it in his firm, pale fingers to inhale the fragrance. Now in
the glowing evening the bull-bats were soaring and tumbling, and the
tree-frogs trilled from the darkling pastures.

Around the bend in the road his house stood all alone, a small,
single-storied cottage in a tangled garden. He passed in at his gate,
but instead of unlocking the front door he began to examine the house as
though he had never before seen it; he scrutinized every window, he made
a cautious, silent tour of the building, returning to stare again at the
front door.

The door was locked; he never left the house without locking it, and he
never returned without approaching the house in alert silence, as though
it might conceal an enemy.

There was no sound of his footfalls as he mounted the steps; the next
instant he was inside the house, his back against the closed
door--listening. As usual, he heard nothing except the ticking of a
clock somewhere in the house, and as usual he slipped his revolver back
into the side pocket of his coat and fitted a key into the door on his
left. The room was pitch dark; he lighted a candle and held it up,
shading his eyes with a steady hand.

There was a table, a printing-press, and one chair in the room; the
table was littered with engraver's tools, copper plates, bottles of
acid, packets of fibre paper, and photographic paraphernalia. A camera,
a reading-lamp, and a dark-lantern stood on a shelf beside a
nickel-plated clock which ticked sharply.

The two windows in the room had been sealed up with planks, over which
sheet iron was nailed. The door also had been reinforced with
sheet-iron. From a peg above it a repeating-rifle hung festooned with
two cartridge belts.

When he had filled his lamp from a can of kerosene he lighted it and sat
down to the task before him with even less interest than usual--and his
interest had been waning for weeks. For the excitement that makes crime
interesting had subsided and the novelty was gone. There was no longer
anything in his crime that appealed to his intellect. The problem of
successfully accomplishing crime was no longer a problem to him; he had
solved it. The twelve months' work on the plate before him demonstrated
this; the plate was perfect; the counterfeit an absolute fac-simile. The
government stood to lose whatever he chose to take from it.

As an artist in engraving and as an intelligent man, Helm was, or had
been, proud of his work. But for that very reaso