thered feline screech as from a tiger whose back is
broken in a deadfall. Richard gave his wrist the shadow of a twist, and
Storri fell on one knee. Then, as though it were some foul thing,
Richard tossed aside Storri's hand, from the nails of which blood came
oozing in black drops as large as grapes.

"What was it?" gasped Dorothy, who had stood throughout the duel like
one planet-struck; "what was it you did?"

"Storri on his knee?" asked Richard with a kind of vicious sweetness.
There was something arctic, something remorselessly glacial, in the man.
It caught and held Dorothy, entrancing while it froze. "Storri on his
knee?" repeated Richard, looking where his adversary was staining a
handkerchief with Tartar blood. "It was nothing. It is a way in which
Russians honor me--that is, Russians whom I do not like!"

CHAPTER II

HOW A PRESIDENT IS BRED

Mr. Patrick Henry Hanway, a Senator of the United States, had the
countenance of a prelate and the conscience of a buccaneer. His
grandfather--it was at this old gentleman, for lack of information, he
was compelled to stop his ancestral count--was a farmer in his day.
Also, personally, he had been the soul of ignorance and religion, and of
a narrowness touching Scriptural things that oft got him into trouble.

Grandfather Hanway read his Bible and believed it. He held that the
earth was flat; that it had four corners; and that the sun went around
the earth. He replied to a neighbor who assured him that the earth
revolved, by placing a pan of water on his gate-post. Not a drop was
spilled, not a spoonful missing, in the morning. He showed this to the
astronomical neighbor as refutatory of that theory of revolution.

"For," said Grandfather Hanway, with a logical directness which among
the world's greatest has more than once found parallel, "if the y'earth
had turned over in the night like you allow, that water would have done
run out."

When the astronomical one undertook a counter argument, Grandfather
Hanway fell upon him with the blind, unreasoning fury of a holy war and
beat him beyond expression. After that Grandfather Hanway was left
undisturbed in his beliefs and their demonstrations, and tilled his sour
acres and begat a son.

The son, Hiram Hanway, was sly and lazy, and not wanting in a gift for
making money that was rather the fruit of avarice than any general
length and breadth and depth of native wit. Having occasion to visit, as
a young man,