ou have
put it--Ended by God!"

"It's what?" cried Blake.

"You don't seem to be aware of the fact, Blake, that Binhart is
dead--dead and buried!"

Blake stared up at him.

"Is what?" his lips automatically inquired.

"Binhart died seven weeks ago. He died in the town of Toluca, out in
Arizona. He's buried there."

"That's a lie!" cried Blake, sagging forward in his chair.

"We had the Phoenix authorities verify the report in every detail.
There is no shadow of doubt about it."

Still Blake stared up at the other man.

"I don't believe it," he wheezed.

Copeland did not answer him. He stepped to the end of the desk and
with his scholarly white finger touched a mother-of-pearl bell button.
Utter silence reigned in the room until the servant answered his
summons.

"Bridley, go to my secretary and bring me the portfolio in the second
drawer."

Blake heard and yet did not hear the message. A fog-like sense of
unreality seemed to drape everything about him. The earth itself
seemed to crumble away and leave him poised alone in the very emptiness
of space. Binhart was dead!

He could hear Copeland's voice far away. He could see the returning
figure of the servant, but it seemed as gray and ghostlike as the
entire room about him. In his shaking fingers he took the official
papers which Copeland handed over to him. He could read the words, he
could see the signatures, but they seemed unable to impart any
clear-cut message to his brain. His dazed eyes wandered over the
newspaper clippings which Copeland thrust into his unsteady fingers.
There, too, was the same calamitous proclamation, as final as though he
had been reading it on a tombstone. Binhart was dead! Here were the
proofs of it; here was an authentic copy of the death certificate, the
reports of the police verification; here in his hands were the final
and indisputable proofs.

But he could not quite comprehend it. He tried to tell himself it was
only that his old-time enemy was playing some new trick on him, a trick
which he could not quite fathom. Then the totality of it all swept
home to him, swept through his entire startled being as a tidal-wave
sweeps over a coast-shoal.

Blake, in his day, had known desolation, but it had seldom been
desolation of spirit. It had never been desolation like this. He
tried to plumb it, to its deepest meaning, but consciousness seemed to
have no line long enough. He only knew that his world had e