lies between!”

Suddenly she spoke.

“You’re a Socialist,” said she. “What does it mean to be a Socialist?”

He shook his head.

“You couldn’t understand, if I told you,” he answered.

“Why not?”

“Oh, because your ideas and environments and interests and everything have been so different from mine—because you’re what you are—because you can never be anything else.”

“You mean Socialism is something beyond my understanding?” she demanded, piqued. “Of course, that’s nonsense. I’m a human being. I’ve got brains, haven’t I? I can understand a scheme of dividing up, or levelling down, or whatever it is, even if I can’t believe in it!”

He smiled oddly.

“You’ve just proved, by what you’ve said,” he answered slowly, “that your whole concepts are mistaken. Socialism isn’t anything like what you think it is, and if I should try to explain it, you’d raise ten thousand futile objections, and beg the question, and defeat my object of explanation by your very inability to get the point of view. So you see—”

“I see that I want to know more!” she exclaimed, with determination. “If there’s any branch of human knowledge that lies outside my reasoning powers, it’s time I found that fact out. I thought Socialists were wild, crazy, erratic cranks; but if you’re one, then I seem to have been wrong. You look rational enough, and you talk in an eminently sane manner.”

“Thank you,” he replied, ironically.

“Don’t be sarcastic!” she retorted. “I only meant—”

“It’s all right, anyhow,” said he. “You’ve simply got the old, stupid, wornout ideas of your class. You can’t grasp this new ideal, rising through the ruck and waste and sin and misery of the present system. I don’t blame you. You’re a product of your environment. You can’t help it. With that environment, how can you sense the newer and more vital ideas of the day?”

For a moment she fixed eager eyes on him, in silence. Then asked she:

“Ideals? You mean that Socialism has ideals, and that it’s not all a matter of tearing down and dividing up, and destroying everything good and noble and right—all the accumulated wisdom and resources of the world?”

He laughed heartily.

“Who handed you that bunk?” he demanded.

“Father told me Socialism was all that, and more,”

“What’s your father’s business?”

“Why, investments, stocks, bonds, industrial development and all that sort of thing.”

“Hm!” he grunted. “I thought as much!”

“You mean that father misinformed me?”

“Rather!”

“Well, if he did, what is Socialism?”

“Socialism,” answered the young man slowly, while he fixed his eyes on the smouldering fire, “Socialism is a political movement, a concept of life, a philosophy, an interpretation, a prophecy, an ideal. It embraces history, economics, science, art, religion, literature and every phase of human activity. It explains life, points the way to better things, gives us hope, strengthens the weary and heavy-laden, bids us look upward and onward, and constitutes the most sublime ideal ever conceived by the soul of man!”

“Can this be true?” the girl demanded, astonished.

“Not only can, but is! Socialism would free the world from slavery and slaves, from war, poverty, prostitution, vice and crime; would cleanse the sores of our rotting capitalism, would loose the gyves from the fettered hands of mankind, would bid the imprisoned soul of man awake to nobler and to purer things! How? The answer to that would take me weeks. You would have to read and study many books, to learn the entire truth. But I am telling you the substance of the ideal—a realizable ideal, and no chimera—when I say that Socialism sums up all that is good, and banishes all that is evil! And do you wonder that I love and serve it, all my life?”

She peered at him in wonder.

“You serve it? How?” she demanded.

“By spreading it abroad; by speaking for it, working for it, fighting for it! By the spoken and the printed word! By every act and through every means whereby I can bring it nearer and nearer realization!”

“You’re a dreamer, a visionary, a fanatic!” she exclaimed.

“You think so? No, I can’t agree. Time will judge that matter. Meanwhile, I travel up and down the earth, spreading Socialism.”

“And what do you get out of it, personally?”

“I? What do you mean? I never thought of that question.”

“I mean, money. What do you make out of it?”

He laughed heartily.

“I get a few jail-sentences, once in a while; now and then a crack over the head with a policeman’s billy, or maybe a peek down the muzzle of a rifle. I get—”

“You mean that you’re a martyr?”

“By no means! I’ve never even thought of being called such. This is a privilege, this propaganda of ours. It’s the greatest privilege in the world—bringing the word of life and hope and joy to a crushed, bleeding and despairing world!”

She thought a moment, in silence.

“You’re a poet, I believe!” said she.

“No, not that. Only a worker in the ranks.”

“But do you write poetry?”

“I write verses. You’d hardly call them poetry!”

“Verses? About Socialism?”

“Sometimes.”

“Will you give me some?”

“What do you mean?”

“Tell me some of them.”

“Of course not! I can’t recite my verses! They aren’t worth bothering you with!”

“That’s for me to judge. Let me hear something of that kind. If you only knew how terribly much you interest me!”

“You mean that?”

“Of course I do! Please let me hear something you’ve written!”

He pondered a moment, then in his well-modulated, deep-toned voice began:

HESPERIDES.

I.

My feet, used to pine-needles, moss and turf,

And the gray boulders at the lip o’ the sea,

Where the cold brine jets up its creamy surf,

Now tread once more these city ways, unloved by me,

Hateful and hot, gross with iniquity.

And so I grieve,

Grieve when I wake, or at high blinding noon

Or when the moon

Mocks this sad Ninevah where the throngs weave

Their jostling ways by day, their paths by night;

Where darkness is not—where the streets burn bright

With hectic fevers, eloquent of death!

I gasp for breath....

Visions have I, visions! So sweet they seem

That from this welter of men and things I turn, to dream

Of the dim Wood-world, calling out to me.

Where forest-virgins I half glimpse, half see

With cool mysterious fingers beckoning!

Where vine-wreathed woodland altars sunlit burn,

Or Dryads dance their mystic rounds and sing,

Sing high, sing low, with magic cadences

That once the wild oaks of Dodona heard;

And every wood-note bids me burst asunder

The bonds that hold me from the leaf-hid bird.

I quaff thee, O Nepenthe! Ah, the wonder

Grows, that there be who buy their wealth, their ease

By damning serfs to cities, hot and blurred,

Far from thy golden quest, Hesperides!...

II.

I see this August sun again

Sheer up high heaven wheel his angry way;

And hordes of men

Bleared with unrestful sleep rise up another day,

Their bodies racked with aftermaths of toil.

Over the city, in each gasping street,

Shudders a haze of heat,

Reverberant from pillar, span and plinth.

Once more, cribbed in this monstrous labyrinth

Sacrificed to the Minotaur of Greed

Men bear the turmoil, glare, sweat, brute inharmonies;

Denial of each simplest human need,

Loss of life’s meaning as day lags on day;

And my rebellious spirit rises, flies

In dreams to the green quiet wood away,

Away! Away!

III.

And now, and now...I feel the forest-moss...

Come! On these moss-beds let me lie with Pan,

Twined with the ivy-vine in tendrill’d curls,

And I will hold all gold, that hampers man,

Only the ashes of base, barren dross!

On with the love-dance of the pagan girls!

The pagan girls with lips all rosy-red,

With breasts upgirt and foreheads garlanded,

With fair white foreheads nobly garlanded!

With sandalled feet that weave the magic ring!

Now...let them sing,

And I will pipe a tune that all may hear,

To bid them mind the time of my wild rhyme;

To warn profaning feet lest they draw near.

Away! Away! Beware these mystic trees!

Who dares to quest you now, Hesperides?

IV.

Great men of song, what sing ye? Woodland meadows?

Rocks, trees and rills where sunlight glints to gold?

Sing ye the hills, adown whose sides blue shadows

Creep when the westering day is growing old?

Sing ye the brooks where in the purling shallows

The small fish dart and gleam?

Sing ye the pale green tresses of the willows

That stoop to kiss the stream?

Or sing ye burning streets, foul with the breath

Of sweatshop, tenement, where endlessly

Spawned swarms of folk serve tyrant masters twain—

Profit, and his twin-brother, grinning Death?

Where millions toil, hedged off from aught save pain?

Far from thee ever, O mine Arcady?...

His voice ceased and silence fell between the man and woman in the old sugar-house. Gabriel sat there by the dying fire, which cast its ruddy light over his strongly virile face, and gazed into the coals. The girl, lying on the rude bed, her face eager, her slim strong hands tightly clasped, had almost forgotten to breathe.

At last she spoke.

“That—that is wonderful!” she cried, a tremor of enthusiasm in her voice.

He shook his head.

“No compliments, please,” said he.

“I’m not complimenting you! I think it is wonderful. You’re a true poet!”

“I wish I were—so I might use it all for Socialism!”

“You could make a fortune, if you’d work for some paper or magazine—some regular one, I mean, not Socialist.”

He shook his head.

“Dead sea fruit,” he answered. “Fairy gold, fading in the clutch, worthless through and through. No, if my work has any merit, it’s all for Socialism, now and ever!”

Silence again. Neither now found a word to say, but their eyes met and read each other; and a kind of solemn hush seemed to lie over their hearts.

Then, as they sat there, looking each at each—for now the girl had raised herself on the crude bed and was supporting herself with one hand—a sudden sound of a motor, on the road, awakened them from their musing.

Came the raucous wail of a siren. Then the engine-exhaust ceased; and a voice, raised in some annoyance, hailed loudly through the maple-grove:

“Hello! Hello? What’s wrong here?”

Gabriel stepped to the sugar-house door:

“Here! Come here!” he shouted in a ringing voice that echoed wildly from between his hollowed palms.

As the motorist still sat there, uncomprehending, Gabriel made his way toward the road.

“Accident here,” said he. “Girl in here, injured. Can you take her to the nearest town, at once? She needs a doctor.”

Instantly the man was out of his car, and hastening toward Gabriel.

“Eh? What?” he asked. “Anything serious?”

In a few words, Gabriel told him the outlines of the tale.

“The quicker you get the girl to a town, and let her have a doctor and communication with her family, the better,” he concluded.

“Right! I’ll do all in my power,” said the other, a rather stout, well-to-do, vulgar-looking man.

“Good! This way, then!”

The man followed Gabriel to the sugar-house. They found the girl already on her feet, standing there a bit unsteadily, but with determination to be game, in every feature.

Five minutes later she was in the new-comer’s car, which had been turned around and now was headed back toward Haverstraw. The shawl and robe serving her as wraps, she was made comfortable in the tonneau.

“Think you can stand it, all right?” asked Gabriel, as he took in his the hand she extended. “In half an hour, you’ll be under a doctor’s care, and your father will be on his way toward you.”

She nodded, and for a second tightened the grasp of her hand.

“I—I’m not even going to know who you are?” she asked, a strange tone in her voice.

“No,” he answered. “And now, good luck, and good-bye!”

“Good-bye,” she echoed, her voice almost inaudible. “I—I won’t forget you.”

He made no answer, but only smiled in a peculiar way.

Then, as the car rolled slowly forward, their hands separated.

Gabriel, bareheaded and with level gaze, stood there in the middle of the great highway, looking after her. A minute, under the darkening arches of the forest road, he saw her, still. Then the car swung round a bend, and vanished.

Had she waved her hand at him? He could not tell. Motionless he stood, a while, then cleared away the barrier of branches that obstructed the road, took up his knapsack, and with slow steps returned to the sugar-house.

Almost on the threshold, a white something caught his eye. He picked it up. Her handkerchief! A moment he held the dainty, filmy thing in his rough hand. A vague perfume reached his nostrils, disquieting and seductive.

“More than eighteen dollars an ounce, perhaps!” he exclaimed, with sudden bitterness; but still he did not throw the handkerchief away. Instead, he looked at it more keenly. In one corner, the fading light just showed him some initials. He studied them, a moment.

“C. J. F.” he read. Then, yielding to a sudden impulse, he folded the kerchief and put it in his pocket.

He entered the sugar-house, to make sure, before departing, that he had left no danger of fire behind him.

Another impulse bade him sit down on a rough box, there, before the dying embers. He gazed at the bed of leaves, a while, immersed in thought, then filled his pipe and lighted it with a glowing brand, and sat there—while the night came—smoking and musing, in a reverie.

The overpowering lure of the woman who had lain in his arms, as he had borne her thither; her breath upon his face; the perfume of her, even her blood that he had washed away—all these were working on his senses, still. But most of all he seemed to see her eyes, there in the ember-lit gloom, and hear her voice, and feel her lithe young body and her breast against his breast.

For a long time he sat there, thinking, dreaming, smoking, till the last shred of tobacco was burned out in the heel of his briar; till the last ember had winked and died under the old sheet-iron stove.

At last, with a peculiar laugh, he rose, slung the knapsack once more on his shoulders, settled his cap upon his head, and made ready to depart.

But still, one moment, he lingered in the doorway. Lingered and looked back, as though in his mind’s eye he would have borne the place away with him forever.

Suddenly he stooped, picked up a leaf from the bed where she had lain, and put that, too, in his pocket where the kerchief was.

Then, looking no more behind him, he strode off across the maple-grove, through which, now, the first pale stars were glimmering. He reached the road again, swung to the north, and, striking into his long marching stride, pushed onward northward, away and away into the soft June twilight.

CHAPTER XVI.

TIGER WALDRON “COMES BACK.”

Old Isaac Flint loved but two things in all this world—power, and his daughter Catherine.

I speak advisedly in putting “power” first. Much as he idolized the girl, much as she reminded him of the long-dead wife of his youth, he could have survived the loss of her. The loss of power would inevitably have crushed and broken him, stunned him, killed him. Yet, so far as human affection could still blossom in that withered heart, shrunk by cold scheming and the cruel piracies of many decades, he loved the girl.

And so it was that when the message came in, that evening, over the telephone, the news that Kate had been injured in an auto-accident which had entirely destroyed the machine and killed Herrick, he paled, trembled, and clutched the receiver, hardly able to hold it to his ear with his shaking hand.

“Here! You!” he cried. “She—she’s not badly hurt? She’s living? She’s safe? No lies, now! The truth!”

“Your daughter is very much alive, and perfectly safe,” a voice answered. “This is Doctor MacDougal, of Haverstraw, speaking. The patient is now having a superficial scalp wound dressed by my assistant. You can speak to her, in a few minutes, if you like.”

“Now! For God’s sake, let me speak now!” entreated the Billionaire; but the doctor refused. Not all Flint’s urging or bribing would turn him one hair’s breadth.

“No,” he insisted. “In ten minutes she can talk to you. Not now. But have no fear, sir. She is perfectly safe and—barring her wound, which will probably heal almost without a scar—is as well as ever. A little nervous and unstrung, of course, but that’s to be expected.”

“What happened, and how?” demanded Flint, in terrible agitation.

The doctor briefly gave him such facts as he knew, ending with the statement that a passing automobilist had brought the girl to him, and outlining the situation of the first-aid measures in the sugar-house. At the thought that Herrick, the drunken cause of it all, was dead and burned, Flint smiled with real satisfaction.

“Damn him! It’s too good for the scum!” he muttered. Then, aloud, he asked over the wire:

“And who was the rescuer?”

“I don’t know,” MacDougal answered. “Your daughter didn’t tell me. But from what I’ve learned, he must have been a man of rare strength and presence of mind. It may well be that you owe your daughter’s life to his prompt work.”

“I’ll find him, yet. He’ll be suitably rewarded,” thought the Billionaire. “No matter what my enemies have called me, I’m not incapable of gratitude!”

Some few minutes later, having paced the library floor meanwhile, in great excitement, he called the doctor’s house again by long-distance, and this time succeeded in having speech with his daughter. Her voice, though a little weak, vastly reassured him. Once more he asked for the outline of the story. She told him all the essentials, and finished by:

“Now, come and get me, won’t you, father dear? I want to go home. And the quicker you come for me, the happier I’ll be.”

“Bless your heart, Kate!” he exclaimed, deeply moved. “Nothing like the old man, after all, is there? Yes, I’ll start at once. I’ve only been waiting here, to talk with you and know you’re safe. In five minutes I’ll be on my way, with the racing-car. And if I don’t break a few records between here and Haverstraw, my name’s not Isaac Flint!”

After an affectionate good-bye, the old man hung up, rang for Slawson, his private valet, and ordered the swiftest car in his garage made ready at once, for a quick run.

Two hours later, Doctor MacDougal had pocketed the largest fee he ever had received or ever would, again; and Kate was safe at home, in Idle Hour.

On the homeward journey, Flint learned every detail of the affair, from start to finish; and again grimly consigned the soul of the dead chauffeur to the nethermost pits of Hell. Yes, he realized, he must have the body brought in and decently buried, after the coroner’s verdict had been rendered; but in his heart he knew that, save for the eye of public opinion and the law, he would let those charred remnants lie and rot there, by the river bank, under the twisted wreckage of the car—and revel in the thought of that last, barbarous revenge.

Arrived at home, Flint routed specialists out of their offices, and at a large expense satisfied himself the girl had really taken no serious harm. Next day, and the days following, all that money and science could do to make the gash heal without a scar, was done. Waldron called, greatly unnerved and not at all himself; and Kate received him with amicable interest. She had not yet informed her father of the rupture between Waldron and herself, nor did he suspect it. As for “Tiger,” he realized the time was inopportune for any statement of conditions, and held his peace. But once she should be well, again, he had savagely resolved this decision of hers should not stand.

“Damn it, it can’t! It mustn’t!” he reflected, as on the third evening he returned to his Fifth Avenue house. “Now that I’m really in danger of losing her, I’m just beginning to realize what an extraordinary woman she is! As a wife, the mistress of my establishment, a hostess, a social leader, what a figure she would make! And too, the alliance between Flint and myself simply must not be shattered. Kate is the only child. The old man’s billion, or more, will surely come to her, practically every penny of it. Flint is more than sixty-three this very minute, he’s a dope-fiend, and his heart’s damned weak. He’s liable to drop off, any moment. If I get Kate, and he dies, what a fortune! What a prize! Added to my interests, it will make me master of the world!

“Then, too, this new Air Trust scheme positively demands that Flint and I should be bound together by something closer than mere financial association. I’ve simply got to be one of the family. I’ve got to be his son-in-law. That’s a positive necessity! God, what a fool I was at Longmeadow, to have taken those three drinks, and have been piqued at her beating me—to have let my tongue and temper slip—in short, to have acted like an ass!”

Ugly and grim, he puffed at his Londres. Vast schemes of finance and of conquest wove through his busy, plotting brain. Visions of the girl arose, too, tempting him still more, though his chill heart was powerless to feel the urge of any real, self-sacrificing or devoted love. Sensual passion he knew, and ambition, and the lust of power; nothing else. But these all opened his eyes to the vast blunder he had committed, and nerved him to reconquest of the ground that he had lost.

“I can win her, yet,” reflected he, as his car swung into the long and brilliant night-vista of Fifth Avenue. “I know women, and I understand the game. Flowers, letters, telephone calls, attention every day—every hour, if need be—these are the artillery to batter down the strongest fortresses of indifference, even of dislike. And she shall have them all—all and more. Wally, old chap, you’ve never been beaten at any game, whether in the Street or in the pursuit of woman. You’ll win yet; you’re bound to win! And Kate shall yet open the door to you, toward wealth and power and position such as never yet were seen on earth!”

Thus fortified by his own determination, he slept more calmly that night. And, on the morrow, his campaign began.

It lasted but a week.

At the end of that time, a friendly little note from Idle Hour told him, frankly and in the kindest manner possible, that—much as she still liked and respected him—Catherine could not, now or ever, think of him in any other way than as a friend.

Stunned by this body-blow, “Tiger” first swore with hideous blasphemies that caused his valet to retreat precipitately from the famous, nymph-frieze bedchamber; then ordered drink, then walked the floor a while in a violent passion; and finally knit up his decision.

“By God!” he swore, shaking his fist in the direction of Englewood. “She’s balky, eh? She won’t, eh? But I say she will! And if I can’t make her, there’s her father, who can. Together we can break this stiff-necked spirit and bring her to time. Hm! Fancy anybody or anything in this world setting up opposition to Flint and Waldron, combined! Just fancy it, that’s all!

“So then, what’s to do? This: See her father and have a heart-to-heart talk with him. It’s obvious she hasn’t told him, yet, the real state of affairs. I doubt if the old idiot has even noticed the absence of my ring from her finger. And if he has, she’s been able to fool him, easily enough. But not much longer, so help me!

“No, this very morning he shall hear from me, the whole infernal story—he shall learn his daughter’s unreasonable rebellion, the slight she’s put upon me and her opposition to his will. Then we shall see—we shall see who’s master in that family, he or the girl!”

With this strong determination in his superheated mind, Waldron rang up Flint, asked for a private talk, at eleven, in the Wall Street office, and made ready the mustering of his arguments; his self-defense; his appeals to Flint’s every sense of interest and liking; his whole plea for the resumption of the broken betrothal.

And Catherine, all this time of convalescence—what were her thoughts, and whither were they straying? Not thoughts of Waldron, that is sure, despite his notes, his telephoning, his flowers, his visits. Not to him did they wander, as she sat in her sunny bedroom bay-window, looking out over the great, close cropped lawn, through the oaks and elms, to the Palisades and the sparkling Hudson beneath.

No, not to Waldron. Yet wander they did, despite her; and with persistence they followed channels till then quite unknown to her.

What might these channels be? And whither, I ask again, did the girl’s memories and fancies, her wondering thoughts, her vague, half-formulated longings, lead?

You, perhaps, can answer, as well as I, if you but remember that—Billionaire’s daughter though she was, and all unversed in the hard realities of life—she was, at heart and soul, very much a woman after all.

CHAPTER XVII.

THOUGHTS.

During the long days, the June days, of her convalescence, Catherine found herself involuntarily reverting, more often than she could understand, to thoughts of the inscrutable and unknown man who had in all probability saved her life.

“Had it not been for him,” she reflected, as she sat there gazing out over the river, “I might not be here, this minute. Caught as I was, on the very brink of the precipice, I should almost certainly have slipped and fallen over, in my dazed condition, when I tried to get up. If I’d been alone, if he hadn’t found me just when he did—!”

She shuddered at thought of what must almost inevitably have happened, and covered her face with both hands. Her cheeks burned; she knew emotion such as not once had Waldron’s kiss ever been able to arouse in her. The memory of how she, half-unconscious, had lain in that stranger’s arms, so powerful and tense; had been carried by him, as though she had been a child; had felt his breath upon her face and the quick, vigorous beating of his heart—all this, and more, dwelt in her soul, nor could she banish it.

Gratitude? Yes, and more. For the first time in her two-and-twenty years, Catherine had sensed the power, the virility of a real man—not of the make-believe, manicured and tailored parasites of her own class—and something elemental in her, some urge of primitive womanhood, grappled her to that memory and, all against her will, caused her to live and re-live those moments, time and time again, as the most strange and vital of her life.

Yet, it was not this physical call alone, in her, that had awakened her being. The man’s eyes, and mouth and hair, true, all remained with her as a subtly compelling lure; his strength and straight directness seemed to conquer her and draw her to him; but beyond all this, something in his speech, in his ideas and the strange reticence that had so puzzled her, kept him even more constantly in her wondering thoughts.

“A workingman,” she murmured to herself, in uncomprehending revery, “he said he was a workingman—and he knew that I was very, very rich. He knew my father would have rewarded him magnificently, given him money, work, anything he might have asked. And yet, and yet—he would not even tell his name. And he refused to know mine! He didn’t want to know! His pride—why, in all my life, among all the proud, rich people that I’ve known, I’ve never found such pride as that!”

She reflected what would have happened had any man of the usual type rescued her, even a man of wealth and position. Of course, thought she, that man would have made himself known and would have called on her, ostensibly to inquire after her condition, yet really to ingratiate himself. At this reflection she shuddered again.

“Ugh!” she whispered. “He’d have tried to take liberties, any other man would. He’d have presumed on the accident—he’d have been—oh, everything that that man was not, and could never be!”

Now her thoughts wandered to the brief talk they two had had there in the old sugar-house. Every word of it seemed graven on her memory. Disconnected bits of what he had told her, seemed to float before her mental vision—: “I? Oh, I’m just an out-of-work—don’t ask me who I am; and I won’t ask who you are. We’re of different worlds, I guess—don’t question me; I’d rather you wouldn’t. Am I happy? Yes, in a way, or shall be, when I’ve done what I mean to do!”

Such were some of his phrases that kept coming back to her, as she sat there in that luxurious and beautiful room, her book lying unread in her lap, the scent of flowers everywhere, and, merely for her taking, all the world’s treasures hers to command. Strange man, indeed, and stranger speech, to her! Never had she been thus spoken to. His every word and thought and point of view, commonplace enough, perhaps, seemed peculiarly stimulating to her, and wakened eager curiosity, and would not let her live in peace, as heretofore.

“He said he was a Socialist, too,” she murmured, “whatever that may be. But he—he didn’t look it! On the contrary, he looked remarkably clean and intelligent. And the words he used were the words of an educated man. Far better vocabulary than Waldron’s, for example; and as for poor little Van Slyke, and that set, why this man’s mind seems to have towered above them as the Palisades tower above the river!

“Happy? Rich? He said he was both—and all he had was eighteen dollars and his two big hands! Just fancy that, will you? He might as well have said eighteen cents; it would have been about as much! And I—what did I tell him? I told him I, with all my money and everything, was vacant, empty, futile! Just those words. And—God help me, I—I am!”

Suddenly, she felt her eyes were wet. What was the reason? Herself she knew not. All she knew was that with her beautiful and queenly head bowed on the arm of her Japanese silk morning gown, as its loose sleeves lay along the edge of the Chippendale table, she was crying like a child.

Crying bitterly; and yet in a kind of new, strange joy. Crying with tears so bitter-sweet that she, herself, could not half understand them; could not fathom the deeper meaning that lay hidden there.

“If!” she whispered to her heart. “If only I were of his class, or he of mine!”

And Gabriel, what of him?

As he swung north and westward, day by day, on the long hike toward Niagara, the memory of the girl went with him, and hour by hour bore him company.

He was not forgetting. Could he forget? Strive as he might, to thrust her out of his heart and soul, she still indwelt there.

Not all his philosophy, nor all his realization that this woman he had saved, this woman who had lain in his two arms and mingled her breath with his, belonged to another and an alien class, could banish her.

And as he strode along, swinging his knotted stick at the daisies and pondering on all that might have been and now could never be, a sudden, passionate longing burst over him, as a long sea-roller, hurled against a cliff, flings upward in vast tourbillions of spume.

Raising his face to the summer sky, his bare head high with emotion and his eyes wide with the thought of strange possibilities that shook and intoxicated him, he cried:

“Oh—would God she were an orphan and an outcast! Would God she had no penny in this world to call her own!”

CHAPTER XVIII.

FLINT AND WALDRON PLAN.

“Tiger” Waldron’s interview with old man Flint, regarding Catherine’s breaking of the engagement, was particularly electric. Promptly at the appointed hour, Waldron appeared, shook hands with the older man, sat down and lighted a cigar, then proceeded to business.

“Flint,” said he, without any ado, “I’ve come here to tell you some very unpleasant news and to ask your help. Can you stand the one, and give me the other?”

The Billionaire looked at him through his pince-nez, poised on that vulture-beak, with some astonishment. Then he smiled nervously, showing his gleaming tooth of gold, and answered:

“Yes, I guess so. What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong? Everything! Catherine has broken our engagement!”

For a moment old Flint sat there motionless and staring. Then, moving his head forward with a peculiar, pecking twitch that still further enhanced his likeness to a buzzard, he stammered:

“You—you mean—?”

“I mean just what I say. Your daughter has severed the betrothal. Haven’t you noticed my ring was gone from her finger?”

“Gone? Bless my soul, no—that is, yes—maybe. I don’t know. But—but at any rate, I thought nothing of it. So then, you say—she’s broken it off? But, why? And when? And—and tell me, Wally, what’s it all about?”

“Listen, and I will tell you,” Tiger answered. “And I’ll give it to you straight. I’m partly at fault. Mostly so, it may be. Let me assume all the blame, at any rate. I’m not sparing myself and have no intention of doing so. My conduct, I admit, was beastly. No excuses offered. All I want to do, now, is to make the amende honorable, be forgiven, and have the former status resumed.”

Thus spoke Waldron. But all the time his soul lay hot within him, at having so to humble himself before Flint; at being thus obliged to eat crow, and fawn and feign and creep.

“If I didn’t need your billion, old man,” his secret thought was, as he eyed Flint with pretended humility, “you might go to Hell, for all of me—you and your daughter with you, damn you both!”

The Billionaire sat blinking, for a moment. Then, picking up a pencil and idly scrawling pothooks on the big clean sheet of blotting-paper that covered his reference-book table, beside which the men were sitting, he asked:

“Well, what’s the trouble all about? What are the facts? I must have those, in full, before I can guarantee to do anything toward changing my daughter’s opinion. Much as I deplore her action, Wally, I don’t know whether she’s right or wrong, till you tell me. Now, let’s have it.”

“I will,” the other answered; and he was as good as his word. Realizing the prime futility of any subterfuge, or any misstatement of fact—which Catherine would surely discover and tell her father, and which would react against him—Waldron began at the beginning and narrated the entire affair, with every detail precisely accurate. Nay, he even exaggerated the offensiveness of his conduct, at the Longmeadow Club, and in various ways gave the Billionaire to understand that he was a more serious offender than in truth he really was. For, after all, the only real offense was the lack of any compatibility between the girl and himself—the total absence of love.

Flint listened carefully and with a judicial expression. If he blamed Waldron, he made no statement of that fact. A man himself, and one who viewed man’s weaknesses and woman’s foibles with a cynic eye, he could judge motives and weigh actions with considerable skill.

“I see, I see,” he commented, when Waldron had quite done, and had poured forth a highly false declaration of his great love for the girl and his determination that this rupture should not be permanent. “I understand the case, I think. It all seems an unfortunate accident—just one of those unavoidable incidents which strike into and upset human calculations, against all expectation.

“You’re not terribly guilty, Waldron. You acted inconsiderably. Irritatingly, perhaps, and not wholly like a gentleman—for which, blame the rotten Scotch they will persist in selling, out there at Longmeadow. But even that’s not fatal. Many men have done worse and been forgiven. I’ll have a talk with Catherine, inside a day or two, when the psychological moment offers. And you may be sure, if a father’s advice and good offices are of any avail, this little quarrel will be all patched up between you two. Surely will be! I can almost positively promise you that!”

“Promise it?” asked Waldron, leaning eagerly forward, a strange light in those close-set, greenish eyes.

Flint nodded. “Yes,” he answered. “I’ve never yet failed to bring Kate to reason and good common-sense, when I’ve set out to. This will be no exception. My word and my counsel possess the greatest weight with her. She’ll listen and be advised, I’m sure. So have no uneasiness,” he concluded, holding out his hand to his partner. “Leave everything to me. You’ll see, it will all come right, in the end.”

“Tiger” shook his hand, cordially.

“I haven’t words to thank you!” he exclaimed, with as much emotion as he could simulate from a perfectly cold heart and calculating soul.

“Don’t try to,” the Billionaire replied, with seeming benevolence. “All the thanks I want, Wally, is to patch up this little difficulty and reunite two—that is—two loving, sympathetic hearts!”

“You old hypocrite!” Waldron thought, eyeing him. “All you want of me, if anything, is to keep me as your partner, because you know you’re growing old and losing your grip, and I’m still in the game with all four claws! Paternal philanthropist you are—I don’t think!”

Wally was dead right.

“I can’t lose this man,” the Billionaire was thinking. “Whether or no, Kate has got to marry him. This Air Trust business demands a strong, a quick, a perfectly unscrupulous hand. And no outsider will do. My partner has got to be my son-in-law. Love be damned! Romantic slush can go to Hell! Kate will marry him—she’s got to—or I’ll know the reason why!

“Though, after all,” he soothed his conscience, as Waldron stood up, walked to the window and stood gazing out as he smoked, “after all, Wally will make her as happy, I fancy, as any man. He’s a fine figure in the world, commanding, heavily propertied, energetic and successful, also of the finest family connections. Yes, a husband any woman might admire and be proud of. Certainly, the only son-in-law for me. Even if she can’t idolize and worship him, as some fool women think they must, a man, she can respect and be respected with him. And with him she can take the highest position in the land, without a qualm as to his competence and manner. Beside all that, what’s love? Love? Bah!”

With which philosophy, he too arose, went back into his own office, and returned to the dictating of some very private letters to Slade, the Cosmos Detective Agency manager, in re the ferreting-out and jailing or deporting of all Socialists and labor leaders at Niagara. This preparatory work on the ground of the huge new Air Trust plant, he deemed most essential. The Cosmos people, scenting a big contract, had fostered his belief, and now, already, the work was well under way. Subterranean methods were still sufficing; but, should these fail, others lay in the background.

Flint smiled a grim, vulturine smile as he read over the finished letters of instruction, a few minutes later.

“And to think,” he mused, as he finished them, “that these fanatics believe—really believe—they can make headway anywhere in this country, now! Ten years ago, yes, they might have. But that’s not today. Then, publie opinion—stupid and futile as it was—could still be aroused. Then, there was a really effective labor and Socialist press. And the Limited Franchise Bill hadn’t gone through. Neither had the enlarged Military Bill, the National Censorship nor even the Grays—the National Mounted Police. While now—ah, thank Heaven, it’s all so different and so easy that I call myself a fool, at times, for even giving these matters a single thought!

“Well,” he concluded, handing the letters back to his confidential secretary, for mailing, “well, now that’s done, at any rate. So then, to the S. & S. committee meeting. And tonight my little talk with Kate. I’ll soon bring her to reason, I’m sure. There’s nothing can’t be accomplished by a little patience and persuasion.”

The old Billionaire chose his time well, that night, for the vital interview with his daughter, who had so far rebelled against his authority as to break with the man most eminently acceptable to him. After a simple but exquisite dinner in the Venetian room, he asked the girl to play for him, which (he knew) always pleased her and put her in a receptive mood.

“Play for you, father?” she answered. “Of course I will, anything and as much as you like! What shall it be, tonight? Chopin, or Grieg, or—?”

“Anything that pleases you, suits me, my dear,” he answered, smiling with satisfaction at his ruse. Never had he felt more masterful. He had allowed himself a trifle more morphia than usual that day, by reason of the approaching interview; and now the subtle drug filled him with well-being and seemed to enhance his self-control and power. Lighting a cigar—rare treat for him—he offered Kate his arm; and together, unattended by any valet or domestic, they walked along the high, paneled hallway, hung with Gobelin tapestries, and so reached the magnificent music-room which Kate claimed, in a way, as her own special place at Idle Hour.

Here everything suggested harmony. The mahogany wainscotted walls were decked with fine portraits of the world’s great masters of melody. Handsome cabinets contained costly and elaborate collections and folios of music, a complete library of the entire world’s best productions. The girl’s harp—a masterpiece by Pestalozzi of Venice—stood at one side; on the other, a five hundred dollar Victrola, with a wonderful repertoire of records. But the grand piano itself dominated all, especially made for Catherine by Durand Frères, in Paris, and imported on the Billionaire’s own yacht, the “Bandit.” A wondrous instrument, this, finer even than the pipe-organ in an alcove at the far end of the room. It summed up all that the world’s masters knew of instrument-production; and its cost, from factory to its present place at Idle Hour, represented twenty years’ wages, and more, of any of Flint’s slaves in the West Virginia mines or the Glenn Pool oil-fields of Oklahoma.

At this magnificent piano the girl now seated herself, on a bench of polished teak, from Mindanao. And, turning to her father, who had sunk down in his favorite easy-chair of Russia leather, she asked with a smile:

“Well, daddy, what shall I play for you, to-night?”

He looked at her a minute, before replying. Never had she seemed to dear, so beautiful to him. The rose-tinted light that fell softly from a Bohemian chandelier over her head, flooded her coiled hair, her face, her hands, with soft warm color. The slight dressing that her wound now required was covered by a deft arrangement of her hair. She had regained her usual tint. Nothing now told of the accident, the close call she had had, from death, so short a time before. And old Flint smiled, as he answered her:

“What shall you play? Anything you like, my dear. You know best—only, don’t make it too classical. Your old father isn’t up to that ultra music, you know, and never will be!”

She smiled again with understanding, and turned to the keyboard. Then, without notes, and with a delicate touch of perfectly modulated interpretation, she began to render “Traümerei,” as though she, too, had been dreaming of something that might have been.

Flint listened, with perfect content. The music soothed and quieted him. Even the foreknowledge of the difficult task that lay before him, the interview that he must have with his daughter, faded from his mind, a little, and left him wholly calm. Eyes closed, every sense intent on the delicious harmony, he followed the masterpiece to the end; and sighed when the last notes had died away, and kept silence.

Then Kate, still needing no music on the rack before her, played the “Miserere” from “Il Trovatore,” a Hungarian “Czardas,” Mendelssohn’s “Frühlingslied” and the overture from “William Tell.” She followed these with the “Intermezzo” and the “Pizzicato” from “Sylvia,” and then with “Narcissus” and “Sans Souci.” And at the end of this, she paused again; for now her father had arisen and come close to her. With a hand on her shoulder, looking down at her with stern yet kindly eyes, he said:

“’Sans Souci’? That means ‘Without Care,’ doesn’t it, Kate?”

“Yes, Daddy. Why?” she answered.

“Oh, I was just thinking, that’s all,” said he. “It made me wish I had no cares, no troubles, no sorrows.”

“Sorrows, father? Why should you have sorrows?” she queried, turning to him and taking both his shriveled hands in her warm, strong ones.

“Sorrows? Why shouldn’t I?” said he. “Every man of large affairs has them. Every father has them, too.” And he bent over her and kissed her, with unusual emotion.

“Every father?” asked she. “What do you mean? Am I a sorrow to you?”

“A joy in many ways,” he answered. “In some, a sorrow.”

“In what ways?” she asked quickly, her eyes widening.

“In this way, most of all,” he told her, as he took her left hand up, and pointed at the finger where Waldron’s ring had been and now no longer was.

She looked at him a moment, hardly understanding; then bowed her head.

“Father,” she whispered. “Forgive me—but I couldn’t! I—I couldn’t! No, not for the world!”

Flint’s drug-contracted eyes hardened as he stood there gazing down at her. Once, twice he essayed to speak, but found no words. At last, however, blinking nervously, he said:

“This, Kate, is what I want to talk with you about, to-night. Will you hear me?”