quilly
on--herding sheep and shearing them, weaving cloths and dyeing them,
driving engines, handling freight, conducting trains, usefully busy,
adding to the sum of human happiness, subtracting from the sum of human
misery.

At three o'clock Dumont sank back among his cushions and pillows. His
child, his other self, his Woolens Monopoly, was again his own; his
enemies were under his heel, as much so as those heaps and coils of
ticker-tape he had been churning in his excitement. "I'm dead tired,"
he muttered, his face ghastly, his body relaxed in utter exhaustion.

He closed his eyes. "I must sleep--I've earned it. To-morrow"--a smile
flitted round his mouth--"I'll hang their hides where every coyote and
vulture can see."

Toward four o'clock in came Doctor Sackett and Culver. The room was
flooded with light--the infinite light of the late-spring afternoon
reflected on the white enamel and white brocade of walls and furniture.
On the floor in the heaps and coils of ticker-tape lay Dumont.

In his struggles the tape had wound round and round his legs, his arms,
his neck. It lay in a curling, coiling mat, like a serpent's head,
upon his throat, where his hands clutched the collar of his pajamas.

Sackett knelt beside him, listening at his chest, feeling for his pulse
in vain. And Culver stood by, staring stupidly at the now worthless
instrument of his ambition for wealth and power.

XXVIII.

AFTER THE LONG WINTER.

Within two hours Langdon, in full control, had arranged with Tavistock
to make the imperiled victory secure. Thus, not until the next day but
one did it come out that the cataclysm had been caused by a man ruined
and broken and with his back against death's door to hold it shut; that
Dumont himself had turned the triumphing host of his enemies into a
flying mob, in its panic flinging away its own possessions as well as
its booty.

Perhaps the truth never would have been known, perhaps Langdon would
have bribed Tavistock to silence and would have posed as the conquering
genius, had he found out a day earlier how Dumont had put himself in
funds. As it was, this discovery did not come too late for him to
seize the opportunity that was his through Dumont's secret methods,
Pauline's indifference to wealth and his own unchecked authority. He
has got many an hour of--strictly private--mental gymnastics out of the
moral problem he saw, in his keeping for himself and Gladys the spoils
he gathere