n in a chair to light his
pipe.

CHAPTER IX

Cal Maggard lay unmoving as the old man's chair creaked. Over there with
his back turned toward the fire stood Bas Rowlett, his barrel-like chest
swelling heavily with that excitement which he sought to conceal. To
Caleb Harper, serenely unsuspicious, the churlish sullenness of the eyes
that resented his intrusion, went unmarked. It was an intervention that
had come between the wounded man and immediate death, and now Rowlett
cursed himself for a temporizing fool who had lost his chance.

He stood with feet wide apart and his magnified shadow falling
gigantically across floor and wall--across the bed, too, on which his
intended victim lay defenseless.

If Cal Maggard had been kneeling with his neck on the guillotine block
the intense burden of his suspense could hardly have been greater.

So long as Caleb Harper sat there, with his benign old face open-eyed in
wakefulness, death would stand grudgingly aloof, staring at the wounded
man yet held in leash.

If those eyes closed in sleep the restive executioner would hardly
permit himself to be the third time thwarted.

Yet the present reprieve would for a few moments endure, since the
assassin would hesitate to goad his victim to any appeal for help.

Slowly the fire began to dwindle and the shadows to encroach with a
dominion of somberness over the room. It seemed to the figure in the
bed as he struggled against rising tides of torpor and exhaustion that
his own resolution was waning with the firelight and that the murk of
death approached with the thickening shadows.

He craved only sleep yet knew that it meant death.

With a morose passion closely akin to mania the thoughts of the other
man, standing with hands clenched at his back, were running in turbulent
freshet.

To have understood them at all one must have seen far under the surface
of that bland and factitious normality which he maintained before his
fellows. In his veins ran a mongrelized strain of tendencies and vices
which had hardened into a cruel and monstrous summary of vicious
degeneracy.

Yet with this brain-warping brutality went a self-protective disguise of
fair-seeming and candour.

Rowlett's infatuation for Dorothy Harper had been of a piece with his
perverse nature--always a flame of hot passion and never a steadfast
light of unselfish love.

He had received little enough encouragement from the girl herself, but
old Caleb Harper