the disputants' hands, now remained there as
melancholy reminders of the double game--love and golf--which had so
suddenly ended in disaster.

CHAPTER XII.

ON THE GREAT HIGHWAY.

As violently rent from his job as Maxim Waldron had been torn from his
alliance with Catherine, Gabriel Armstrong met the sudden change in his
affairs with far more equanimity than the financier could muster. Once
the young electrician's first anger had subsided--and he had pretty well
mastered it before he had reached the Oakwood Heights station--he began
philosophically to turn the situation in his mind, and to rough out his
plans for the future.

"Things might be worse, all round," he reflected, as he strode along at
a smart pace. "During the seven months I've been working for these
pirates, I've managed to pay off the debt I got into at the time of the
big E. W. strike, and I've got eighteen dollars or a little more in
my pocket. My clothes will do a while longer. Even though Flint
blacklists me all over the country, as he probably will, I can duck into
some job or other, somewhere. And most important of all, I know what's
due to happen in America--I've seen that note-book! Let them do what
they will, they can't take _that_ knowledge away from me!"

The outlook, on the whole, was cheering. Gabriel broke into a whistle,
as he swung along the highway, and slashed cheerfully with his heavy
stick at the dusty bushes by the roadside. A vigorous, pleasing figure
of a man he made, striding onward in his blue flannel shirt and
corduroys, stout boots making light of distance, somewhat rebellious
black hair clustering under his cap, blue eyes clear and steady as the
sunlight itself. There must have been a drop of Irish blood somewhere or
other in his veins, to have given him that ruddy cheek, those eyes, that
hair, that quick enthusiasm and that swiftness to anger--then, by
reaction, that quick buoyancy which so soon banished everything but
courageous optimism from his hot heart.

Thus the man walked, all his few worldly belongings--most precious among
them his union card and his red Socialist card--packed in the knapsack
strapped to his broad shoulders. And as he walked, he formulated his
plans.

"Niagara for mine," he decided. "It's there these hellions mean to start
their devilish work of enslaving the whole world. It's there I want to
be, and must be, to follow the infernal job from the beginning and to
nail it, when the r