e beyond cavil that certain of his acts were
inspired by sinister motives which he himself knew to have sprung from
dissipation at the worst. It was astonishing how plausible their story
was; and he admitted that if anybody else had been accused, he himself
would probably have been convinced by it. Certainly, then, the lawyers
must have been to blame--that is, unless they were only carrying out what
others had hired them to do.

That qualifying phrase started a new train of thought. Mechanically, dip
by dip, swaying gently with each stroke as to a kind of rhythm, he drove
the canoe onward, while he pondered it. It was easy to meditate out here,
on the wide, empty lake, for no sound broke the midnight stillness but the
soft swish of the paddle and the skimming of the broad keel along the
water. It was not by any orderly system of analysis, or synthesis, or
syllogism, that Ford, as the hours went by, came at last to his final
conclusion; and yet he reached it with conviction. By a process of
elimination he absolved judge, jury, legal profession, and local public
from the greater condemnation. Each had contributed to the error that made
him an outlaw, but no one contributor was the whole of the great force
responsible. That force, which had set its component parts to work, and
plied them till the worst they could do was done, was the body which they
called Organized Society. To Ford, Organized Society was a new expression.
He could not remember ever to have heard it till it was used in court.
There it had been on everybody's lips. Far more than old Chris Ford
himself it was made to figure as the injured party. Though there was
little sympathy for the victim in his own person, Organized Society seemed
to have received in his death a blow that called for the utmost avenging.
Organized Society was plaintiff in the case, as well as police, jury,
judge, and public. The single human creature who could not apparently gain
footing within its fold was Norrie Ford himself. Organized Society had
cast him out.

He had been told that before, and yet the actual fact had never come home
to him till now. In prison, in court, in the cabin in the woods, there had
always been some human hand within reach of his own, some human tie, even
though it was a chain. However ignoble, there had been a place for him.
But out here on the great vacant lake there was an isolation that gave
reality to his expulsion. The last man left on earth would not fe