haf me cold.
I paid Stanford five hundred dollars for his vote on the charter; and
Joseph Newmark, he know dot; he can PROVE it. He tell me if I don't do
what he say, he put me in jail. Think of dot! All my friends go back on
me; all my money gone; maybe my daughter Mina go back on me, too. How
could I?"

"Well, he can still put you in prison," said Orde.

"Vot I care?" cried Heinzman, throwing up both his arms. "You and your
wife are my friends. She save my Mina. DU LIEBER GOTT! If my daughter
had died, vot good iss friends and money? Vot good iss anything? I don't
vant to live! And ven I sit dere by her always something ask me: 'Vy you
do dot to the peoples dot safe your Mina?' And ven she look at me, her
eyes say it; and in the night everything cry out at me; and I get sick,
and I can't stand it no longer, and I don't care if he send me to prison
or to hell, no more."

His excitement died. He sat listless, his eyes vacant, his hands between
his knees.

"Vell, I go," he said at last.

"Have you that note?" asked Orde.

"Joseph Newmark, he keeps it most times," replied Heinzman, "but now it
is at my office for the foreclosure. I vill not foreclose; he can send
me to the penitentiary."

"Telephone Lambert in the morning to give it to me. No; here. Write an
order in this notebook."

Heinzman wrote the required order.

"I go," said he, suddenly weary.

Orde accompanied him down the street. The German was again light-headed
with the fever, mumbling about his daughter, the notes, Carroll, the
voices that had driven him to righteousness. By some manoeuvring Orde
succeeded in slipping him through the improvised quarantine without
discovery. Then the riverman with slow and thoughtful steps returned
to where the lamp in the study still marked off with the spaced
replenishments from its oil reservoir the early morning hours.

XLVI

Morning found Orde still seated in the library chair. His head was sunk
forward on his chest; his hands were extended listless, palms up, along
the arms of the chair; his eyes were vacant and troubled. Hardly once in
the long hours had he shifted by a hair's breadth his position. His body
was suspended in an absolute inaction while his spirit battered at the
walls of an impasse. For, strangely enough, Orde did not once, even
for a single instant, give a thought to the business aspects of the
situation--what it meant to him and his prospects or what he could
do about it. Hurt