am sorry. I hope he is not too sick to see me."

"Naw, he'll see you. He wants to." The speaker motioned Alan to follow
him to the rear of the store. Together they mounted some narrow stairs,
passed through a hallway and into a bedroom, a disorderly, dingy,
obviously man-kept affair. On the bed lay a large framed, exceedingly
ugly looking man. His flesh was yellow and sagged loosely away from his
big bones. The impression he gave was one of huge animal bulk, shriveling
away in an unlovely manner, getting ready to disintegrate entirely. The
man was sick undoubtedly. Possibly dying. He looked it.

The door shut with a soft click. The two men were alone.

"Hello, Jim." Alan approached the bed. "Bad as this? I am sorry." He
spoke with the careless, easy friendliness he could assume when it
suited him.

The man grinned, faintly, ironically. The grin did not lessen the
ugliness of his face, rather accentuated it.

"It's not so bad," he drawled. "Nothing but death and what's that? I
don't suffer much--not now. It's cancer, keeps gnawing away like a rat in
the wall. By and by it will get up to my heart and then it's good-by Jim.
I shan't care. What's life good for that a chap should cling to it like a
barnacle on a rock?"

"We do though," said Alan Massey.

"Oh, yes, we do. It's the way we're made. We are always clinging to
something, good or bad. Life, love, home, drink, power, money! Always
something we are ready to sell our souls to get or keep. With you and me
it was money. You sold your soul to me to keep money and I took it to
get money."

He laughed raucously and Alan winced at the sound and cursed the morbid
curiosity that had brought him to the bedside of this man who for three
years past had held his own future in his dirty hand, or claimed to hold
it. Alan Massey had paid, paid high for the privilege of not knowing
things he did not wish to know.

"What kind of a trail had you struck when you wired me, Massey? I didn't
know you were anxious for details about young John Massey's career I
thought you preferred ignorance. It was what you bought of me."

"I know it was," groaned Alan, dropping into a creaking rocker beside the
bed. "I am a fool. I admit it. But sometimes it seems to me I can't stand
not knowing. I want to squeeze what you know out of you as you would
squeeze a lemon until there was nothing left but bitter pulp. It is
driving me mad."

The sick man eyed the speaker with a leer of malicious sa