ate car across
the tracks on the siding, and pulled at his cigar.

Helena watched him in silence--a little bitterly. That quick, clever,
cunning brain of his was at work again--scheming--scheming--always
scheming--and Naida Thornton was dead.

"I'll tell you," said Madison, speaking again as abruptly as he had
stopped. "It's simple enough. There's a westbound train due in an hour
or so--we'll couple the private car onto that and send it right along to
Chicago. What the authorities don't know won't hurt them. There's no
reason for anybody except Thornton to know what's happened till she gets
there--I'll wire him. The main thing is that the car won't be here in
the morning, and that'll take a little of the intimate touch of Needley
off. It might well have happened on her way home--journey too much for
her--left too soon--see? Thornton'll see it in the right light because
he's got fifty thousand dollars worth of faith in what's going on
here--get that? He won't want to harm the 'cause.' There'll be some
publicity of course, we can't help that--but it won't hurt much--and
Thornton can gag a whole lot of it--he'd want to anyway for his own
sake. Now then, kid, there's Sam over there--you pile into the wagon and
go home, while I get busy--and don't you say a word about this, even to
the Flopper."

And so Helena drove back to the Patriarch's cottage that night, a little
silent figure in the back seat of the wagon--and her hands were locked
tightly together in her lap--and to her, as she drove over the peaceful,
moonlit road, and under the still, arched branches of the trees in the
wood that hid the starlight, came again and again the words of one who
had gone, who perhaps knew better now--"you are as God made you."

--XVI--

A FLY IN THE OINTMENT

The days passed. And with the days, morning, noon and night, they came
by almost every train, the sick and suffering, the lame, the paralytics
and the maimed--a steady influx by twos and threes and fours--from north
over the Canadian boundary line, from the far west, and from the
southernmost tip of the Florida coast. No longer on the company's
schedule was Needley a flag station--it was a regular stop, and its
passenger traffic returns were benign and pleasing things in the
auditor's office. And it was an accustomed sight now, many times a
day--what had once been a strange, rare spectacle--that slow procession
wending its way from the station to the town, some carried