" assented Justin; "there was
nothing to bind you."

"That's what I said to myself. If there had been, I'd 'a' stuck to it,
of course. But a man's got to do the best he can for himself in this
world."

"Has he?" asked the sick man, with an enigmatic, questioning smile.

"I'd be mighty sorry to have anything come between us. I reckon I took a
shine to you the first day I met up with you," continued Cater
helplessly. "I'd be mighty sorry to think we weren't friends."

Justin's brilliant eyes surveyed him serenely. Something sadly humorous,
yet noble and imposing, seemed to emanate from his presence, weak and a
failure though he was. "I can be friends with you, but you can't be
friends with me, Cater; it isn't in you to know how," he said.
"Good-by."

"Well, good-by," said the other, rising, his long, angular figure
knocking awkwardly against chairs and tables as he went out, leaving
Justin lying there alone, with his head throbbing horribly. Yet,
strangely enough, in spite of it, his mind felt luminously clear, in
that a certain power seemed to have come to him--a power of correlating
all the events of the past eighteen months and placing them in their
relative sequence. A certain faith--the candid, boyish, unquestioning
faith in the adequacy of his knowledge of those whom he had called his
friends--was gone; the face of Leverich came to him, brutal in its
unveiled cupidity, showing what other men felt but concealed; yet his
own faith in honor and honesty remained, stronger and higher than ever
before. Nothing, he knew, could take it from him; it was a faith that he
had won from the battle with his own soul.

By to-morrow night that note of Lewiston's would be protested, and
then--the burning pain of failure gripped him in its racking clutches
once more, though he strove to fight it off. He would have to get well
quickly, so as to begin to hustle for a small clerkship somewhere, to
get bread for Lois and the babies. Men of his age who were successful
were sought for, but men of his age who were not had a pretty hard row
to hoe.

Lois was long gone--probably she was with the baby. He missed his
handkerchief, and rose and went over, with a swaying unsteadiness, to
his chiffonier drawer in the farther corner to get one. A pistol lying
there in its leather case, as it had done any time this five years, for
a reserve protection against burglars, caught his eyes. He took it out
of its case, examining the little weapon