ad been otherwise, it is doubtful if Thorpe would have
cared in the least. He was lost in a rushing train of thought. His
brain had cleared under the stimulating potions of raw whiskey, and,
just as before his chaotic state had made him unable to grasp things
fully, now it was equally chaotic in an opposite direction. His brain
was running riot with a clearness and rapidity that showed only too
plainly the nervous tension under which he was laboring. He was
piecing this latest trick of fortune with the ill-luck which seemed to
be ever pursuing him. Under the influence of the burning spirit he
seemed to have lost the sting of the actual wrong to himself, and in
its place a morbid train of thought had been set working.

It was a persecution that was steadily dogging him. When his early
misfortunes had come he had accepted them stoically, believing them to
be part of the balance of things, beginning on the wrong side, no
doubt, but which would be leveled up later on. Time and again he had
received these buffets, and he had merely smiled, a little grimly
perhaps, and started to "buck the game" afresh.

Then, when things eventually turned slightly in his favor, very
slightly, out here on the prairie amongst the derelicts, the flotsam
of the grassy ocean, he had found a brief breathing space. He had
begun to think the balance had really turned. Hope dawned, and life
offered fresh possibilities. And now--now he had been let down afresh.
Before, the attack had been directed against the worldly hopes of a
man, such as all see crushed at some time in life, but now it was his
spirit that was aimed at. It was that strong, living soul which was
the mainspring of his moral existence.

He had lost the woman he loved; that was something he could face,
something he could live down. But it was the manner of it. It was the
fact of Will's treachery that had opened the vital wound.

The thought chilled his heart, it crushed him. Yet his anger was not
all for the man who had so rankly betrayed his trust, his bitterness
was not all for the fact itself. It was the evidence it afforded of
the merciless hand of an invisible foe at work against him, and with
which he was powerless to contend. The subtlety of it--to his
exaggerated thought--was stupendous.

Slowly his bitterness resolved itself to an unutterable pessimism; the
acuteness of the stimulant was wearing off. There was an unhealthy
streak in his mind somewhere, a streak that was gr