thing worth taking. The night before O'Brien
had served his customers up to the usual hour, and there was nothing
unusual to be observed. Therefore, the removal must have been effected
swiftly and silently in the dead of night, performed as the result of
careful, well-laid plans.

This was the first result of the definite establishment of police
authority. Evidently the future of Rocky Springs no longer appealed to
the shrewd saloonkeeper, and so he "moved on."

This was the cue for further goings. With the saloon closed, and the
police authority established, Rocky Springs was Rocky Springs no
longer. So, one by one, silently, without the least ostentation, men
began to yield up their claims as citizens, and, vanishing over the
distant horizon, were heard of no more.

The sledgehammer of police methods had penetrated through the
case-hardening of the village, and the place became hopelessly
impossible for its population of undesirables.

For Helen Seton those first three weeks left her with a dull,
apathetic feeling that quite suddenly her whole world had been turned
upside down. That somehow a complete wreckage of all the life about
her, her new life, had been consummated. Nor did she understand why,
or how. It seemed to her she was living in a new world where all was
misery and depression. Her usually bubbling spirit was weighted down
as with an avalanche of responsibility and unhappiness.

For her the change had begun with almost the very moment of the
felling of the old pine, and, somehow, it seemed to her as if that
wicked, mischievous monument of bygone crimes were responsible.

With the yielding up of the secrets of the Meeting House had started a
succession of shocks, each one harder than its predecessor to bear,
until she was left almost paralyzed and quite powerless to resist
them.

With Stanley Fyles heading the procession of death, with the man's
brief outline of the circumstances attending his raid, her heart
seemed suddenly to have turned to stone. Her thought turned at once to
her sister. That sister, even now away from home, waiting in dreading
unconsciousness for the completion of the disaster she so terribly
feared. To Helen's sympathetic heart the horror of the position was
magnified an hundredfold. Kate had been right. Kate had understood
where they had all been blind, and Kate, loyal, strong, brave Kate,
must learn that the very disaster she had prophesied had come, and, in
coming, had over