more smoothly. As it was, he looked back, perhaps,
through a long vista of misspent years, and the glance was not
encouraging. Of late, his mind had dwelt with somewhat unpleasant
frequency on the finding of a dead body in the quarry near his Vermont
home.

His first great crime had found him out when he was beginning to forget
it. He had walked that moment from the presence of a girl whose
sorrowful, frightened face reminded him of another long-buried victim of
that quarry tragedy. He knew, too, that this girl had been defrauded by
him and his brother of a vast sum of money, and a guilty conscience made
the prospect blacker than it really was. And then, he was a man of
fierce impulses, of ungovernable rage, a very tiger when his baleful
passions were stirred. A wave of madness swept through him now. He saw
the bright prospect of an easily-earned fortune ruthlessly replaced by a
more palpable vision of prison walls and silent, whitewashed corridors.
Perhaps the chair of death itself loomed through the red mist before his
eyes.

Yet he retained his senses sufficiently to note the police-captain's
slight signal to his men to come on board, and again he heard
Steingall's voice:

"Don't make any trouble, Voles. It'll be all the worse for you in the
end."

The detective's warning was not given without good cause. He knew the
faces of men, and in the blazing eyes of this man he read a maniacal
fury.

Voles glanced toward the river. It was nearly night. He could swim like
an otter. In the sure confusion he might--Then, for the first time, he
noticed the police launch. His right hand dropped to his hip.

"Ah, don't be a fool, Voles!" came the cry from the bridge. "You're only
making matters worse."

A bitter smile creased the lips of the man who felt the world slipping
away beneath him. His hand was thrust forward, not toward the occupants
of the bridge, but toward the wharf. Fowle saw him and yelled. A report
and the yell merged into a scream of agony. Voles was sure that Fowle
had betrayed him, and took vengeance. There was a deadly certainty in
his aim.

Steingall, utterly fearless when action was called for, swung himself
down by the railings. He was too late. A second report, and Voles
crumpled up.

His bold spirit had not yielded nor his hand failed him in the last
moment of his need. A bullet was lodged in his brain. He was dead ere
the huge body thudded on the deck.

When Carshaw found Winifred in a cabin