to find that other man,--intuition made it unnecessary
to ask his name. As it was, he wanted now to be away. The tiny room
seemed all at once stifling. He wanted to be out of doors where the sun
shone, out where he could think. He seized his hat, then suddenly
remembered, paused to glance--and that instant was his undoing, and
another man's--Clarence Sidwell's--salvation.

And Florence Baker, at whom he had glanced? She was not tearful or
hysterical now. Instead, she was looking at him out of wide-open eyes.
Well she knew this man, and knew the volcano she had aroused.

"You won't hurt him, Ben!" she said. "You won't hurt him! For my sake,
say you won't!"

The devil lurking in the cowboy's blue eyes vanished, but the great jaw
was still set. He reached out and caught the girl by the shoulder.
"Florence Baker," he said, "on your honor, is he worth it--is he worth
the sacrifice you ask of me? Answer!"

But the girl did not answer, did not stir. "You won't hurt him!" she
repeated. "Say you won't!"

A moment longer Ben Blair held her; then his hands dropped and he turned
toward the vestibule.

"I don't know," he said. "I don't know."

CHAPTER XXII

TWO FRIENDS HAVE IT OUT

Clarence Sidwell was alone in his down-town bachelor quarters; that is,
alone save for an individual the club-man's friends termed his "Man
Friday," an undersized and very black negro named Alexander Hamilton
Brown, but answering to the contraction "Alec." Valet, man of all work,
steward, Alec was as much a fixture about the place as the floor or the
ceiling; and, like them, his presence, save as a convenience, was
ignored.

The rooms themselves were on the eleventh floor of a down-town
office-building, as near the roof as it had been possible for him to
secure suitable quarters. For eight years Sidwell had made them his home
when he was in town. The circle of his friends had commented, his mother
and sisters (his father had been long dead) had protested, when, a much
younger man, he first severed himself from the semi-colonial mansion
which for three generations had borne the name of Sidwell; but as usual,
he had had his own way.

"I want to work when I feel so inclined, when the mood is on me, whether
it's two o'clock of the afternoon or of the morning,'" he had explained;
"and I can't do it without interruption here with you and your
friends."

For the same reason he had chosen to live near the sky. There, high
above the noise