d be obliged to meet her
friends; people who, as I soon learned, were of the ultra fast set. At
another it would be a driving party to some out-of-town resort with the
same, or a worse, crowd; midnight banquetings, with champagne in the
finger-bowls, cocktails to go before and after, and quite likely some
daring young woman to show us a new dance, with the cleared
dinner-table for a stage. Many times I tried to dodge; to slip into
Denver on the necessary business errand and out again before the
newspapers could publish my arrival. It was no use. That woman's
ingenuity, prescience, intuition--whatever it may be called, was simply
devilish. Before I could turn around, my summons would find me, and I
had to obey or take the consequences.

Now and again I rebelled, even as the poorest worm will turn if it be
sufficiently trodden upon; but that, too, was useless. My tormentor
held me in a grip of steel. Worse than all, the dog's life she was
leading me caused me to lose all sense of proportion. As a choice
between two evils, a return to prison would have been far more
endurable than this indefinite sentence of degradation Agatha Geddis
was making me serve. But I could not see this: all I could see was
that this woman had the power to make a total wreck of all that I had
builded. The larger fact that I was myself the principal contributor
to the wreck, helping it on by the time-serving course I was pursuing,
did not lay hold of me.

One night, or rather early one morning, when I had taken her home from
a road-house revel so shameful that the keeper of the place had
practically turned us out, I asked her where all this was to end.

"Perhaps it will end when I have taught you how to make love to me
again," she returned flippantly.

"And if I refuse to learn?"

Her smile was no longer alluring; it was mockingly triumphant.

"You can't keep it up indefinitely--with the Cripple Creek girl, I
mean, Bertie"--she still called me "Bertie" or "Herbert" when we were
alone together. "Sooner or later, she is going to find out what you
are doing to her; and after that, the fireworks."

I shook my head. "It is hard to decide, sometimes, Agatha, whether you
are a woman or merely a she-devil in woman's shape."

"Oh, I'm a woman--all woman."

"But the motive," I gritted. "If I had done you the greatest injury a
woman could suffer--if you had a lifelong grudge to satisfy--you could
hardly be more vindictively merciless."