of whiskey.

Carl glanced at the bottle and frowned.

"Take it away!" he said curtly.

Kronberg obeyed.

A little later, white and very tired, Carl went up to bed.

Dick went in the morning. At the door, after chatting nervously to
cover the surge of emotion in his heart, he held out his hand. Neither
spoke.

"Carl," choked Wherry at last, meeting the other's eyes with a glance
of wild imploring, "so help me God, I'll run straight. You know that?"

"Yes," said Carl truthfully, "I know it."

An interval of desperate silence, then: "I--I can't thank you, old man,
I--I'd like to but--"

"No," said Carl. "I wish you wouldn't."

And Wherry, wildly wringing his hand for the last time, was off to the
sleigh waiting in the lane, a lean, quivering lad with blazing eyes of
gratitude and a great choke in his throat as he waved at Carl, who
smiled back at him with lazy reassurance through the smoke of a
cigarette.

Carl's day was restless and very lonely. By midnight he was drinking
heavily, having accepted the tray this time and dismissed Kronberg for
the night. Though the snow had abated some the night before, and
ceased in the morning, it was again whirling outside in the lane with
the wild abandon of a Bacchante. The wind too was rising and filling
the house with ghostly creaks.

It was one of those curious nights when John Barleycorn chose to be
kind--when mind and body stayed alert and keen. Carl lazily poured
some whiskey in the fire and watched the flame burn blue. He could not
rid his mind of the doctor's farm and the girl in Vermont.

Again the wind shook the farmhouse and danced and howled to its crazy
castanetting. There was a creak in the hallway beyond. Last night,
too, when he had been talking to Wherry, there had been such a creak
and for the moment, he recalled vividly, there had been no wind. Then,
disturbed by Dick's utter collapse, he had carelessly dismissed it.
Now with his brain dangerously edged by the whiskey and his mind
brooding intently over a series of mysterious and sinister adventures
which had enlivened his summer, he rose and stealing catlike to the
door, flung it suddenly back.

Kronberg, his dark, thin-lipped face ashen, fell headlong into the room
with a revolver in his hand.

With the tigerish agility which had served him many a time before Carl
leaped for the revolver and smiling with satanic interest leveled it at
the man at his feet.

"So," said he softly, "y