dead-white face come up; they saw those sick eyes beginning to clear.
And The Pilgrim smiled a little--smiled into Morehouse's face.

"Silk," he repeated softly. "Silk!" and then, as if it had all come
back at once: "Silk--next to her skin!"

And they called it a miracle--that recovery. They called it a miracle
of the mind over a body already beaten beyond endurance. For in the
scant thirty seconds which were left, while the boy lay back with them
working desperately above him, it was almost possible to see the
strength ebbing back into his veins. They dashed water upon his head,
inverted bottles of it into his face, and emptied it from his eyes,
but during that long half minute the vague smile never left his
lips--nor his eyes the face of Conway across from him.

And he went to meet The Red when the gong called to them again. He
went to meet him--smiling!

The bell seemed to pick him up and drop him in the middle of the ring.
Set for the shock he stopped Conway's hurtling attack. And when The
Red swung he tightened, took the blow flush on the side of the face,
and only rocked a little.

Conway's chin seemed to lift to receive the blow which he started
then from the waist. That right hand, flashing up, found it and
straightened The Red back--lifted him to his toes. And while he was
still in the air The Pilgrim measured and swung. The left glove
caught him flush below the ear; it picked him up and drove him
crashing back into the corner from which he had just come.

Old Jerry saw them bend over him--saw them pick him up at last and
slip him through the ropes. Then he realized that the referee was
holding Young Denny's right hand aloft; that Hogarty, with arms about
him, was holding the boy erect.

The little mail-carrier heard the ex-lightweight's words, as he edged
in beside Morehouse, against the ropes.

"A world-beater," he was screaming above the tumult. "I'll make a
world-beater of you in a year!"

And The Pilgrim, still smiling vaguely, shook his head a little.

"Maybe," he answered faintly. "Maybe I'll come back. I don't
know--yet. But now--now I reckon I'd better be going along home!"

CHAPTER XIX

It was a white night--a night so brilliant that the village lights far
below in the hollow all but lost their own identity in the radiance of
that huge, pale moon; so white that the yellow flare of the single
lamp in its bracket, in the back kitchen of the old Bolton place on
the hill seemed sh