get the dope to fool the old
folks? Let me at her! I'll give her what for! Messages to mother from
her departed son! 'Do not grieve for me,' 'I am happy over here,' Oh,
for the love o' Mike! what _am_ I going to do first?"

Followed a long time of thought. At first, chaotic, wondering,
uncertain, then focussing and crystallizing into two definite ideas.

One, the astonishing but undeniable fact of his father's belief and
sincerity, the other, what would happen if that belief and sincerity
were suddenly stultified.

"Good Lord!" he summed up, "when I appear on the scene that medium will
get the jolt of her sweet young life-- I assume she's young still, and
Dad----

"H'm, where will he get off?"

That gave him pause. For Benjamin Crane to have written such a book as
this, for it to have achieved such a phenomenal success and popularity,
for it to have been the means, as it doubtless was, of converting
thousands to a belief in Spiritism, then, for the whole thing to be
overturned by the reappearance in the flesh of the man supposed dead,
would mean a cataclysm unparalleled in literary history.

And his father? The dear old man, happy in his communications from his
dead son, how would he be pleased to learn that they were not from his
dead son at all, but the faked drivel of a fraudulent medium?

It was a moil, indeed.

Peter Crane had come home incognito, because he doubted the wisdom of a
sudden shock to his parents. Unable to send or get news, and making his
voyage home at the first possible opportunity, he had intended to learn
how matters stood before making his appearance.

He had intended telephoning Blair and Shelby, and if they said all was
well at home he would go there at once. But if there had been illness or
death he would use care and tact in making his presence known.

For Peter Boots had had no word of, or from his people for half a
year--all the long Labrador winter he had lived in ignorance of their
welfare and had suffered to the limit, both mentally and physically.

And he had thought they would probably assume his death--as, by reason
of this astonishing book he now knew they had done--and, what was he to
do about it?

Impulse would have sent him flying home--home to his mother, Dad and
Julie, and--and dear little Carly.

But--when he thought of the possibility of his reappearance being the
means of making his father's name a by-word of ridicule, of heaping on
the old man's fame obloquy