w."

* * * * *

Colonel Wallifarro stepped from the train at Marlin Town and turned up
the collar of his heavy coat, while an edged and searching wind carried
its chill through clothing and flesh and seemed to strike at the marrow
of a man's bones.

The Colonel felt the dismal and bleak oppressiveness of a picture
blotted from visual record by the reeking blackness of a winter dawn. A
railway schedule apparently devised for purposes of human torture had
deposited him in a sleeping town gloomed down on by sleeping mountains
at the hour when mortal spirits are at their zero of vitality, and the
train that had marooned him there wailed on its way like a strident
banshee.

In his pocket was the telegram that had brought him. It had come from
Larry Masters and had succeeded only in bewildering and alarming its
recipient with words that explained nothing except that the sender stood
in some desperate need of instant help. The words had startled Tom
Wallifarro like a scream heard in a dark street.

He had responded in person and at once. Now Larry was not even at the
station to meet him, so the Colonel turned and trudged forebodingly
through the viscid slop of unpaved streets, churned by yesterday's feet
of men and mules and oxen, toward that edge of the town where the mine
superintendent had his bungalow.

Through the windows of the house when he drew near he caught the pallid
glimmer of lamplight, but to his first rapping on the door there was no
response. A vigorous repetition, which started echoes up and down the
empty dark, brought at length a dull voice of summons, "Come in," and
on turning the knob the visitor looked upon a man who sat at the centre
of his room in apathetic collapse.

A kerosene lamp, guttering now to the inanition of spent fuel and wick,
revealed a face of pasty pallor and eyes deep sunk in dark sockets. It
was cold in the room, for on the hearth, where the fire had been long
unmended, only a few expiring embers glinted in the gray of the ash bed.

Colonel Wallifarro's first impression was that the man who had called on
him for help had turned meantime to the more immediate solace of
alcohol, and that now he was whiskey sodden, but a second glance
dispelled that conjecture. This torpidity was not born of drunkenness
but despair.

"I'm here, Larry," said Colonel Wallifarro, as he fumbled with chilled
fingers into a breast pocket and fished out a telegraph envelo