ll, in fact, I have
already once offered my aid to the Express. And I stand ready now to
join with it in giving the lie to those who are seeking to embarrass
the present administration. Miss Carmen is with us--"

"Mr. Ames," the girl quietly interrupted, "I wish _you_ were with
_us_."

"But, my dear girl, have I--"

"For then there would be no more suffering in Avon," she added.

"Ha! Then it was you who wrote that misleading stuff in the Express,
eh? I might have known it! May I ask," he added with a contemptuous
sneer, "by whose authority you have visited the houses occupied by my
tenants, without my permission or knowledge? I take it you were down
there, although the cloudy weather must have quite dimmed your
perception."

"Yes," she answered in a low voice, "I have been there. And it was
_very_ cloudy. Yes, I visited your charnel houses and your cemeteries.
I saw your victims. I held their trembling hands, and stroked their
hot brows. I fed them, and gave them the promise that I would plead
their cause with you."

"Humph! But you first come here to--"

"It was with no thought of seeing you that I came to Washington, Mr.
Ames. If I cross your path often, it must be for a purpose not yet
revealed to either of us. Perhaps it is to warn you, to awaken you, if
not too late, to a sense of your desperate state."

"My desperate state!"

"Yes. You are drunk, you know, drunk with greed. And such continuous
drunkenness has made you sick unto death. It is the same dread disease
of the soul that the wicked Cortez told the bewildered Mexicans he
had, and that could be cured only with gold. You--you don't see, Mr.
Ames, that you are mesmerized by the evil which is always using you."

She stood close to the huge man, and looked straight up into his face.
He remained for a moment motionless, yielding again to that
fascination which always held him when in her presence, and of which
he could give no account to himself. That slight, girlish figure--how
easily he could crush her!

"But you couldn't, you know," she said cryptically, as she shook her
head.

"Couldn't what?" he demanded.

"Crush me."

He recoiled a step, struck by the sudden revelation that the girl had
read his thought.

"You see, Mr. Ames," she continued, "what a craven error is before
truth. It makes a coward of you, doesn't it? Your boasted power is
only a mesmerism, which you throw like a huge net over your victims.
You and they can break it, if