ease me to have you confuse my father's welcome
with the idea of free and easy liberty. Is that clear?"

Morgan was glaring up into Boone's eyes, since Boone stood several
inches the taller, and Boone's fingers ached to take him by the neck and
shake him as a terrier does a rat. The need of remembering whose son he
was became a trying obligation.

"Does Anne--whose social equal you are--know--that you're going to marry
her?" he inquired, with a quiet which should have warned Morgan had he
just then been able to recognize warnings.

"Perhaps," was the curt rejoinder, and Boone laughed.

"No, Mr. Wallifarro," he said. "No--even that 'perhaps' is a lie. She
doesn't so much as suspect it. As for me, I know you are _not_ going to
marry her."

Morgan had turned and walked around behind his desk, and as Boone added
his paralyzing announcement, he threw open the drawer. "I aim to marry
her myself--when I've made good--if she'll have me."

Morgan halted, half bent over, and his eyes burned madly.

"You!" he exclaimed, with a boiling over of contemptuous rage. "You
damned baboon!"

The words had sent Wellver, like the force of uncoiled springs, vaulting
over the table, and his face had gone paste-white. Yet as he landed on
the far side he halted and drew himself rigidly straight, though to keep
his arms inactive at his sides he had to tense every sinew from wrist to
shoulder, until each fibre ached with the cramp of repression. He had
caught himself on the brink of murder lust, with the murder fog in his
eyes. He had caught himself and now he held himself with a desperate
sense of need, though he saw Morgan's fingers close over the stock of a
heavy revolver. He even smiled briefly as he noted that it was a gun
with an elegant pearl grip.

"If any other man of God's earth had fathered you," he said, each word
coming separately like the drippings from an icicle, "I'd prove that I
wasn't only a baboon but a gorilla--and I'd prove it by pulling the
snobbish head off of your damned, tailor-made shoulders. People don't
generally say things like that to me and go free."

Morgan too was pallid with anger, and in neither of them was any
tragedy-averting possibility of faltering courage. Wallifarro held the
pistol before him, and gave back a step--only one, and that one not in
retreat but in order that he might have a chance to speak before he was
forced to fire.

"I realize perfectly," he said, "that physically I'd be helples