. He vouchsafed the fat man's
elaborate pantomime not so much as the shadow of a smile, nodded once,
thoughtfully, and let his eyes fall again to the card between his
elbows on the table-top.

"Come in, Chub," he invited shortly. "Come in." And as a clamor of
many voices in the outer entrance heralded the arrival of the rest of
Ogden's crowd: "Here comes the mob now. Come in and close the door."

Morehouse, still from head to toe a symphony in many-toned browns,
shed every shred of his facetiousness at Hogarty's crisply repeated
invitation. He closed the door and snapped the catch that made it fast
before he crossed, without a word, and drew a chair up to the opposite
side of the desk.

"Your hurry call just caught me as I was leaving for lunch," he
explained then. "And I made pretty fair time getting down here, too.
What's the dark secret?"

The black-clad proprietor lifted his lean jaw from his hands and gazed
long and steadily into the newspaper man's eyes, picked up the bit of
pasteboard which bore the latter's own name across its front and
flipped it silently across the table to him. Morehouse took it up
gingerly and read it--reversed it and read again.

"Nice little touch, that," he averred finally. "Rather neat and tasty,
if I do say it myself. 'Introducing The Pilgrim!' Hum-m-m. You can't
quite appreciate it of course, but--oh, Flash, I wish you could have
seen that big boy standing there in the door of that little backwoods
tavern, just as I saw him, about a week ago! Why, he--he was----"

"He's come!" Hogarty cut in briefly.

Morehouse's chin dropped. He sat with mouth agape.

"Huh?" he grunted. "He's--he's come where?"

Where his facetiousness had failed him Morehouse's round-eyed
astonishment, a little tinged with panic, was more than successful.
Hogarty permitted himself to smile a trifle--his queer, strained
smile.

"He is here," he repeated gravely, and the words were couched in his
choicest accents. "He came in, perhaps, an hour ago. That is his
monogramed trail across the floor which caught your eye. Oh, he's
here--don't doubt that! I'll give you a little review of the manner of
his coming, after you tell me how you ever happened to send him--why
you gave him that card? What's the answer to it, Chub?"

That same light of savage hope and cruelly calculating enmity, all so
strangely mixed with a persistent doubt, which Young Denny had seen
flare up in the ex-lightweight's eyes a little while