The music faltered and broke off. The bow dropped at his feet. He picked it up fumblingly and turned back into the office, as a man entered from a rear door. The new-comer was Michael Halloran, the hotel's proprietor, short, thick-set and surly. Asleep in his room, he had neither seen the fracas nor heard the playing. He saw instantly, however, that something unusual was forward, and, blinking on the threshold, caught sight of the man who was handing the violin back to its owner. He clenched his fist with a scowl and started toward him.
His wife caught his arm.
"Oh, Michael, Michael!" she cried. "Say nothing, lad! Ye should have heard him play!"
"Play!" he exclaimed. "Let him go fiddle to his side-partner Prendergast and the other riffraff he's run with the year past!" He turned blackly to Harry. "Take yourself from this house, Hugh Stires!" he said. "Whether all's true that's said of you I don't say, but you'll not come here!"
Harry had turned very white. With the spoken name—a name how familiar!—his eyes had fallen to the ring on his finger—the ring with the initials H. S. A sudden comprehension had darted to his mind. A score of circumstances that had seemed odd stood out now in a baleful light. The looks of dislike in the bar-room—the attitude of the street—this angry diatribe—all smacked of acquaintance, and not alone acquaintance, but obloquy. His name was Hugh Stires! He belonged to this very town! And he was a man hated, despised, forbidden entrance to an uncouth hostelry, an unwelcome visitant even in a bar-room!
An hour earlier the discovery would not so have appalled him. But the violin music, in the emergence of the real Harry Sanderson, had, as it were, flushed the mind of its turgid silt of devil-may-care and left it quick and quivering. He turned to Felder and said in a low voice—to him, not to the hotel-keeper, or to the roomful:
"When I entered this town to-day, I did not know my name, or that I had ever set foot in it before. I was struck by a train a month ago, and remember nothing beyond that time. It seems that the town knows me better than I know myself."
Halloran looked about him with a laugh of derision and incredulity, but few joined in it. Those who had heard the playing realized that in some eerie way the personality of the man they had known had been altered. Before the painful, shocked intensity of his face, the lawyer felt his instant skepticism fraying. This was little like acting! He felt an inclination to hold out his hand, but something held him back.
Harry Sanderson turned quietly and walked out of the door. Pavement and street were a hubbub of excited talk. The groups parted as he came out, and he passed between them with eyes straight before him.
As he turned down the street, a fragment of quartz, thrown with deliberate and venomous aim, flew from the saloon doorway. It grazed his head, knocking off his hat.