easts at Ephesus. An exaltation possessed
him. Not since the day when his hand was on the lever of the flume with
George Masson below; not since the day he had turned his back for ever
on the Manor Cartier had he been so young and so much his old self-an
egotist, with all the blind confidence of his kind; a dreamer inflamed
into action with all a mad dreamer's wild power. He was not fifty-two
years of age, but thirty-two at this moment, and all the knowledge got
of the wrestling river-drivers of his boyhood, when he had spent hours
by the river struggling with river-champions, came back to him. It was
a relief to his sick soul to wrench and strain, and propel and twist
and force onward, step by step, to the door opening on the river, this
creature who had left his Carmen to die alone.

"No, you don't--not yet. The jail before the river!" called a cool,
sharp, sour voice; and on the edge of the trembling platform overhanging
the river, Hugo Stolphe was dragged back from the plunge downward he was
about to take, with Jean Jacques' hand at his throat.

Stolphe had heard the door of the bedroom forced, but Jean Jacques had
not heard it; he was only conscious of hands dragging him back just at
the moment of Stolphe's deadly peril.

"What is it?" asked Jean Jacques, seeing Stolphe in the hands of two
men, and hearing the snap of steel. "Wanted for firing a house for
insurance--wanted for falsifying the accounts of a Land Company--wanted
for his own good, Mr. Hugo Stolphe, C.O.D.--collect on delivery!" said
the officer of the law. "And collected just in time!"

"We didn't mean to take him till to-morrow," the officer added, "but out
on the river one of us saw this gladiator business here in the red-light
zone, and there wasn't any time to lose.... I don't know what your
business with him was," the long-moustached detective said to Jean
Jacques, "but whatever the grudge is, if you don't want to appear in
court in the morning, the walking's good out of town night or day--so
long!"

He hustled his prisoner out.

Jean Jacques did not want to appear in court, and as the walking was
officially good at dawn, he said good-bye to Virginie Poucette's sister
through the crack of a door, and was gone before she could restrain him.

"Well, things happen that way," he said, as he turned back to look at
Shilah before it disappeared from view.

"Ah, the poor, handsome vaurien!" the woman at the tavern kept saying to
her husband all t