began to drop in at the hotel
bar, where Wilkerson, the professional drunkard, favored him with his
society. The old man understood; he knew it was the beginning of the
end. He sold his books in order to continue his credit at the Palace
bar, and once or twice, unable to proceed to his own dwelling, spent
the night in a lumber yard, piloted thither by the hardier veteran,
Wilkerson.

The morning after the editor took him home, Fisbee appeared at the
"Herald" office in a new hat and a decent suit of black. He had received
his salary in advance, his books had been repurchased, and he had become
the reportorial staff of the "Carlow County Herald"; also, he was to
write various treatises for the paper. For the first few evenings, when
he started home from the office, his chief walked with him, chatting
heartily, until they had passed the Palace bar. But Fisbee's redemption
was complete.

The old man had a daughter. When she came to Plattville, he told her
what the editor of the "Herald" had done for him.

The journalist kept steadily at his work; and, as time went on, the
bitterness his predecessor's swindle had left him passed away. But his
loneliness and a sense of defeat grew and deepened. When the vistas of
the world had opened to his first youth, he had not thought to spend his
life in such a place as Plattville; but he found himself doing it, and
it was no great happiness to him that the congressional representative
of the district, the gentleman whom the "Herald's" opposition to
McCune had sent to Washington, came to depend on his influence for
renomination; nor did the realization that the editor of the "Carlow
County Herald" had come to be McCune's successor as political dictator
produce a perceptibly enlivening effect on the young man. The years
drifted very slowly, and to him it seemed they went by while he stood
far aside and could not even see them move. He did not consider the life
he led an exciting one; but the other citizens of Carlow did when he
undertook a war against the "White Caps." The natives were much more
afraid of the "White Caps" than he was; they knew more about them and
understood them better than he did.

CHAPTER II. THE STRANGE LADY

IT was June. From the patent inner columns of the "Carlow County Herald"
might be gleaned the information (enlivened by cuts of duchesses) that
the London season had reached a high point of gaiety; and that, although
the weather had grown inauspiciou