his
own name leading the list of known dead, and what he saw now, broken up
into choppy paragraphs and done in the nervous English of a trained
reporter throwing a great news story together to catch an edition, but
telling a clear enough story nevertheless, was a narrative in which his
name recurred again and again. The body of the United States deputy
marshal, Meyers, frightfully crushed, had been taken from the wreckage
of the smoker--so the double-leaded story ran--and near to Meyers
another body, with features burned beyond recognition, yet still
retaining certain distinguishing marks of measurement and contour, had
been found and identified as that of Hobart W. Trimm, the convicted
banker. The bodies of these two, with eighteen other mangled dead, had
been removed to a town called Westfield, from which town of Westfield
the account of the disaster had been telegraphed to the New York paper.
In another column farther along was more about Banker Trimm; facts about
his soiled, selfish, greedy, successful life, his great fortune, his
trial, and a statement that, lacking any close kin to claim his body,
his lawyers had been notified.

Mr. Trimm read the account through to the end, and as he read the sense
of dominant, masterful self-control came back to him in waves. He got
up, taking the paper with him, and went back into the deeper woods,
moving warily and watchfully. As he went his mind, trained to take hold
of problems and wring the essence out of them, was busy. Of the charred,
grisly thing in the improvised morgue at Westfield, wherever that might
be, Mr. Trimm took no heed nor wasted any pity. All his life he had used
live men to work his will, with no thought of what might come to them
afterward. The living had served him, why not the dead?

He had other things to think of than this dead proxy of his. He was as
good as free! There would be no hunt for him now; no alarm out, no
posses combing every scrap of cover for a famous criminal turned
fugitive. He had only to lie quiet a few days, somewhere, then get in
secret touch with Walling. Walling would do anything for money. And he
had the money--four millions and more, cannily saved from the crash that
had ruined so many others.

He would alter his personal appearance, change his name--he thought of
Duvall, which was his mother's name--and with Walling's aid he would get
out of the country and into some other country where a man might live
like a prince on fou