ou
never felt that you could tear your enemy with your nails, choke him
till the bones of his neck crackled, and his tongue lolled out like a
panting dog's? That is how I too may feel if you deny my request. And
I will kill you, Marcus Bauer! As sure as God is in Heaven, I will
kill you!"

Fear now lent its blind fury to the instinct of self preservation.
Bower leaped at Stampa, determined to master him at the first
onslaught. But he was heavy and slow, inert after long years of
physical indolence. The older man, awkward only because of his
crippled leg, swung himself clear of Bower's grip, and sprang out
of reach.

"If there be any who look, 'tis you who risk imprisonment," he said
calmly, with a touch of humor that assuredly he did not intend.

Bower knew then how greatly he had erred. It was a mistake ever to
have agreed to meet Stampa alone--a much greater one not to have
waited to be attacked. As Stampa said truly, if anyone in the village
had seen his mad action, there would be testimony that he was the
aggressor. He frowned at Stampa in a bull-like rage, glowering at him
in a frenzy of impotence. This dour old man opposed a grim barrier to
his hopes. It was intolerable that he, Mark Bower the millionaire, a
man who held within his grasp all that the material world has to give,
should be standing there at the mercy of a Swiss peasant. Throughout
the dreary vigil of the night he had pondered this thing, and could
find no loophole of escape. The record of that accursed summer sixteen
years ago was long since obliterated in the history of Marcus Bauer,
the emotional youth who made love to a village belle in Zermatt, and
posed as an Austrian baron among the English and Italians who at that
time formed the select band of climbers in the Valais. But the
short-lived romance was dead and buried, and its memory brought the
taste of Dead Sea ashes to the mouth.

Marcus Bauer had become a naturalized Englishman. The mock barony was
replaced by a wealth that might buy real titles. But the crime still
lived, and woe to Mark Bower, the financial magnate, if it was brought
home to him! He had not risen above his fellows without making
enemies. He well knew the weakness and the strength of the British
social system, with its strange complacency, its "allowances," its
hysterical prudery, its queer amalgam of Puritanism and light hearted
forbearance. He might gamble with loaded dice in the City, and people
would applaud him a