e brown
throat by the collarless and faded shirt. Simmons regarded him with a
covert gaze, then, catching the attention of the clerk in the store
outside, beckoned slightly with his head. The clerk approached, vigorously
brushing the counters with a turkey wing.

Gordon Makimmon's gaze concentrated on the storekeeper. "You're almost an
old man," he said, in a slow, unnatural voice; "you have been robbing men
and women of their homes for a great many years, and you are still alive.
It's surprising that some one has not killed you."

"I have been shot at," Valentine Simmons replied; "behind my back. The men
who fail are like that as a rule."

"I'm not like that," Gordon informed him; "it's pretty well known that I
stand square in front of the man I'm after. Don't you think, this time,
you have made a little mistake? Hadn't I better give you that fifty, and
something more later?"

Valentine Simmons rose from his chair and turned, facing Gordon. His
muslin bow had slipped awry on the polished, immaculate bosom of his
shirt, and it gave him a slightly ridiculous, birdlike expression. He
gazed coldly, with his thin lips firm and hands still, into the other's
threatening, virulent countenance. "Two hundred and fifty dollars," he
insisted.

The thought of Clare, betrayed, persisted in Gordon's mind, battling with
his surging temper, his unreasoning resentment. Valentine Simmons stood
upright, still, against the lamplight. It was plain that he was not to be
intimidated. An overwhelming wave of misery, a dim realization of the
disastrous possibilities of his folly, inundated Gordon, drowning all
other considerations. He turned, and walked abruptly from the office into
the store. There the clerk placed on the counter the bottle, filled and
wrapped. In a petty gust of rage, like a jet of steam escaping from a
defective boiler, he swept the bottle to the floor, where he ground the
splintering fragments of glass, the torn and stained paper, into an untidy
blot.

VIII

Outside, the village, the Greenstream Valley, was folded in still, velvety
dark. He crossed the street, and sat on one of the iron benches placed
under the trees on the Courthouse lawn. He could see a dull, reddish light
shining through the dusty window of the _Bugle_ office. Shining like that,
through his egotistical pride, the facts of his failure and impotence
tormented him. It hurt him the more that he had been, simply, diddled, no
better than a chi