s, and Dave would be held responsible. In
a moment every impulse within her beat forth in a wild frenzy to save
him from such a consequence.

"Oh, don't, Dave, don't, don't shoot him," she cried, flying down the
remaining steps. Before Dave could grasp her purpose she was upon him;
had clutched his revolver; had wrapped her arms about his. "Don't,
don't, Dave," she pleaded. "For my sake, don't do--_that_."

Her words were tragically unfortunate. For a moment Dave stood as one
paralyzed; then his heart dried up within him.

"So that's the way of it," he said, as he broke her grip, and the
horror in his own eyes would not let him read the sudden horror in
hers. "All right; take it," and he placed the revolver in her hand.
"You should know what to do with it." And before she could stop him he
had walked out of the house.

She rushed to the gate, but already the roar of his motor was lost in
the hum of the city's traffic.

CHAPTER TWENTY

When Dave sprang into his car he gave the motor a full head and drove
through the city streets in a fury of recklessness. His mind was
numbed; it was incapable of assorting thoughts and placing them in
proper relationship to each other. His muscles guided the machine
apparently without any mental impulse. He rode it as he had ridden
unbroken bronchos in his far-away boyhood. Only this difference; then
he had no sense of danger; now he knew the danger, and defied it. If
he killed himself, so much the better; if he killed others, so much the
better still. The world was a place without purpose; a chaos of blind,
impotent, struggling creatures, who struggled only because they did not
know they were blind and impotent. Life was a farce and death a big
bluff set up that men might take the farce seriously.

He was soon out of the city, roaring through the still Autumn night
with undiminished speed. Over tortuous country roads, across sudden
bridges, along slippery hillsides, through black bluffs of
scrub-land--in some strange way he tried to drown the uproar in his
soul in the frenzy of the steel that quivered beneath him. On and on,
into the night. Bright stars gleamed overhead; a soft breeze pressed
against his face; it was such a night as he had driven, a year ago,
with Bert Morrison. Was that only a year ago? And what had happened?
Where had he been? Oh, to bring the boy--Charlie, the boy. When was
that? Under the calm heaven his mind was already attempting