e
who recognized him as he passed paused to look after him curiously. He
walked directly to his club.

A few men gathered there reading newspapers paused to look after him
curiously, bowed coldly and at once resumed reading. Others seemed to
avoid him. Boland felt that the newspapers' conspicuous comment on a
certain financial magnate prominent in the electrical world in connection
with the vice-scandal pointed at him too plainly for any one in Chicago
to misunderstand.

He called his car and drove to his lonely home.

That night John Boland had a strange vision. He saw an eternity of pain
and everlasting darkness. Through it the nightmare of his past life in
strangely terrifying pictures passed before his mind.

Scenes of his boyhood, the panorama of his young manhood, pictures of his
battle for success against overwhelming forces in the great city. These
pictures returned again and again, vivid in their relief. He saw again
the death of his wife and the spirit of darkness that had then come to
walk beside him, taunting him that now he was of necessity a cold,
calculating, lonely, indomitable man, not knowing how to give to his only
son fatherly tenderness.

This phase passed. He seemed to enter into a larger world full of
terrifying monsters, all of human form. One he recognized as Druce,
another as Anson, a third as the senator whose seat he had helped to get.
And with them came a host of smaller figures, some struggling for life,
and being crushed down into oblivion under his inexorable progress, some
fighting with one another lest they too be torn down and crushed before
him.

There were piteous girl faces and worn kindly faces of women and men and
these had gone down before the others because they had not the power of
resistance needed in this battle. It was a great whirling nightmare of
continuous struggle.

And always walking by his side and seeming to grow stronger and more
terrible as he tore his path through every obstacle strode his guide, the
spirit of darkness.

At last they were alone, he and the spirit. And the spirit turned upon
him and clutched him by the throat. He struggled in that grasp just as
others had struggled in his own grasp, tortured and futile. And again
those words from Grogan:

_"You can't beat Nature and you can't beat God!"_

Sweat stood out on John Boland's forehead.

He awoke with a mighty effort and sat upright. Around him was the
emptiness and loneliness of the great