.
There isn't a man or woman in Askatoon who'd believe your sickening
slanders, for every one knows what you are. How dare you enter this
house? If the men of Askatoon had any manhood in them they would
tar-and-feather you. My girl is as good as any girl that ever lived, and
you know it. Now go out of here--now!"

Crozier intervened quietly. "Mrs. Tynan, I asked him in here because
it is my room. I have some business with him. When it is over, then he
shall go, and we will fumigate the place. As for the tar-and-feathers,
you might leave that to me. I think I can arrange it.

"I'll turn the hose on him as he goes out, if you don't mind," the irate
mother exclaimed as she left the room.

Crozier nodded. "Well, that would be appropriate, Mrs. Tynan, but it
wouldn't cleanse him. He is the original leopard whose spots are there
for ever."

By this time Burlingame was on his feet, and a look of craft and fear
and ugly meaning was in his face. Morally he was a coward, physically he
was a coward, but he had in his pocket a weapon which gave him a
feeling of superiority in the situation; and after a night of extreme
self-indulgence he was in a state of irritation of the nerves which gave
him what the searchers after excuses for ungoverned instincts and acts
call "brain-storms." He had had sense enough to know that his amorous
escapades would get him into trouble one day, and he had always carried
the little pistol which was now so convenient to his hand. It gave him
a fictitious courage which he would not have had unarmed against almost
any man--or woman--in Askatoon.

"You get a woman to do your fighting for you," he said hatefully. "You
have to drag her in. It was you I meant to challenge, not the poor
girl young enough to be your daughter." His hand went to his waistcoat
pocket. Crozier saw and understood.

Suddenly Crozier's eyes blazed. The abnormal in him--the Celtic strain
always at variance with the normal, an almost ultra-natural attendant
of it awoke like a tempest in the tropics. His face became transformed,
alive with a passion uncanny in its recklessness and purpose. It was a
brain-storm indeed, but it had behind it a normal power, a moral force
which was not to be resisted.

"None of your sickly melodrama here. Take out of your pocket the pistol
you carry and give it to me," Crozier growled. "You are not to
be trusted. The habit of thinking you would shoot somebody some
time--somebody you had injured--migh