en "Trickster." Connor had made his choice.

That done, his expression softened as men relax after a day of mental
strain and he loitered down the stairs and into the street. Passing
through the lobby he heard the voice of Jack Townsend raised obviously
to attract his attention.

"There he goes now. And nothing but the weight kept him from bettin' on
the gray."

Connor heard sounds, not words, for his mind was already far away in a
club house, waiting for the "ponies" to file past. On the way to the
telegraph office he saw neither street nor building nor face, until he
had written on one of the yellow blanks, "A thousand on Trickster," and
addressed it to Harry Slocum. Not until he shoved the telegram across
the counter did he see Ruth Manning.

She was half-turned from the key, but her head was canted toward the
chattering sounder with a blank, inward look.

"Do you hear?" she cried happily. "Bjornsen is back!"

"Who?" asked Connor.

"Sveynrod Bjornsen. Lost three men out of eight, but he got within a
hundred and fifty miles of the pole. Found new land, too."

"Lucky devil, eh?"

But the girl frowned at him.

"Lucky, nothing! Bjornsen is a fighter; he lost his father and his older
brother up there three years ago and then he went back to make up for
their deaths. Luck?"

Connor, wondering, nodded. "Slipped my mind, that story of Bjornsen. Any
other news?"

She made a little gesture, palms up, as though she gathered something
from the air.

"News? The old wire has been pouring it at me all morning. Henry
Levateur went up thirty-two thousand feet yesterday and the Admiral Barr
was launched."

Connor kept fairly abreast of the times, but now he was at sea.

"That's the new liner, isn't it?"

"Thirty thousand tons of liner at that. She took the water like a duck.
Well, that's the stuff for Uncle Sam to give them; a few more like the
Admiral Barr and we'll have the old colors in every port that calls
itself a town. Europe will have to wake up."

She counted the telegram with a sweep of her pencil and flipped the
change to Connor out of the coin-box. The rattle of the sounder meant
new things to Connor; the edges of the world crowded close, for when the
noise stopped, in the thick silence he watched her features relax and
the light go out of her eyes. It enabled him to glance into her life in
Lukin, with only the chattering wire for a companion. A moment before
she had been radiant--now she was a tired