it, have they? No, they're not
expecting _me_. What I could do to 'em now would make the Big Uns look
like a bunch of pikers--and their beans would have to turn inside out
before they fell for it that _I'd_ come back to my happy home and was
on the job again."

"If--if you hadn't been so white, I'd have cut and run for it without
ever putting you wise. But I want to play fair. I'd be a hog if I
didn't play fair, and I'm trying to do it. I'm going because I can't
stay. I've got enough of my own money, earned honest, saved up, to pay
my way. Let me take it and go. And if I can come back, why, I'll
come."

He was stone deaf to entreaties, prayers, reasoning, argument. The
four years of his stay with me, and all their work, and study, and
endeavor, and progress, seemed to have slipped from him as if they had
never been. They were swept aside like cobwebs. He broke away from me
in the midst of my pleading, hurried into his bedroom, and began to
sort into a grip a few necessities.

"I'll leave on the three-o'clock," he flung over his shoulder to me,
standing disconsolate in the door. "I'll stop at the bank on my way."
I could do nothing; he had taken the bit between his teeth and was
bolting. I had for the time being lost all power of control over him,
and before I might hope to recover it he would be out of my reach.
Perhaps, I reflected wretchedly, the best thing to do under the
circumstances, would simply be to give him his head. I had seen horses
conquered like that. But the road before John Flint was so dark and so
crooked--and at the end of it waited Slippy McGee!

CHAPTER VIII

THE BUTTERFLY MAN

It was just one-thirty by the placid little clock on his mantel. The
express was due at three.

"Very well," said I, forcing myself to face the inevitable without
noise, "you are free. If you must go, you must go."

"I've got to go! I've got to go!" He repeated it as one repeats an
incantation. "I've got to go!" And he went on methodically assorting
and packing. Even at this moment of obsession his ingrained
orderliness asserted itself; the things he rejected were laid back in
their proper place with, the nicest care.

I went over to tell my mother that John Flint had suddenly decided to
go north. She expressed no surprise, but immediately fell to counting
on her fingers his available shirts, socks, and underwear. She rather
hoped he would buy a new overcoat in New York, his old one being
hardly able to st