thin the next three or four days."

His plan had worked so successfully that Daney was, for the moment,
rendered incapable of speech.

"Will you be leaving Port Agnew?" he sputtered presently. "Or can I
arrange to let you have a small house at a modest rental--"

She dissipated this verbal camouflage with a disdainful motion of her
upflung hand.

"Thank you. I shall leave Port Agnew--forever. The loss of the Brutus
makes my escape possible," she added ironically.

"May I suggest that you give no intimation of your intention to
surrender this property?" he suggested eagerly. "If word of your plan
to abandon got abroad, it might create an opportunity for some person
to jump the Sawdust Pile and defy us to dispossess him."

Mr. Daney sought, by this subterfuge, to simulate an interest in the
physical possession of the Sawdust Pile which he was far from feeling.
He congratulated himself, however, that, all in all, he had carried
off his mission wonderfully well, and departed with a promise to bring
over the money himself that very afternoon. Indeed, so delighted was
he that it was with difficulty that he restrained himself from
unburdening to The Laird, when the latter dropped in at the mill
office that afternoon, the news that before the week should be out
Nan Brent would be but a memory in Port Agnew. Later, he wondered how
far from Port Agnew she would settle for a new start in life and
whether she would leave a forwarding address. He resolved to ask her,
and he did, when he reappeared at the Sawdust Pile that afternoon with
the money to reimburse Nan for the loss of the Brutus.

"I haven't decided where I shall go, Mr. Daney," Nan informed him
truthfully, "except that I shall betake myself some distance from the
Pacific Coast--some place where the opportunities for meeting people
who know me are nebulous, to say the least. And I shall leave no
forwarding address. When I leave Port Agnew"--she looked Mr. Daney
squarely in the eyes as she said this--"I shall see to it that no man,
woman, or child in Port Agnew--not even Don McKaye or The Laird, who
have been most kind to me--shall know where I have gone."

"I'm sorry matters have so shaped themselves in your life, poor girl,
that you're feeling bitter," Mr. Daney replied, with genuine sympathy,
notwithstanding the fact that he would have been distressed and
puzzled had her bitterness been less genuine. In the realization that
it _was_ genuine, he had a wild impul