This paper weapon was the centering point of the struggle which had now
lasted for nearly a fortnight. So long as the weapon was his to use or to
cast away, the outcome of the moral conflict hung in the balance. But now
he was emerging from the night wanderings among the tombs of the
undecided.

"I can't give it up; there is too much at stake," he muttered, as he
trudged heavily back to the hotel. And before he went above stairs he
asked the young woman at the house telephone exchange to ascertain if
Governor Bucks were in his office at the capitol, and if so, if he were
likely to remain there for an hour.

When he reached his rooms he flung the packet of papers on the
writing-table and went to freshen himself with a bath. That which lay
before him called for fitness, mental and physical, and cool sanity. In
other times of stress, as just before a critical hour in court, the tub
and the cold plunge had been his fillip where other men resorted to the
bottle.

He was struggling into clean linen, and the packet was still lying where
he had tossed it on entering, when a bell-boy came up with a card. Kent
read the name with a ghost of a smile relaxing the care-drawn lines about
his mouth. There are times when a man's fate rushes to meet him, and he
had fallen upon one of them.

"Show him up," was the brief direction; and when the door of the elevator
cage clacked again, Kent was waiting.

His visitor was a man of heroic proportions; a large man a little
breathed, as it seemed, by the swift upward rush of the elevator. Kent
admitted him with a nod; and the governor planted himself heavily in a
chair and begged a light for his cigar. In the match-passing he gathered
his spent breath and declared his errand.

"I think we have a little score to settle between us as man to man, Kent,"
he began, when Kent had clipped the end from his own cigar and lighted it
in stolid silence.

"Possibly: that is for you to say," was the unencouraging reply.

Bucks rose deliberately, walked to the bath-room door, and looked beyond
it into the bedroom.

"We are quite alone, if that is what you want to make sure of," said Kent,
in the same indifferent tone; and the governor came back and resumed his
chair.

"I came up to see what you want--what you will take to quit," he
announced, crossing his legs and locking the huge ham-like hands over his
knee. "That is putting it rather abruptly, but business is business, and
we can dispense with