. By consequence the man's pistol
went off harmlessly in the air. The shot brought a policeman lumbering
heavily up from the street beyond, and the skirling of relief whistles
shrilled on the night. But the man with a pistol had twisted out of Kent's
grasp and was gone in a flash.

"By Jove!" said Loring, breathing hard; "he wasn't as drunk as he seemed
to be!"

Kent drew down his cuffs and shook himself straight in his coat.

"No; he wasn't drunk at all; I guess he was the man you saw when we came
out of the square." Then, as the policeman came up puffing: "Let me do the
talking; the whisky theory will be good enough for the newspapers."

XIX

DEEP-SEA SOUNDINGS

"_Oof_! I feel as if I had been dipped in a warm bath of conspiracy and
hung up to dry in the cold storage of nihilism! If you take me to any more
meetings of your committee of safety, I shall be like the man without
music in his soul--'fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.'"

Thus Penelope, after the breaking up of the Van Brock dinner party. Elinor
had elected to walk the few blocks intervening between Alameda Square and
Tejon Avenue, and Ormsby had dismissed his chauffeur with the motor-car.

"I told you beforehand it was going to be a political confab," said the
club-man in self-defense. "And you mustn't treat it lightly, either. Ten
prattling words of what you have heard to-night set afloat on the gossip
pool of this town might make it pretty difficult for our David."

"We are not very likely to babble," retorted Penelope. "We are not so rich
in intimates in this aboriginal desert." But Elinor spoke to the penal
clause in his warning.

"Then Mr. Kent's danger is more real than he admitted?" she said.

"It's real enough, I fancy; more real for him than it might be for another
man in his place. He is a curious combination, is David: keen and
sharp-witted and as cold as an icicle in the planning part; but when it
comes to the in-fighting he hasn't sense enough to pound sand, as his New
Hampshire neighbors would say."

"I like that side of him best," Penelope averred. "Deliver me from a man
of the cold and calculating sort who sits on his impulses, sleeps on his
injuries, and takes money-revenge for an insult. Mr. Loring tells a story
of a transplanted Vermonter in South America. A hot-headed Peruvian called
him a liar, and he said: 'Oh, pshaw! you can't prove it.'"

"What a merciless generalizer you are!" said Ormsby, laughing. "The