h me. It isn't very late and this
is Canaan."

"I want to come with you, however," he said, picking up his hat. "You
can't go alone."

"But you are so tired, you--"

She was interrupted. There were muffled, flying footsteps on the
stairs, and a shabby little man ran furtively into the room, shut the
door behind him, and set his back against it. His face was mottled
like a colored map, thick lines of perspiration shining across the
splotches.

"Joe," he panted, "I've got Nashville good, and he's got me good,
too;--I got to clear out. He's fixed me good, damn him! but he won't
trouble nobody--"

Joe was across the room like a flying shadow.

"QUIET!" His voice rang like a shot, and on the instant his hand fell
sharply across the speaker's mouth. "In THERE, Happy!"

He threw an arm across the little man's shoulders and swung him toward
the door of the other room.

Happy Fear looked up from beneath the down-bent brim of his black
slouch hat; his eyes followed an imperious gesture toward Ariel, gave
her a brief, ghastly stare, and stumbled into the inner chamber.

"Wait!" Joe said, cavalierly, to Ariel. He went in quickly after Mr.
Fear and closed the door.

This was Joseph Louden, Attorney-at-Law; and to Ariel it was like a new
face seen in a flash-light--not at all the face of Joe. The sense of
his strangeness, his unfamiliarity in this electrical aspect, overcame
her. She was possessed by astonishment: Did she know him so well,
after all? The strange client had burst in, shaken beyond belief with
some passion unknown to her, but Joe, alert, and masterful beyond
denial, had controlled him instantly; had swept him into the other room
as with a broom. Could it be that Joe sometimes did other things in
the same sweeping fashion?

She heard a match struck in the next room, and the voices of the two
men: Joe's, then the other's, the latter at first broken and
protestive, but soon rising shrilly. She could hear only fragments.
Once she heard the client cry, almost scream: "By God! Joe, I thought
Claudine had chased him around there to DO me!" And, instantly,
followed Louden's voice:

"STEADY, HAPPY, STEADY!"

The name "Claudine" startled her; and although she had had no
comprehension of the argot of Happy Fear, the sense of a mysterious
catastrophe oppressed her; she was sure that something horrible had
happened. She went to the window; touched the shade, which disappeared
upward immediately, a