but my spirit rejoiced at the thought of him in
jail! _Snake_!

"The strike only brought out Simon's worst qualities of stubbornness
and vindictiveness. He ordered a closed shop, and suspended a lot of
innocent, needy clerks without pay. Except that it goaded him to fury,
a pleasant achievement to contemplate, I had to write off my strike as
a flash in the pan.

"I chanced to discover that Simon's heel of Achilles was his fear of
death, so my next scheme was a pious plot to frighten him into behaving
like a human being and a good citizen. I had known the legend of the
monk all my life, of course, and it was while telling it to Janet one
day that I was struck with the idea of employing it to my own
ends--though I afterwards pretended to Simon that I first heard of it
from Sheila Graham.

"The next time I went to New York I purchased the costume and a pair of
large boots from a theatrical supply store. I made a mask myself, and
wired the cowl to stay up so that it would give the impression of a
tall man. The large boots, of course, were to give a wrong idea of the
man's size in case I left tracks.

"Sometimes I kept the outfit in the bottom of a trunk in that closet,
there, but more often it was hidden in a cubbyhole of my little house
down the hill. There is a very ancient and disreputable typewriter in
the attic, there, too, and I used that to write my messages on. I
concealed that, by the way, under a loose piece of flooring just as a
precaution, though I did not think then that a police case would ever
grow out of what I was doing!

"I set the first fire in the tannery, and it fizzled out. Then I wrote
my first note to Simon and waylaid him in the trail. I slipped off the
disguise in the woods, ran to overtake him and pretended I, too, had
seen a 'ghost'. The next day I brought him that historical book and
read him the legend, and I had real hopes of humanizing him when I saw
how scared he was!

"I followed up this jolt by firing the tannery again, hoping that its
destruction would necessitate the building of modern and proper
quarters for the men to work in. I was nearly caught that time--Simon
had the cunning to order his watchman to make double rounds!

"That night brought things to a sudden head. I had escaped from the
tannery yard, run up into the woods and shed my disguise, and came back
to stand on the hill and watch the fire.

"It was than that Leslie Sherwood spoke to me and made no bo