at, sprang out of the
shadows.

"Stranger," he called hastily. "There's a little child fell in the river
round the bend, and his mother got hold of him, but she can't pull him
out, and can't hold on much longer. Will you come help me, quick? I've
only got one arm or I would n't have had to ask for help."

An empty sleeve was flapping in the rain, and Fenneben did not notice
then that the man kept that side of himself all the time in the shadows.
Fenneben had only one thought as he hurried away in the darkness, to
save the woman and child. His companion said little, directing the
course toward the bend in the river before the gateway of Pigeon Place.
As they pushed on with all speed through rain and mud, Fenneben was
hardly conscious that Dennie Saxon's words about the lonely gray-haired
hermit woman were recurring curiously to his mind.

"If talking about Sunrise made her cry like that, maybe you might do
something for her," Dennie had said. He had never tried to do anything
for her. Somehow she seemed to be the woman who was in peril now, and
he was half-consciously blaming himself that he had never tried to help
her, had not even thought of her for months. Women were not in his line,
except the kindly impersonal interest he felt for all the Sunrise
girls, and his sense of responsibility for Norrie, and the memory of a
girl--oh, the hungry haunting memory!

All this in a semi-conscious fleetness swept across his mind, that was
bent on reaching the river, and on that woman holding a drowning child.
At the bend in the river, the man halted suddenly.

"Look out! There's a stone; don't stumble!" he said hoarsely, dodging
back as he spoke.

Then Fenneben was conscious of his own feet striking the slab of stone
by the roadside, of a sudden shove from somebody behind him, a two-armed
man it must have been, of stumbling blindly, trying to catch at the elm
tree that stood there, of falling through the underbrush, headforemost,
into the river, even of striking the water. As he fell, he was very
faintly conscious of a sense of pity for Victor Burleigh fighting out a
battle with his own honor tonight, and then he must have heard a dog's
fierce yelp, and a woman's scream. Somehow, it seemed to come through
distance of time, as out of past years, and not through length of
space--and then of a brutal laugh and an oath with the words:

"Now for Josh Wream, and--"

But Fenneben's head had struck the stone ledge against which t