f some sort of debt?"

"A debt of honor!" He laughed in measureless self-contempt. "Poker."

"I see. But, Vernon, don't make me drag it out of you like this. Tell
me the whole story."

"It was before Starr went to Mexico." Vernon hesitated and then the
words came with a rush from his overburdened breast. "He was playing up
strong to Angie, and he saw I didn't like it. Father is hipped about him
and so is old North; they think he's the coming man in the oil game, and
he may be for all I know, but I'd heard other things about him and I
wasn't keen on having him for a brother-in-law. He began to jolly me
along; made up parties and wanted me to pal around with him. He's older
and he goes with the swiftest bunch in town, and, like a regular saphead,
I was flattered. He put me up at his club, and I got into some pretty
high play, away over my head, but I wouldn't have him or his friends
think I was a piker, so I stuck.

"He won usually, and I almost got writer's cramp making out I. O. U.'s
for him. Then his manner changed a bit and he began kidding me. He was
good-natured with it at first, but after a while he grew nasty, and one
night he taunted me before the whole crowd about my four-flushing.

"I'd been drinking and it made me wild. I don't know what put the idea
in my head, but I brooded over it and I couldn't see any other way out.
Father had said when he paid my debts before that it was the last time,
and he meant it. I--I took a check from his desk--he and Mason North
have accounts in the same bank--and I made it out, copying the signature
from an old letter."

His voice was getting lower and lower, and finally it halted, but Willa
prompted him firmly.

"What happened after you gave it to Starr Wiley?"

"Nothing. I realized what I had done when it was too late, of course,
and I lived in just plain hell for the next four weeks, waiting for the
blow to fall, but it didn't. At last I couldn't stand the strain any
longer; I went to Starr and asked him if he'd put it through, and he said
he hadn't. He knew when he accepted it from me that it was forged. I
had given him a song-and-dance about it being some money coming to me
from your grandfather's estate, but it hadn't fooled him for a minute.

"I groveled at his feet and told him I'd work my fingers to the bone to
pay it back, but he said I could do that in his way, at his own time.
He's held me under his thumb ever since, and when he got in town