te, staring at her, waited a moment for her question. It did not
come. He turned to Houston.

"You tell eet!" he ordered. There was something of the father about
him,--the father with a wayward boy, fearful of the story that might
come, yet determined to do everything within his power to aid a person
he loved. Houston straightened.

"I'll try not to shield myself in any way," came at last. The words
were directed to Ba'tiste, but meant for Medaine Robinette. "There are
some things about it that I'd rather not tell--I wish I could leave
them out. But--it all goes. My word of honor--if that counts for
anything--goes with it. It's the truth, nothing else.

"I had come home from France--invalided back. The records of the
Twenty-sixth will prove that. Gas. I was slated for out here--the
recuperation hospital at Denver. But we managed to persuade the army
authorities that I could get better treatment at home, and they gave me
a disability discharge in about ten months--honorable, of course.
After a while, I went back to work, still weak, but rather eager to get
at it, in an effort to gather up the strands which had become tangled
by the war. I was in the real-estate business then, for myself. Then,
one afternoon," his breath pulled sharp, "Tom Langdon came into my
office."

"He was your cousin?" Ba'tiste's voice was that of a friendly
cross-examiner.

"Yes. I hadn't seen him in five years. We had never had much to do
with him; we," and Houston smiled coldly with the turn that Fate had
given to conditions in the Houston family, "always had looked on him as
a sort of a black sheep. He had been a runaway from home; about the
only letters my uncle ever had received from him had asked for money to
get him out of trouble. Where he had been this time, I don't know. He
asked for my father and appeared anxious to see him. I told him that
father was out of town. Then he said he would stay in Boston until he
came back, that he had information for him that was of the greatest
importance, and that when he told father what it was, that he, Langdon,
could have anything my father possessed in the way of a job and a
competence for life. It sounded like blackmail--I could think of
nothing else coming from Tom Langdon--and I told him so. That was
unfortunate. There were several persons in my office at the time. He
resented the statement and we quarreled. They heard it and later
testified."

Houston halted, to