f Market Street, his heart was hot with the glowing coals of an old
wrong revived. For to Judge Van Dorn, home had become a trap, and the
glorious eyes that had beamed upon him in the morning seemed beacons of
liberty.

As gradually those eyes became fixed in his consciousness, through days
and weeks and months, a mounting passion for Margaret Fenn kindled in
his heart. And slowly he went stone-blind mad. The whole of his world
was turned over. Every ambition, every hope, every desire he ever had
known was burned out before this passion that was too deep for desire.
Whatever lust was in his blood in those first months of his madness grew
pale. It seemed to the man who went stalking down the street past her
house night after night that the one great, unselfish passion of his
life was upon him, loosening the roots of his being, so that any
sacrifice he could make, whether of himself or of any one or anything
about him, would give him infinite joy. When he met Henry Fenn, Van Dorn
was always tempted and often yielded to the temptation to rush up to
Fenn with some foolish question that made the sad-eyed man stare and
wonder. But just to be that near to her for the moment pleased him.
There was no jealousy for Fenn in Van Dorn's heart; there was only a
dog-like infatuation that had swept him away from his reason and seated
a fatuous, chattering, impotent, lecherous ape where his intellect
should have been. And he knew he was a fool. He knew that he was stark
mad. Yet what he did not know was that this madness was a culmination,
not a pristine passion new born in his heart. For the maggot in his
brain had eaten out a rotten place wherein was the memory of many
women's yieldings, of many women's tears. One side of his brain worked
with rare cunning. He wound the evidence against the men in the mine,
taken at the coroner's hearing, through the labyrinth of the law, and
snared them tightly in it. That part of his brain clicked with automatic
precision. But sitting beside him was the ape, grinning, leering, ready
to rise and master him. So many a night when he was weary, he lay on the
couch beside his desk, and the ape came and howled him to a troubled
sleep.

But while Judge Van Dorn tried to fight his devil away with his law
book, down in South Harvey death still lingered. Death is no respecter
of persons, and often vaunts himself of his democracy. Yet it is a sham
democracy. In Harvey, when death taps on a door and enters the