nto his complicated
problem.

"I can explain it more intelligibly a little later on; or if I don't,
Ormsby will. In the mean time, you must take my word for it that we shall
have our railroad back in due season."

It is a question for the psychologists to answer if there be or be not
crises in a man's life when the event, weighty or trivial, turns upon that
thing which, for the want of a better name, is called a premonition.

In the silence that followed his dismissal of the subject, Kent became
aware of a vague prompting which was urging him to cut his visit short.
There was no definable reason for his going. He had finally brought
himself to the point of speaking openly to Elinor of her engagement, and
they were, as he fondly believed, safely beyond the danger point in that
field. Moreover, Penelope was stirring in her hammock and the perilous
privacy was at an end. Nevertheless, he rose and said good-night, and was
half-way to the next corner before he realized how inexcusably abrupt his
leave-taking had been.

When he did realize it, he was of two minds whether to go back or to let
the apology excuse another call the following evening. Then the insistent
prompting seized him again; and when next he came to a competent sense of
things present he was standing opposite the capitol building, staring
fixedly up at a pair of lighted windows in the second story.

They were the windows of the governor's room; and David Kent's brain
cleared suddenly. In the earliest beginnings of the determinate plan to
wrest the Trans-Western out of the grasp of the junto he had known that it
must come finally to some desperate duel with the master-spirit of the
ringsters. Was Jasper Bucks behind those lighted windows--alone?

Kent had not meant to make the open attack until he should have a weapon
in his hands which would arm him to win. But now as he stood looking up at
the heckoning windows a mad desire to have it out once for all with the
robber-in-chief sent the blood tingling to his finger-tips. True, he had
nothing as yet in the oil-field conspiracy that the newspapers or the
public would accept as evidence of fraud and corruption. But on the other
hand, Bucks was only a man, after all; a man with a bucaneer's record, and
by consequence vulnerable beneath the brazen armor of assurance. If the
attack were bold enough----

Kent did not stop to argue it out. When a man's blood is up the odds
against him shrink and become as naugh