uild his burned office; and to let the
incendiary, sufficiently identified by the watchman, it was believed, go
scot-free.

With the greater land-wide interest to divert it, even Paradise failed
to note the curious change that had come over the younger of the
Gordons, dating from the night of burnings. But the few who came in
contact with him in the business day saw and felt it. Miss Ackerman, the
pipe-works stenographer, quit when her week was up. It was nothing that
the young manager had said or done; but, as she confided to her sister,
more fortunately situated in town, it was like being caged with a living
threat. Even Norman, the trusted lieutenant, was cut out of his
employer's confidence; and for hours on end in the business day the card
"Not in" would be displayed on the glass-paneled door of the private
room in the rebuilt office.

Not to make a mystery of it for ourselves, Tom had passed another
milestone in the descent to the valley of lost souls. Or rather, let us
say, he had taken a longer step backward toward the primitive. Daggered
_amour-propre_ is rarely a benign wound. Oftener than not it gangrenes,
and there is loss of sound tissue and the setting-up of strange and
malevolent growth. With the passing of the first healthful shock of
honest resentment, Tom became a man of one idea. Somewhere in the land
of the living dwelt a man who had robbed him, intentionally or
otherwise, indirectly, but none the less effectually, of the ennobling
love of the one woman; to find that man and to deal with him as Joab
dealt with Amasa became the one thing worth living for.

The first step was taken in secrecy. One day a stranger, purporting to
be a walking delegate for the United Miners, but repudiated as such by
check-weigher Ludlow, took up his residence in Gordonia and began to
interest himself, quite unminer-like, in the various mechanical
appliances of the Chiawassee plant, and particularly in the different
sources of its water supply.

Divested of his cloakings, this sham walking delegate was a Pinkerton
man, detailed grudgingly from the Chicago storm-center on Tom's
requisition. His task was to scrutinize Nancy Bryerson's past, and to
identify, if possible, one or more of the three men who, in January of
the year 1890, had inspected and repaired the pipe-line running from the
coke-yard tank up to the barrel-spring on high Lebanon.

To the detective the exclusion card on Tom's door did not apply, and the
co