eturn of reason, the consciousness that his feet were set
upon the road to Los Muertos, and that he was fleeing terror-stricken,
gasping, all but insane with hysteria. Then the never-to-be-forgotten
night that ensued, when he descended into the pit, horrified at what
he supposed he had done, at one moment ridden with remorse, at another
raging against his own feebleness, his lack of courage, his wretched,
vacillating spirit. But morning had come, and with it the knowledge that
he had failed, and the baser assurance that he was not even remotely
suspected. His own escape had been no less miraculous than that of his
enemy, and he had fallen on his knees in inarticulate prayer, weeping,
pouring out his thanks to God for the deliverance from the gulf to the
very brink of which his feet had been drawn.

After this, however, there had come to Presley a deep-rooted suspicion
that he was--of all human beings, the most wretched--a failure.
Everything to which he had set his mind failed--his great epic, his
efforts to help the people who surrounded him, even his attempted
destruction of the enemy, all these had come to nothing. Girding his
shattered strength together, he resolved upon one last attempt to live
up to the best that was in him, and to that end had set himself to lift
out of the despair into which they had been thrust, the bereaved family
of the German, Hooven.

After all was over, and Hooven, together with the seven others who had
fallen at the irrigating ditch, was buried in the Bonneville cemetery,
Mrs. Hooven, asking no one's aid or advice, and taking with her Minna
and little Hilda, had gone to San Francisco--had gone to find work,
abandoning Los Muertos and her home forever. Presley only learned of the
departure of the family after fifteen days had elapsed.

At once, however, the suspicion forced itself upon him that Mrs.
Hooven--and Minna, too for the matter of that--country-bred, ignorant of
city ways, might easily come to grief in the hard, huge struggle of city
life. This suspicion had swiftly hardened to a conviction, acting at
last upon which Presley had followed them to San Francisco, bent upon
finding and assisting them.

The house to which Presley was led by the address in his memorandum book
was a cheap but fairly decent hotel near the power house of the Castro
Street cable. He inquired for Mrs. Hooven.

The landlady recollected the Hoovens perfectly.

"German woman, with a little girl-baby, and