meantime, hurried uptown in his hansom, consumed with a
feeling of resentment, torn by a fury of blind revolt against all
organized society, against all law and authority and order. Still once
more it seemed that some dark coalition of forces silently confronted
and combated him at every turn. The consciousness that he must now
fight, not only alone, but in the face of this unjust coalition brought
with it a desperate and almost intoxicating sense of audacity. If the
law itself was against him, he would take fate into his own hands, and
go to his own ends, in his own way. If the machinery of justice ground
so loosely and so blindly, there remained no reason why he himself,
however recklessly he went his way, should not in the end disregard its
engines and evade its ever-impending cogs.

He would show them! He would teach them that red-tape and officialism
could only blunder blindly on at the heels of his elusive and
lightfooted wariness. If they were bound to hold him down and
delegitimatize him and keep him a pariah and a revolter against order,
he would show them what he, alone, could do in his own behalf.

And as he drove hurriedly through the crowded city streets, still
lashing himself into a fury of resentment against organized society; he
formulated his plan of action, and mentally took up, point by point,
each new move and what it might mean. As he pictured, in his mind,
each anticipated phase of the struggle he felt come over him, for the
second time, a sort of blind and irrational fury, the fury of a rat in
a corner, fighting for its life and the life of its mate.

CHAPTER XX

THE SPIDER AND THE FLY

"And here's where we two hang out!" It was MacNutt who spoke.

Frances Durkin was neither protesting nor struggling when he drew up in
front of what she knew to be Penfield's lower gambling club. It stood
in that half-squalidly residential and half-heartedly commercial
district, lying south of Washington Square, a little to the west of
Broadway's great artery of traffic. A decorous and unbetraying door,
bearing only the modest sign, "The Neptune Club," and a narrow stairway
leading to an equally decorous and uncompromising hall, gave no hint,
to the uninitiated, of what the great gloomy walls of the building
might hold.

But on one side of the narrow door she could make out an incongruously
ornate and showy cigarstore; on the other, an equally unlooked-for
woman's hair-dressing and manicuri