ging a suggestive return of the furtive
fierceness which he promptly fought down. "I must see you before eight
o'clock this evening. It is of the last importance," was the wording of
the note; and the heavy underscoring of the "last," and a certain
tremulous characteristic in the handwriting, stressed the urgency.

Griswold thrust the note into his pocket and made his preparations to go
to town, still fighting down the furtive malevolence which was unnerving
him; fighting also an unshakable premonition that his hour had come.
Once, before the Inn brake was ready to make its evening trip to Wahaska
and the railway station, the premonition gripped him so benumbingly that
he was sorely tempted. There was another railroad fourteen miles to the
westward; a line running a fast day-train to the north with connections
for Winnipeg. One of the Inn guests was driving over to catch this fast
train at a country crossing, and there was a spare seat in the hired
carry-all. Griswold considered the alternative for the length of time it
took the hotel porter to put the departing guest's luggage into the
waiting vehicle. Then he turned his back and let the chance escape. The
issue was fairly defined. To become a fugitive now was to plead guilty
as charged--to open the door to chaos.

It was still quite early in the evening when the Inn conveyance set him
down at the door of his lodgings in upper Shawnee Street. To the
care-taking widow, who would have prepared a late dinner for him, he
explained that he was going out again almost at once; and taking time
only for a bath and a change, he set forth on the cross-town walk. It
lacked something less than a half-hour of the time limit set in Miss
Farnham's note, but he attached no special importance to that. He knew
that the doctor's dinner-hour was early, and that in any event he could
choose his own time for an evening call.

It nettled him angrily to find that the premonition of coming disaster
was still with him when he crossed the Court House square and came into
the main street a few doors from the Winnebago entrance. Attacking from
a fresh vantage-ground it was warning him that the town hotel was the
stopping-place of the man Broffin, and that he was taking an unnecessary
hazard in passing it. Brushing the warning aside, he went on defiantly,
and just before he came within identifying range of the loungers on the
hotel porch an omnibus backed to the curb to deliver its complement of
p