limbed with a dominant ambition--that
was different. That smugly superior world had betrayed him.

The young features hardened, and the eyes kindled into the
lightning-play that leads men, but it was such a leadership as animates
the chief who dances around the war fires and no longer of him who
smokes the pipe of sane counsel.

Just now it would take little to send the pedestal of acquired thought
down in ruin. Just now an enemy would not have been safe within the
reach of his blow.

Yet with a pale, expiring flicker, struggling through darkness, there
remained a half realization that this was all a delirium which he must
combat and overcome.

"I reckon," he said aloud, with that self-pity which is not good for a
man, "I've been as deep down in hell today as a man can go." Then he
started as a knock came on his door, and into the room stepped Jim
Bartleton of Marlin Town.

"Saul Fulton's done come back," he announced curtly, "an' Tom Carr's
done tuck him in. I'm one of the men thet's been hired ter kill ye."

Of course, the tale of the still and the threatened raid was of a piece
with all of Jim Bartleton's hatred; of a piece, too, with his seeming
degeneration. Boone Wellver, facing the animosities of enemies who
fought with ancient guile, had sought to meet that condition. "Little"
Jim was one of several, wholly faithful to him, who had undertaken to
insinuate themselves into the confidence of the conspirators.

* * * * *

The same Commonwealth's attorney who had prosecuted Asa Gregory had gone
to his own house for dinner, and now he sat before his library fire in
slippers and faded smoking jacket. On the floor near him lay an
afternoon paper, but the day's chief news he had garnered more directly
by personal contact. Over there in the Assembly was being waged a battle
which interested him deeply. So inured had he become to high tides of
political struggle that it did not occur to him to reflect upon the
frequency with which, in his native State, bitter campaign followed upon
bitter campaign. A Democrat and a Republican were at grips for the
United States senatorship. Each of them had been a governor of Kentucky
and the legislature, where senators were still made, hung in grimly
unyielding deadlock. All that afternoon until its adjournment the lawyer
had sat in the visitors' gallery of the house or laboured in the lobby.
Now he sought brief relaxation after his own fashion. He