f
the factory that made the strips from Hendricks' Exchange National to
the new Merchants' State Bank which Gabriel Carnine was establishing.
For Carnine and Barclay were more of a mind than were Barclay and
Hendricks; Carnine was bent on getting rich, and he had come to regard
Barclay as the most remarkable man in the world. Hendricks, on the
other hand, knew Barclay to the core, and since the quarrel of the
seventies, while they had maintained business relations, they were
merely getting along together. There were times when Barclay felt
uncomfortable, knowing that Hendricks knew much about his business,
but the more Carnine knew, the more praise Barclay had of him; and so,
even though Jane kept her own account with Hendricks, and though John
himself kept a personal account with Hendricks, the Economy Door Strip
Company and the Golden Belt Wheat Company did business with Carnine,
and Barclay became a director of the Merchants' State Bank, and
greatly increased its prestige thereby. And Bob Hendricks sighed a
sigh of relief, for he knew that he would never become John Barclay's
fence and be called upon to dispose of stolen goods. So Hendricks went
his way with his eyes on a level and his jaw squared with the world.
And when he knew that Jane knew the secret of his soul, about the only
comfort he had in those black days was the exultation in his heart
that John--whatever he might know--could not turn it into cash at
the Exchange National Bank.

As he walked alone under the stars that first night after Molly
Brownwell's note came to him, he saw his life as it was, with things
squarely in their relations. Of course this light did not stay with
him always; at times in his loneliness the old cloud of wild yearning
would come over him, and he would rattle the bars of his madhouse
until he could fight his way out to the clean air of Heaven under the
stars. And at such times he would elude Dolan, and walk far away from
the town in fields and meadows and woods struggling back to
sanity--sometimes through a long night. But as the years passed, this
truth came to be a part of his consciousness--that in some measure
the thing we call custom, or law, or civilization, or society, with
all its faults, is the best that man, endowed as he is to-day, can
establish, and that the highest service one can pay to man or to God
is found in conforming to the social compact, at whatever cost of
physical pain, or mental anguish, if the conforma