ually ripening, their color scheme ranging
from sky blue of blossoms to warm browns of maturity. Blotches of sod
corn added here and there a dash of green to the picture. Surrounding
all, a setting for all, the unbroken virgin prairie, mottled green and
brown, stretched, smiling, harmonious, beneficent; a land of promise
and of plenty for generations yet unborn.

All through the long, hot summer Asa Arnold had stayed in town,
smoking a big pipe in front of the hotel of Hans Becher. Indolent,
abnormally indolent, a stranger seeing him thus would have commented;
but, save Hans the confiding, none other of the many interested
observers were deceived. No man merely indolent sleeps neither by
night nor by day; and it seemed the little man never slept. No man
merely indolent sits wide-eyed hour after hour, gazing blankly at the
earth beneath his feet--and uttering never a word. Brooding, not
dreaming, was Asa Arnold; brooding over the eternal problem of right
and wrong. And, as passed the slow weeks, he moved back--back on the
trail of civilization, back until Passion and not Reason was the god
enthroned; back until one thought alone was with him morning, noon,
and night,--and that thought preponderant, overmastering, deadly
hate.

Observant Curtis, the doctor, shrugged his shoulders.

"The old, old trail," he satirized.

It was to Bud Evans, the little agent, that he made the observation.

"Which has no ending," completed the latter.

The doctor shrugged afresh.

"That has one inevitable termination," he refuted.

"Which is--"

"Madness--sheer madness."

The agent was silent a moment.

"And the end of that?" he suggested.

Curtis pursed his lips.

"Tragedy, or a strait-jacket. The former, in this instance."

Evans was silent longer than before.

"Do you really mean that?" he queried at last, significantly.

"I've warned Maurice,"--sententiously. "I can do no more."

"And he?" quickly.

"Thanked me."

"That was all?"

"That was all."

The two friends looked at each other, steadily; yet, though they said
no more, each knew the thought of the other, each knew that in future
no move of Asa Arnold's would pass unnoticed, unchallenged.

Again, weeks, a month, passed without incident. It was well along in
the fall and of an early evening that a vague rumor of the unusual
passed swiftly, by word of mouth, throughout the tiny town. Only a
rumor it was, but sufficient to set every man within hearing in
m