What's all this?" he
asked. Then he recognized Marchand. "He's been playing with fire again,"
he added sarcastically, and there was a look of contempt on his face.

As he said it, Dennis broke through the crowd and made for Marchand.
Stooping over, he looked into Marchand's face.

"Hell and damnation--you!" he growled. "I risked my life to save you!"

With a sudden access of rage his hand suddenly went to his hip-pocket,
but another hand was quicker. It was that of Fleda Druse.

"No--no," she said, her fingers on his wrist. "You have had
your revenge. For the rest of his life he will have to bear his
punishment--that you have saved him. Leave him alone. It was to be. It
is fate."

Dennis Doane was not a man of great thinking capacity. If he got
a matter into his head it stayed there till it was dislodged, and
dislodging was a real business with him.

"If you want her to live with you again, you had better let this be as
it is," whispered Fleda, for the crowd were surging round and cheering
the new hero. "Just escaped the roof falling in," said one.

"Got the strength of two, for a drunk man weighs twice as heavy as a
sober one!" exclaimed another admiringly.

"Marchand's game is up on the Sagalac," declared a third decisively.

The excitement was so great, however, that only a very few of them knew
what they were saying, and fewer still knew that Dennis Doane had risked
his life to save the man he had been stalking for weeks past. Marchand
had been lying on his face in the smoke-filled room when Dennis broke
into it, and he had been carried down the stairs without his face being
seen at all.

To Dennis it was as though he had been made a fool of by Fate or
Providence, or whatever controlled the destinies of men; as though the
dangerous episode had been arranged to trap him into this situation.

Ingolby drew near and laid a hand upon Dennis's arm. Fleda's hand was on
the other arm.

"You can't kill a man and save him too," said Ingolby quietly, and
holding the abashed blue eyes of Dennis. "There were two ways to punish
him; taking away his life at great cost, or giving it him at great cost.
If you'd taken away his life, the cost would probably have been your own
life; in giving him his life you only risked your own; you had a chance
to save it. You're a bit scorched-hair, eyebrows, moustache, clothes
too, but he'll have brimstone inside him. Come along. Your wife would
rather have it this way; and so will y