s
the girl hasn't run very far away from the north country, even if you
did think it was too hot to hold you."

Latisan shook his head slowly. Confidence was still chilled in him; the
memory of what had happened was a forbidding barrier; in her case, at
the thought of thrusting himself back into her presence, he was as
timid to an extreme as he had been fearless in his dealings with men in
the Vose-Mern offices.

While he was wrestling with his thoughts, delivery men were wrestling
with furniture, bringing it in through the door from the corridor,
blocking the passage.

Mern snapped his attention from Latisan, then he pushed the latter out
of the range of vision from the corridor door.

Craig was out in the corridor, cursing the furniture and the men who
were obstructing the doorway. Craig was in a hurry and in a state of
mind; his language revealed his feelings.

"It won't do--it won't do!" insisted Mern when Latisan protested at
being shoved behind the partition. "He mustn't see you. Hear him rave!
I'm not staging another fight to-day. Stay in there! Crouch down! Keep
out of sight."

When Craig won his way past the blocking furniture he stormed to Mern,
stamping across the glass-strewn floor, shaking his fists and jabbering.

He was in a horrible state of rage. His face was so apoplectically
purple that the bruises on his patched-up countenance were subdued
somewhat by lack of contrast.

"Look at me! Called down to the home office just now, looking like this.
Lying like blazes about an automobile accident! That's what your
invitation to view the tame tiger has done for me. But that isn't what
I'm here for, you damnation, four-flushing double-crosser." He continued
to berate the chief.

"Say, you hold on there!" barked Mern, managing a few oaths of his own
after struggling out of the amazement stirred by this ferocious attack.
"If you're here to do business or to complain about the business that
has been done, you'll have to be decent, or I'll run you out." Mern
jutted his jaw and took two steps in Craig's direction--and Craig had
suffered violence too recently to persist in inviting more.

But he was still as acrimonious as he dared to be. Behind his rage there
was the bitterness of a man who had been tricked out of money--betrayed
shamefully--but Craig was so precipitate, breathless, violent, so
provokingly vague with his tumbling words and his broken sentences, that
Mern ceased to be angry in return and