' a livin' thing. I'm just a-hopin'--hopin' I'll wake up
bime-by and find it's on'y a bad dream." Then, with sudden and agonizing
emphasis: "My God, son! they been butcherin' one 'nother down yonder for
four long weeks!"

"I can't help that!" was the savage response. "It's a battle to the
death, and the smoke of it has got into my blood. If I believed in God,
as I used to once, I'd be down on my knees to Him this minute, asking
Him to let me live long enough to see these two hypocritical
thieves,--thugs,--sandbaggers,--hit the bottom!"

He turned away, walked to the north end of the veranda, where the flare
of the rekindled furnace was redly visible over the knolls, and
presently came back.

"I said you should know after a little: you may as well know now. I
planned this thing; I set out to break them; and, as it happened, I
wasn't a moment too soon. In another week you and Major Dabney would
have had a chance to sell out for little or nothing, or lose it all.
Farley had it fixed to be swallowed by the trust, and this is how it was
to be done. Farley stipulated that the stock transaction should figure
as a forced sale at next to nothing, in which all the stock-holders
should participate, and that the remainder of the purchase price, which
would have been a fair figure for all the stock, should be paid to him
and his son individually as a bonus!"

The old iron-master groaned. In spite of the hard teaching of all the
years, he would have clung to some poor shadow of belief in Duxbury
Farley if he could have done so.

"That's all," Tom went on stridently: "all but the turning of the trick
that put them in the hole they were digging for you and the Major. Vint
Farley had no notion of letting Ardea bring her money into the family of
her own free will: he planned to rob her first and marry her afterward.
Now, by God, I'm going down to tell them both what they're up against!
Don't sit up for me."

He had taken a dozen strides down the graveled path when he saw some one
coming hurriedly across the lawns from Deer Trace, and heard a
voice--the voice of the woman he loved--calling to him softly in the
stillness:

"Tom! O Tom!" it said, "please wait--just one minute!"

But there are lusts mightier, momentarily, than love, and the lust of
vengeance is one. He made as if he did not see or hear; and lest she
should overtake him, left the path to lose himself among the trees and
to vault the low boundary wall into the pike a