through this smoking portal
leaped Fred, closely followed by his comrades. The shooting flames
overhead and down the main building lit a pathway even through the
stifling clouds of smoke, and a moment more brought the foremost of the
party to a little room partitioned off. There on its accustomed peg hung
old Wallace's coat.

Here, there, and everywhere, overturned benches and chairs and scattered
tools, and scraping, struggling footprints on the dusty floor told of
some recent and desperate battle. Something warm and wet was sprinkled
all about the place, at touch of which Fred grew sick and faint; but not
another sign was there of old Wallace or of Jim, until from under a
blazing, half-finished car some fifty feet away the firemen dragged a
battered, bleeding form, and the younger brother threw himself by the
senseless elder's side, madly imploring him to say what had befallen
father.

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Begun in HARPER'S ROUND TABLE No. 821.

HIS SCORCHING WAS NOT IN VAIN.

BY WILLIAM HEMMINGWAY.

Arthur Clark believed himself the victim of gross injustice. His bicycle
had brought him into disgrace. He had come home flushed with victory,
ready to be hailed as the uncrowned king of scorchers, and here he was
virtually a prisoner in his room, thither he had been sent directly
after a wretched supper of oatmeal porridge.

"I wouldn't mind it if I had been ordered not to go into the road race,"
he said to himself, for the fiftieth time, as he rolled impatiently in
his bed; "but just because I promised my father I wouldn't do any riding
that would exhaust me, he has packed me off to bed as if I were a mere
child. That's pretty rough on a fellow of fourteen. Anyhow, I beat all
the scorchers in our school, and that's something."

Arthur could not go to sleep. He twisted and squirmed from one side of
the bed to the other, listening to the solemn protests of the katydids
and the shrill chirping of the crickets. That industrious prompter,
conscience, began to annoy him shamelessly. Now that the first flush of
his resentment had died away, he thought that perhaps his father was
right after all. True, he had beaten all the other fellows easily; but
then, what if it had been a hard struggle? Wouldn't it have exhausted
him? It occurred to him that he had broken his word.

Arthur fell asleep very late. He usually slept so fast and so hard that
from bedtime until the rising bell seemed like one