would take
the later train to his destination, but what he actually did was to
board the afternoon local going in the direction of his home. As chance
ordained, he paid his fare to a new conductor, who did not know him, and
sat in the day coach unaccosted and unrecognized.

He did not remain on the local until it reached his own town of Tanner,
but dropped off at West Tanner, one station short of the full distance,
from which point he had a walk of four miles by a road sandy and little
frequented, to his own house.

Even now Eben did not hurry, but when he had left the limits of the
village he walked slowly and even paused occasionally to rest and
reflect, consulting his watch on these halts as though his object was
not so much the saving of time, as its killing.

In short, the Eben Tollman of this evening was not the same man that he
had ever been before. To a superficial eye he was, as usual, sedately
quiet, yet there was a new quality in his mood. This was the sort of
quiet that might brood at the bottom of an ocean whose surface is being
lashed into the destructive turmoil of tempest. Only since Eben Tollman
was a madman--not a noisy and raving maniac but a homicidally dangerous
and crafty one--his situation was inverted. It was the surface that was
calm with him and the deeps that were frenzied.

To be sure, all these seeming vicissitudes of his journey were parts of
a plan symmetrically ordered from the crazed compulsion of suspicion and
jealousy and now ripe for its fruition, which was to be murder.

Of course the motive which actuated him, locked in its logic-proof
compartment, would not have been, by him, called murder but obedience to
a divine mandate. None-the-less it contemplated human sacrifice.

Just as the storm broke with its cannonading of winds and its
fulmination of lightning he stopped at the edge of a small lake where an
ice-house, now exhausted of supply, had been left accommodatingly
unlocked.

He felt no hesitancy to taking refuge there because the place belonged
to him. Quite recently he had foreclosed, the mortgage which gave him
title to the small farm upon which it stood.

Eben's plan contemplated neither a premature nor an over-tardy arrival
at his own house. The two malefactors who were, he felt absolutely
certain, using his roof for their lustful assignation, had the night
before them. They would avail themselves of it with that sybarite
deliberateness which had characterized the