man and choked him into submission before the
fellow had emitted more than a sleepy grunt of surprise. They left him
gagged and tied to the iron leg of some heavy piece of machinery, and
went on up the stairs, treading as stealthily as a prowling cat.

Starr turned to the right, found the door locked, and patiently turned
his key a hair's breadth at a time in the lock, until he slid the bolt
back. Behind him the repressed breathing of O'Malley fanned warmly the
back of his neck. He pushed the door open a half inch at a time, found
the outer office dark and silent, and crossed it stealthily to the closet
behind the stove. O'Malley and Whittier were so close behind that he
could feel them as they entered the closet and crept along its length.

Starr was reaching out before him with his hands, feeling for the door
into the secret office, when Sheriff O'Malley struck his foot against the
old tin spittoon, tried to cover the sound, and ran afoul of the brooms,
which tripped him and sent him lurching against Starr. There in that
small space where everything had been so deathly still the racket was
appalling. O'Malley was not much given to secret work; he forgot himself
now and swore just as full-toned and just as fluently as though be had
tripped in the dark over his own wheelbarrow in his own back yard.

Starr threw himself against the end of the closet where he knew the door
was hidden in the wall, felt the yielding of a board, and heaved against
it with his shoulder. He landed almost on top of a fat-jowled
representative from Santa Fe, but he landed muzzle foremost, as it were,
and he was telling the twelve to put up their hands even before he had
his feet solidly planted on the floor.

Holman Sommers sat facing him. He had been writing, and he still held his
pencil in his hand. He slowly crumpled the sheet of paper, his vivid eyes
lifted to Starr's face. Tragic eyes they were then, for beyond Starr they
looked into the stern face of the government he would have defied. They
looked upon the wreck of his dearest dream; upon the tightening chains of
the wage slaves he would have freed--or so he dreamed.

Starr stared back, his own mind visioning swiftly the havoc he had
wrought in the dream of this leader of men. He saw, not a political
outlaw caught before he could do harm to his country, but a man fated to
bear in his great brain an idea born generations too soon into a brawling
world of ideas that warred always with so