ne, tired and melancholy, beside the shelter of poles, wondering if
there could possibly be any place where trouble did not come. No--not
Chip, but a man who at this moment stood looking into the little valley
where the last camp of the road builders had been.

A somewhat portly, somewhat pompous and self-important appearing
individual was this man. His bristly hair, cut very short, was tinged
with gray under the large, loose-fitting cap such as golfers and motorists
wear. His face was smooth, puffy and red. His very eyes, more touched
with red, also, than they should have been, as well as his pudgy hands
indicated self-indulgence and love of ease.

Presently the cap and the person under it moved from the rise of ground,
above the road builders' last camp, down into the valley. With a smile
that had too much of a sneer about it to be pleasant, the man ground his
heel into the gravel where the Longknives' road had come to its troubled
ending. With the same disagreeable sneer in his manner that accompanied
his unpleasant smile, he turned here and there, noting how the brush
and stunted stalks of mullen were springing up all about the unfinished
task the workmen had left.

Startled suddenly out of his reverie by a bluejay's scream, or some
other noise--he may have fancied it, he thought--the man looked hastily,
searchingly about him; but satisfied, apparently, that he was alone,
he moved leisurely into a shaded place and sat himself down on a
stump--another token of the great road that had been begun but never
completed. Quite carefully he drew up his trousers at the knees, then
picked from his hosiery, whose bright color showed in considerable
expanse above his oxfords, some bits of dry grass and pine needles
gathered in his walk. Mr. Lewis Grandall had come, apparently, to view
the work his perfidy had caused to be abandoned.

For a long time the unfaithful treasurer of the ambitious Longknives sat
in silent meditation. He had noted with some satisfaction that a growth
of brush screened his position from easy discovery should anyone chance
to pass that way; and now his thoughts ran back over the circumstances
leading up to his present personal situation. Quite steadily his eyes
were fixed upon the unleveled bank of gravel, the half-hewn logs and all
the unfinished work in the general picture of desolation and abandonment
before him.

It is doubtful, perhaps, if Grandall realized his own responsibility for
the waste