GLADIATOR

Philip Wylie

[Transcriber's Note: Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

I

Once upon a time in Colorado lived a man named Abednego Danner and his wife, Matilda. Abednego Danner was a professor of biology in a small college in the town of Indian Creek. He was a spindling wisp of a man, with a nature drawn well into itself by the assaults of the world and particularly of the grim Mrs. Danner, who understood nothing and undertook all. Nevertheless these two lived modestly in a frame house on the hem of Indian Creek and they appeared to be a settled and peaceful couple.

The chief obstacle to Mrs. Danner's placid dominion of her hearth was Professor Danner's laboratory, which occupied a room on the first floor of the house. It was the one impregnable redoubt in her domestic stronghold. Neither threat nor entreaty would drive him and what she termed his "stinking, unchristian, unhealthy dinguses" from that room. After he had lectured vaguely to his classes on the structure of the Paramecium caudatum and the law discovered by Mendel, he would shut the door behind himself, and all the fury of the stalwart, black-haired woman could not drive him out until his own obscure ends were served.

It never occurred to Professor Danner that he was a great man or a genius. His alarm at such a notion would have been pathetic. He was so fascinated by the trend of his thoughts and experiments, in fact, that he scarcely realized by what degrees he had outstripped a world that wore picture hats, hobble skirts, and straps beneath its trouser legs. However, as the century turned and the fashions changed, he was carried further from them, which was just as well.

On a certain Sunday he sat beside his wife in church, singing snatches of the hymns in a doleful and untrue voice and meditating, during the long sermon, on the structure of chromosomes. She, bolt upright and overshadowing him, like a coffin in the pew, rigid lest her black silk rustle, thrilled in some corner of her mind at the picture of hell and salvation.

Mr. Danner's thoughts turned to Professor Mudge, whose barren pate showed above the congregation a few rows ahead of him. There, he said to himself, sat a stubborn and unenlightened man. And so, when the weekly tyranny of church was ended, he asked Mudge to dinner. That he accomplished by an argument with his wife, audible the length of the aisle.

They walked to the Danner residence. Mrs. Danner changed her clothes hurriedly, basted the roast, made milk sauce for the string beans, and set three places. They went into the dining-room. Danner carved, the home-made mint jelly was passed, the bread, the butter, the gravy; and Mrs. Danner dropped out of the conversation, after guying her husband on his lack of skill at his task of carving.

Mudge opened with the usual comment. "Well, Abednego, how are the blood-stream radicals progressing?"

His host chuckled. "Excellently, thanks. Some day I'll be ready to jolt you hidebound biologists into your senses."

Mudge's left eyebrow lifted. "So? Still the same thing, I take it? Still believe that chemistry controls human destiny?"

"Almost ready to demonstrate it," Danner replied.

"Along what lines?"

"Muscular strength and the nervous discharge of energy."

Mudge slapped his thigh. "Ho ho! Nervous discharge of energy. You assume the human body to be a voltaic pile, eh? That's good. I'll have to tell Gropper. He'll enjoy it."

Danner, in some embarrassment, gulped a huge mouthful of meat. "Why not?" he said. "Look at the insects—the ants. Strength a hundred times our own. An ant can carry a large spider—yet an ant is tissue and fiber, like a man. If a man could be given the same sinews—he could walk off with his own house."

"Ha ha! There's a good one. Maybe you'll do it, Abednego."

"Possibly, possibly."

"And you would make a splendid piano-mover."

"Pianos! Pooh! Consider the grasshoppers. Make a man as strong as a grasshopper—and he'll be able to leap over a church. I tell you, there is something that determines the quality of every muscle and nerve. Find it—transplant it—and you have the solution."

Mirth overtook Professor Mudge in a series of paroxysms from which he emerged rubicund and witty. "Probably your grasshopper man will look like a grasshopper—more insect than man. At least, Danner, you have imagination."

"Few people have," Danner said, and considered that he had acquitted himself.

His wife interrupted at that point. "I think this nonsense has gone far enough. It is wicked to tamper with God's creatures. It is wicked to discuss such matters—especially on the Sabbath. Abednego, I wish you would give up your work in the laboratory."

Danner's cranium was overlarge and his neck small; but he stiffened it to hold himself in a posture of dignity. "Never."

His wife gazed from the defiant pose to the locked door visible through the parlour. She stirred angrily in her clothes and speared a morsel of food. "You'll be punished for it."

Later in the day Mudge and Gropper laughed heartily at the expense of the former's erstwhile host. Danner read restively. He was forbidden to work on the Sabbath. It was his only compromise. Matilda Danner turned the leaves of the Bible and meditated in a partial vacuum of day-dreams.

On Monday Danner hastened home from his classes. During the night he had had a new idea. And a new idea was a rare thing after fourteen years of groping investigation. "Alkaline radicals," he murmured as he crossed his lawn. He considered a group of ultra-microscopic bodies. He had no name for them. They were the "determinants" of which he had talked. He locked the laboratory door behind himself and bent over the microscope he had designed. "Huh!" he said. An hour later, while he stirred a solution in a beaker, he said: "Huh!" again. He repeated it when his wife called him to dinner. The room was a maze of test tubes, bottles, burners, retorts, instruments. During the meal he did not speak. Afterwards he resumed work. At twelve he prepared six tadpole eggs and put them to hatch. It would be his three hundred and sixty-first separate tadpole hatching.

Then, one day in June, Danner crossed the campus with unusual haste. Birds were singing, a gentle wind eddied over the town from the slopes of the Rocky Mountains, flowers bloomed. The professor did not heed the reburgeoning of nature. A strange thing had happened to him that morning. He had peeped into his workroom before leaving for the college and had come suddenly upon a phenomenon.

One of the tadpoles had hatched in its aquarium. He observed it eagerly, first because it embodied his new idea, and second because it swam with a rare activity. As he looked, the tadpole rushed at the side of its domicile. There was a tinkle and a splash. It had swum through the plate glass! For an instant it lay on the floor. Then, with a flick of its tail, it flew into the air and hit the ceiling of the room.

"Good Lord!" Danner said. Old years of work were at an end. New years of excitement lay ahead. He snatched the creature and it wriggled from his grasp. He caught it again. His fist was not sufficiently strong to hold it. He left it, flopping in eight-foot leaps, and went to class with considerable suppressed agitation and some reluctance. The determinant was known. He had made a living creature abnormally strong.

When he reached his house and unlocked the door of the laboratory, he found that four tadpoles, in all, had hatched. Before they expired in the unfamiliar element of air, they had demolished a quantity of apparatus.

Mrs. Danner knocked on the door. "What's been going on in there?"

"Nothing," her husband answered.

"Nothing! It sounded like nothing! What have you got there? A cat?"

"No—yes."

"Well—I won't have such goings on, and that's all there is to it."

Danner collected the débris. He buried the tadpoles. One was dissected first. Then he wrote for a long time in his notebook. After that he went out and, with some difficulty, secured a pregnant cat. A week later he chloroformed the tabby and inoculated her. Then he waited. He had been patient for a long time. It was difficult to be patient now.

When the kittens were born into this dark and dreary world, Mr. Danner assisted as sole obstetrician. In their first hours nothing marked them as unique. The professor selected one and drowned the remainder. He remembered the tadpoles and made a simple calculation.

When the kitten was two weeks old and its eyes opened, it was dieting on all its mother's milk and more besides. The professor considered that fact significant. Then one day it committed matricide.

Probably the playful blow of its front paw was intended in the best spirit. Certainly the old tabby, receiving it, was not prepared for such violence from its offspring. Danner gasped. The kitten had unseamed its mother in a swift and horrid manner. He put the cat out of its misery and tended the kitten with trepidation. It grew. It ate—beefsteaks and chops, bone and all.

When it reached three weeks, it began to jump alarmingly. The laboratory was not large enough. The professor brought it its food with the expression of a man offering a wax sausage to a hungry panther.

On a peaceful Friday evening Danner built a fire to stave off the rigours of a cold snap. He and Mrs. Danner sat beside the friendly blaze. Her sewing was in her lap, and in his was a book to which he paid scant attention. The kitten, behind its locked door, thumped and mewed.

"It's hungry," Mrs. Danner said. "If you must keep a cat, why don't you feed it?"

"I do," he answered. He refrained, for politic reasons, from mentioning what and how much he fed it. The kitten mewed again.

"Well," she repeated, "it sounds hungry."

Danner fidgeted. The laboratory was unheated and consequently chilly. From its gloomy interior the kitten peered beneath the door and saw the fire. It sensed warmth. The feline affinity for hearths drew it. One paw scratched tentatively on the door.

"It's cold," Mrs. Danner said. "Why don't you bring it here? No, I don't want it here. Take it a cover."

"It—it has a cover." Danner did not wish to go into that dark room.

The kitten scratched again and then it became earnest. There was a splitting, rending sound. The bottom panel of the door was torn away and it emerged nonchalantly, crossing the room and curling up by the fire.

For five minutes Mrs. Danner sat motionless. Her eyes at length moved from the kitten to her husband's quivering face and then to the broken door. On his part, he made no move. The kitten was a scant six inches from his foot. Mrs. Danner rose. She went to the door and studied the orifice, prying at it with her fingers as if to measure the kitten's strength by her own. Then she turned the key and peered into the gloom. That required either consummate nerve or great curiosity. After her inspection she sat down again.

Ten minutes passed. Danner cleared his throat. Then she spoke. "So. You've done it?"

"Done what?" he asked innocently.

"You've made all this rubbish you've been talking about strength—happen to that kitten."

"It wasn't rubbish."

"Evidently."

At that crisis Mr. Danner's toe trembled and the kitten, believing it a new toy, curled its paws over the shoe. There was a sound of tearing leather, and the shoe came apart. Fortunately the foot inside it was not hurt severely. Danner did not dare to budge. He heard his wife's startled inhalation.

Mrs. Danner did not resume her sewing. She breathed heavily and slow fire crept into her cheeks. The enormity of the crime overcame her. And she perceived that the hateful laboratory had invaded her portion of the house. Moreover, her sturdy religion had been desecrated. Danner read her thoughts.

"Don't be angry," he said. Beads of perspiration gathered on his brow.

"Angry!" The kitten stirred at the sound of her voice. "Angry! And why not? Here you defied God and man—and made that creature of the devil. You've overrun my house. You're a wicked, wicked man. And as for that cat, I won't have it. I won't stand for it."

"What are you going to do?"

Her voice rose to a scream. "Do! Do! Plenty—and right here and now." She ran to the kitchen and came back with a broom. She flung the front door wide. Her blazing eyes rested for a moment on the kitten. To her it had become merely an obnoxious little animal. "Scat! You little demon!" The broom came down on the cat's back with a jarring thud.

After that, chaos. A ball of fur lashed through the air. What-not, bird cage, bookcase, morris chair flew asunder. Then the light went out. In the darkness a comet, a hurricane, ricochetted through the room. Then there was a crash mightier than the others, followed by silence.

When Danner was able, he picked himself up and lighted the lamp. His wife lay on the floor in a dead faint. He revived her. She sat up and wept silently over the wreck of her parlour. Danner paled. A round hole—a hole that could have been made by nothing but a solid cannon shot—showed where the kitten had left the room through the wall.

Mrs. Danner's eyes were red-rimmed. Her breath came jerkily. With incredulous little gestures she picked herself up and gazed at the hole. A draught blew through it. Mr. Danner stuffed it with a rug.

"What are we going to do?" she said.

"If it comes back—we'll call it Samson."

And—as soon as Samson felt the gnawing of appetite, he returned to his rightful premises. Mrs. Danner fed him. Her face was pale and her hands trembled. Horror and fascination fought with each other in her soul as she offered the food. Her husband was in his classroom, nervously trying to fix his wits on the subject of the day.

"Kitty, kitty, poor little kitty," she said.

Samson purred and drank a quart of milk. She concealed her astonishment from herself. Mrs. Danner's universe was undergoing a transformation.

At three in the afternoon the kitten scratched away the screen door on the back porch and entered the house. Mrs. Danner fed it the supper meat.

Danner saw it when he returned. It was chasing flies in the yard. He stood in awe. The cat could spring twenty or thirty feet with ease. Then the sharp spur of dread entered him. Suppose someone saw and asked questions. He might be arrested, taken to prison. Something would happen. He tried to analyze and solve the problem. Night came. The cat was allowed to go out unmolested. In the morning the town of Indian Creek rose to find that six large dogs had been slain during the dark hours. A panther had come down from the mountains, they said. And Danner lectured with a dry tongue and errant mind.

It was Will Hoag, farmer of the fifth generation, resident of the environs of Indian Creek, church-goer, and hard-cider addict, who bent himself most mercilessly on the capture of the alleged panther. His chicken-house suffered thrice and then his sheep-fold. After four such depredations he cleaned his rifle and undertook a vigil from a spot behind the barn. An old moon rose late and illuminated his pastures with a blue glow. He drank occasionally from a jug to ward off the evil effects of the night air.

Some time after twelve his attention was distracted from the jug by stealthy sounds. He moved toward them. A hundred yards away his cows were huddled together—a heap of dun shadows. He saw a form which he mistook for a weasel creeping toward the cows. As he watched, he perceived that the small animal behaved singularly unlike a weasel. It slid across the earth on taut limbs, as if it was going to attack the cows. Will Hoag repressed a guffaw.

Then the farmer's short hair bristled. The cat sprang and landed on the neck of the nearest cow and clung there. Its paw descended. There was a horrid sound of ripping flesh, a moan, the thrashing of hoofs, a blot of dribbling blood, and the cat began to gorge on its prey.

Hoag believed that he was intoxicated, that delirium tremens had overtaken him. He stood rooted to the spot. The marauder ignored him. Slowly, unbelievingly, he raised his rifle and fired. The bullet knocked the cat from its perch. Mr. Hoag went forward and picked it up.

"God Almighty," he whispered. The bullet had not penetrated the cat's skin. And, suddenly, it wriggled in his hand. He dropped it. A flash of fur in the moonlight, and he was alone with the corpse of his Holstein.

He contemplated profanity, he considered kneeling in prayer. His joints turned to water. He called faintly for his family. He fell unconscious.

When Danner heard of that exploit—it was relayed by jeering tongues who said the farmer was drunk and a panther had killed the cow—his lips set in a line of resolve. Samson was taking too great liberties. It might attack a person, in which case he, Danner, would be guilty of murder. That day he did not attend his classes. Instead, he prepared a relentless poison in his laboratory and fed it to the kitten in a brace of meaty chops. The dying agonies of Samson, aged seven weeks, were Homeric.

After that, Danner did nothing for some days. He wondered if his formulæ and processes should be given to the world. But, being primarily a man of vast imagination, he foresaw hundreds of rash experiments. Suppose, he thought, that his discovery was tried on a lion, or an elephant! Such a creature would be invincible. The tadpoles were dead. The kitten had been buried. He sighed wearily and turned his life into its usual courses.

II

Before the summer was ended, however, a new twist of his life and affairs started the mechanism of the professor's imagination again. It was announced to him when he returned from summer school on a hot afternoon. He dropped his portfolio on the parlour desk, one corner of which still showed the claw-marks of the miscreant Samson, and sat down with a comfortable sigh.

"Abednego." His wife seldom addressed him by his first name.

"Yes?"

"I—I—I want to tell you something."

"Yes?"

"Haven't you noticed any difference in me lately?"

He had never noticed a difference in his wife. When they reached old age, he would still be unable to discern it. He shook his head and looked at her with some apprehension. She was troubled. "What's the matter?"

"I suppose you wouldn't—yet," she said. "But—well—I'm with child."

The professor folded his upper lip between his thumb and forefinger. "With child? Pregnant? You mean—"

"I'm going to have a baby."

Soon after their marriage the timid notion of parenthood had escaped them. They had, in fact, avoided its mechanics except on those rare evenings when tranquillity and the reproductive urge conspired to imbue him with courage and her with sinfulness. Nothing came of that infrequent union. They never expected anything.

And now they were faced with it. He murmured: "A baby."

Faint annoyance moved her. "Yes. That's what one has. What are we going to do?"

"I don't know, Matilda. But I'm glad."

She softened. "So am I, Abednego."

Then a hissing, spattering sound issued from the kitchen. "The beans!" Mrs. Danner said. The second idyl of their lives was finished.

Alone in his bed, tossing on the humid muslin sheets, Danner struggled within himself. The hour that was at hand would be short. The logical step after the tadpoles and the kitten was to vaccinate the human mammal with his serum. To produce a super-child, an invulnerable man. As a scientist he was passionately intrigued by the idea. As a husband he was dubious. As a member of society he was terrified.

That his wife would submit to the plan or to the step it necessitated was beyond belief. She would never allow a sticky tube of foreign animal matter to be poured into her veins. She would not permit the will of God to be altered or her offspring to be the subject of experiment. Another man would have laughed at the notion of persuading her. Mr. Danner never laughed at matters that involved his wife.

There was another danger. If the child was female and became a woman like his wife, then the effect of such strength would be awful indeed. He envisioned a militant reformer, an iron-bound Calvinist, remodelling the world single-handed. A Scotch Lilith, a matronly Gabriel, a she-Hercules. He shuddered.

A hundred times he denied his science. A hundred and one times it begged him to be served. Each decision to drop the idea was followed by an effort to discover means to inoculate her without her knowledge. To his wakeful ears came the reverberation of her snores. He rose and paced the floor. A scheme came to him. After that he was lost.

Mrs. Danner was surprised when her husband brought a bottle of blackberry cordial to her. It was his first gift to her in more than a year. She was fond of cordial. He was not. She took a glass after supper and then a second, which she drank "for him." He smiled nervously and urged her to drink it. His hands clenched and unclenched. When she finished the second glass, he watched her constantly.

"I feel sleepy," she said.

"You're tired." He tried to dissemble the eagerness in his voice. "Why don't you lie down?"

"Strange," she said a moment later. "I'm not usually so—so—misty."

He nodded. The opiate in the cordial was working. She lay on the couch. She slept. The professor hastened to his laboratory. An hour later he emerged with a hypodermic syringe in his hand. His wife lay limply, one hand touching the floor. Her stern, dark face was relaxed. He sat beside her. His conscience raged. He hated the duplicity his task required. His eyes lingered on the swollen abdomen. It was cryptic, enigmatic, filled with portent. He jabbed the needle. She did not stir. After that he substituted a partly empty bottle of cordial for the drugged liquor. It was, perhaps, the most practical thing he had ever done in his life.

Mrs. Danner could not explain herself on the following morning. She belaboured him. "Why didn't you wake me and make me go to bed? Sleeping in my clothes! I never did such a thing in my life."

"I couldn't wake you. I tried."

"Rubbish."

"You were sleeping so hard—you refused to move."

"Sometimes, old as you are, I'd like to thrash you."

Danner went to the college. There was nothing more to do, nothing more to require his concentration. He could wait—as he had waited before. He trembled occasionally with the hope that his child would be a boy—a sane, healthy boy. Then, in the end, his work might bear fruit. "The Euglena viridis," he said in flat tones, "will be the subject of to-morrow's study. I want you gentlemen to diagram the structure of the Euglena viridis and write five hundred words on its vital principles and processes. It is particularly interesting because it shares properties that are animal with properties that are vegetable."

September, October, November. Chilly winds from the high mountains. The day-by-day freezing over of ponds and brooks. Smoke at the tops of chimneys. Snow. Thanksgiving. And always Mrs. Danner growing with the burden of her offspring. Mr. Danner sitting silent, watching, wondering, waiting. It would soon be time.

On Christmas morning there entered into Mrs. Danner's vitals a pain that was indefinable and at the same time certain. It thrust all thought from her mind. Then it diminished and she summoned her husband. "Get the doctor. It's coming."

Danner tottered into the street and executed his errand. The doctor smiled cheerfully. "Just beginning? I'll be over this afternoon."

"But—good Lord—you can't leave her like—"

"Nonsense."

He came home and found his wife dusting. He shook his head. "Get Mrs. Nolan," she said. Then she threw herself on the bed again.

Mrs. Nolan, the nearest neighbour, wife of Professor Nolan and mother of four children, was delighted. This particular Christmas was going to be a day of some excitement. She prepared hot water and bustled with unessential occupation. Danner sat prostrate in the parlour. He had done it. He had done more—and that would be known later. Perhaps it would fail. He hoped it would fail. He wrung his hands. The concept of another person in his house had not yet occurred to him. Birth was his wife's sickness—until it was over.

The doctor arrived after Danner had made his third trip. Mrs. Nolan prepared lunch. "I love to cook in other people's kitchens," she said. He wanted to strike her. Curious, he thought. At three-thirty the industry of the doctor and Mrs. Nolan increased and the silence of the two, paradoxically, increased with it.

Then the early twilight fell. Mrs. Danner lay with her lank black hair plastered to her brow. She did not moan. Pain twisted and convulsed her. Downstairs Danner sat and sweated. A cry—his wife's. Another—unfamiliar. Scurrying feet on the bare parts of the floor. He looked up. Mrs. Nolan leaned over the stair well.

"It's a boy, Mr. Danner. A beautiful boy. And husky. You never saw such a husky baby."

"It ought to be," he said. They found him later in the back yard, prancing on the snow with weird, ungainly steps. A vacant smile lighted his features. They didn't blame him.

III

Calm and quiet held their negative sway over the Danner ménage for an hour, and then there was a disturbed fretting that developed into a lusty bawl. The professor passed a fatigued hand over his brow. He was unaccustomed to the dissonances of his offspring. Young Hugo—they had named him after a maternal uncle—had attained the age of one week without giving any indication of unnaturalness.

That is not quite true. He was as fleshy as most healthy infants, but the flesh was more than normally firm. He was inordinately active. His eyes had been gray but, already, they gave promise of the inkiness they afterwards exhibited. He was born with a quantity of black hair—hair so dark as to be nearly blue. Abednego Danner, on seeing it, exercised the liberty which all husbands take, and investigated rumours of his wife's forbears with his most secret thoughts. The principal rumour was that one of her lusty Covenanter grandsires had been intrigued by a squaw to the point of forgetting his Psalms and recalling only the Song of Solomon.

However that may have been, Hugo was an attractive and virile baby. Danner spent hours at the side of his crib speculating and watching for any sign of biological variation. But it was not until a week had passed that he was given evidence. By that time he was ready to concede the failure of his greatest experiment.

The baby bawled and presently stopped. And Mrs. Danner, who had put it to breast, suddenly called her husband. "Abednego! Come here! Hurry!"

The professor's heart skipped its regular timing and he scrambled to the floor above. "What's the matter?"

Mrs. Danner was sitting in a rocking-chair. Her face was as white as paper. Only in her eyes was there a spark of life. He thought she was going to faint. "What's the matter?" he said again.

He looked at Hugo and saw nothing terrifying in the ravishing hunger which the infant showed.

"Matter! Matter! You know the matter!"

Then he knew and he realized that his wife had discovered. "I don't. You look frightened. Shall I bring some water?"

Mrs. Danner spoke again. Her voice was icy, distant, terrible. "I came in to feed him just a minute ago. He was lying in his crib. I tried to—to hug him and he put his arms out. As God lives, I could not pull that baby to me! He was too strong, Abednego! Too strong. Too strong. I couldn't unbend his little arms when he stiffened them. I couldn't straighten them when he bent them. And he pushed me—harder than you could push. Harder than I could push myself. I know what it means. You have done your horrible thing to my baby. He's just a baby, Abednego. And you've done your thing to him. How could you? Oh, how could you!"

Mrs. Danner rose and laid the baby gently on the chair. She stood before her husband, towering over him, raised her hand, and struck with all her force. Mr. Danner fell to one knee, and a red welt lifted on his face. She struck him again and he fell against the chair. Little Hugo was dislodged. One hand caught a rung of the chair back and he hung suspended above the floor.

"Look!" Mrs. Danner screamed.

As they looked, the baby flexed its arm and lifted itself back into the chair. It was a feat that a gymnast would have accomplished with difficulty. Danner stared, ignoring the blows, the crimson on his cheek. For once in his lifetime, he suddenly defied his wife. He pointed to the child.

"Yes, look!" His voice rang clearly. "I did it. I vaccinated you the night the cordial put you to sleep. And there's my son. He's strong. Stronger than a lion's cub. And he'll increase in strength as he grows until Samson and Hercules would be pygmies beside him. He'll be the first of a new and glorious race. A race that doesn't have to fear—because it cannot know harm. No man can hurt him, no man can vanquish him. He will be mightier than any circumstances. He, son of a weak man, will be stronger than the beasts, even than the ancient dinosaurs, stronger than the tides, stronger than fate—strong as God is strong. And you—you, Matilda—mother of him, will be proud of him. He will be great and famous. You can knock me down. You can knock me down a thousand times. I have given you a son whose little finger you cannot bend with a crow-bar. Oh, all these years I've listened to you and obeyed you and—yes, I've feared you a little—and God must hate me for it. Now take your son. And my son. You cannot change him. You cannot bend him to your will. He is all I might have been. All that mankind should be." Danner's voice broke and he sobbed. He relented. "I know it's hard for you. It's against your religion—against your love, even. But try to like him. He's no different from you and me—only stronger. And strength is a glorious thing, a great thing. Then—afterwards—if you can—forgive me." He collapsed.

Blood pounded in her ears. She stared at the huddled body of her husband. He had stood like a prophet and spoken words of fire. She was shaken from her pettiness. For one moment she had loved Danner. In that same instant she had glimpsed the superhuman energy that had driven him through the long years of discouragement to triumph. She had seen his soul. She fell at his feet, and when Danner opened his eyes, he found her there, weeping. He took her in his arms, timidly, clumsily. "Don't cry, Mattie. It'll be all right. You love him, don't you?"

She stared at the babe. "Of course I love him. Wash your face, Abednego."

After that there was peace in the house, and with it the child grew. During the next months they ignored his peculiarities. When they found him hanging outside his crib, they put him back gently. When he smashed the crib, they discussed a better place for him to repose. No hysteria, no conflict. When, in the early spring, young Hugo began to recognize them and to assert his feelings, they rejoiced as all parents rejoice.

When he managed to vault the sill of the second-story window by some antic contortion of his limbs, they dismissed the episode. Mrs. Danner had been baking. She heard the child's voice and it seemed to come from the yard. Startled, incredulous, she rushed upstairs. Hugo was not in his room. His wail drifted through the window. She looked out. He was lying in the yard, fifteen feet below. She rushed to his side. He had not been hurt.

Danner made a pen of the iron heads and feet of two old beds. He wired them together. The baby was kept in the inclosure thus formed. The days warmed and lengthened. No one except the Danners knew of the prodigy harboured by their unostentatious house. But the secret was certain to leak out eventually.

Mrs. Nolan, the next-door neighbour, was first to learn it. She had called on Mrs. Danner to borrow a cup of sugar. The call, naturally, included a discussion of various domestic matters and a visit to the baby. She voiced a question that had occupied her mind for some time.

"Why do you keep the child in that iron thing? Aren't you afraid it will hurt itself?"

"Oh, no."

Mrs. Nolan viewed young Hugo. He was lying on a large pillow. Presently he rolled off its surface. "Active youngster, isn't he?"

"Very," Mrs. Danner said, nervously.

Hugo, as if he understood and desired to demonstrate, seized a corner of the pillow and flung it from him. It traversed a long arc and landed on the floor. Mrs. Nolan was startled. "Goodness! I never saw a child his age that could do that!"

"No. Let's go downstairs. I want to show you some tidies I'm making."

Mrs. Nolan paid no attention. She put the pillow back in the pen and watched while Hugo tossed it out. "There's something funny about that. It isn't normal. Have you seen a doctor?"

Mrs. Danner fidgeted. "Oh, yes. Little Hugo's healthy."

Little Hugo grasped the iron wall of his miniature prison. He pulled himself toward it. His skirt caught in the floor. He pulled harder. The pen moved toward him. A high soprano came from Mrs. Nolan. "He's moved it! I don't think I could move it myself! I tell you, I'm going to ask the doctor to examine him. You shouldn't let a child be like that."

Mrs. Danner, filled with consternation, sought refuge in prevarication. "Nonsense," she said as calmly as she could. "All we Douglases are like that. Strong children. I had a grandfather who could lift a cider keg when he was five—two hundred pounds and more. Hugo just takes after him, that's all."

Mrs. Nolan was annoyed. Partly because she was jealous of Hugo's prowess—her own children had been feeble and dull. Partly because she was frightened—no matter how strong a person became, a baby had no right to be so powerful. Partly because she sensed that Mrs. Danner was not telling the whole truth. She suspected that the Danners had found a new way to raise children. "Well," she said, "all I have to say is that it'll damage him. It'll strain his little heart. It'll do him a lot of harm. If I had a child like that, I'd tie it up most of the time for the first few years."

"Kate," Mrs. Danner said unpleasantly, "I believe you would."

Mrs. Nolan shrugged. "Well—I'm glad none of my children are freaks, anyhow."

"I'll get your sugar."

In the afternoon the minister called. He talked of the church and the town until he felt his preamble adequate. "I was wondering why you didn't bring your child to be baptized, Mrs. Danner. And why you couldn't come to church, now that it is old enough?"

"Well," she replied carefully, "the child is rather—irritable. And we thought we'd prefer to have it baptized at home."

"It's irregular."

"We'd prefer it."

"Very well. I'm afraid—" he smiled—"that you're a little—ah—unfamiliar with the upbringing of children. Natural—in the case of the first-born. Quite natural. But—ah—I met Mrs. Nolan to-day. Quite by accident. And she said that you kept the child—ah—in an iron pen. It seemed unnecessarily cruel to me—"

"Did it?" Mrs. Danner's jaw set squarely.

But the minister was not to be turned aside lightly. "I'm afraid, if it's true, that we—the church—will have to do something about it. You can't let the little fellow grow up surrounded by iron walls. It will surely point him toward the prison. Little minds are tender and—ah—impressionable."

"We've had a crib and two pens of wood," Mrs. Danner answered tartly. "He smashed them all."

"Ah? So?" Lifted eyebrows. "Temper, eh? He should be punished. Punishment is the only mould for unruly children."

"You'd punish a six-months-old baby?"

"Why—certainly. I've reared seven by the rod."

"Well—" a blazing maternal instinct made her feel vicious. "Well—you won't raise mine by a rod. Or touch it—by a mile. Here's your hat, parson." Mrs. Danner spent the next hour in prayer.

The village is known for the speed of its gossip and the sloth of its intelligence. Those two factors explain the conditions which preluded and surrounded the dawn of consciousness in young Hugo. Mrs. Danner's extemporaneous fabrication of a sturdy ancestral line kept the more supernatural elements of the baby's prowess from the public eye. It became rapidly and generally understood that the Danner infant was abnormal and that the treatment to which it was submitted was not usual. At the same time neither the gossips of Indian Creek nor the slightly more sage professors of the college exercised the wit necessary to realize that, however strong young Hugo might become, it was neither right nor just that his cradle days be augurs of that eventual estate. On the face of it the argument seemed logical. If Mrs. Danner's forbears had been men of peculiar might, her child might well be able to chin itself at three weeks and it might easily be necessary to confine it in a metal pen, however inhumane the process appeared.

Hugo was sheltered, and his early antics, peculiar and startling as they were to his parents, escaped public attention. The little current of talk about him was kept alive only because there was so small an array of topics for the local burghers. But it was not extraordinarily malicious. Months piled up. A year passed and then another.

Hugo was a good-natured, usually sober, and very sensitive child. Abednego Danner's fear that his process might have created muscular strength at the expense of reason diminished and vanished as Hugo learned to walk and to talk, and as he grasped the rudiments of human behaviour. His high little voice was heard in the house and about its lawns.

They began to condition him. Throughout his later life there lingered in his mind a memory of the barriers erected by his family. He was told not to throw his pillow, when words meant nothing to him. Soon after that, he was told not to throw anything. When he could walk, he was forbidden to jump. His jumps were shocking to see, even at the age of two and a half. He was carefully instructed on his behaviour out of doors. No move of his was to indicate his difference from the ordinary child.

He was taught kindness and respect for people and property. His every destructive impulse was carefully curbed. That training was possible only because he was sensitive and naturally susceptible to advice. Punishment had no physical terror for him, because he could not feel it. But disfavour, anger, vexation, or disappointment in another person reflected itself in him at once.

When he was four and a half, his mother sent him to Sunday school. He was enrolled in a class that sat near her own, so she was able to keep a careful eye on him. But Hugo did not misbehave. It was his first contact with a group of children, his first view of the larger cosmos. He sat quietly with his hands folded, as he had been told to sit. He listened to the teacher's stories of Jesus with excited interest.

On his third Sunday he heard one of the children whisper: "Here comes the strong boy."

He turned quickly, his cheeks red. "I'm not. I'm not."

"Yes, you are. Mother said so."

Hugo struggled with the two hymn books on the table. "I can't even lift these books," he lied.

The other child was impressed and tried to explain the situation later, taking the cause of Hugo's weakness against the charge of strength. But the accusation rankled in Hugo's young mind. He hated to be different—and he was beginning to realize that he was different.

From his earliest day that longing occupied him. He sought to hide his strength. He hated to think that other people were talking about him. The distinction he enjoyed was odious to him because it aroused unpleasant emotions in other people. He could not realize that those emotions sprang from personal and group jealousy, from the hatred of superiority.

His mother, ever zealous to direct her son in the path of righteousness, talked to him often about his strength and how great it would become and what great and good deeds he could do with it. Those lectures on virtuous crusades had two uses: they helped check any impulses in her son which she felt would be harmful to her and they helped her to become used to the abnormality in little Hugo. In her mind, it was like telling a hunchback that his hump was a blessing disguised. Hugo was always aware of the fact that her words connoted some latent evil in his nature.

The motif grew in Mrs. Danner's thoughts until she sought a definite outlet for it. One day she led her child to a keg filled with sand. "All of us," she said to her son, "have to carry a burden through life. One of your burdens will be your strength. But that might can make right. See that little keg?"

"Mmmmm."

"That keg is temptation. Can you say it?"

"Temshun."

"Every day in your life you must bear temptation and throw it from you. Can you bear it?"

"Huh?"

"Can you pick up that keg, Hugo?"

He lifted it in his chubby arms. "Now take it to the barn and back," his mother directed. Manfully he walked with the keg to the barn and back. He felt a little silly and resentful. "Now—throw temptation as far away from you as you can."

Mrs. Danner gasped. The distance he threw the keg was frightening.

"You musn't throw it so far, Hugo," she said, forgetting her allegory for an instant.

"You said as far as I can. I can throw it farther, too, if I wanna."

"No. Just throw it a little way. When you throw it far, it doesn't look right. Now—fill it up with sand, and we'll do it over."

Hugo was perplexed. A vague wish to weep occupied him as he filled the keg. The lesson was repeated. Mrs. Danner had excellent Sunday-school instincts, even if she had no real comprehension of ethics. Some days later the burden of temptation was exhibited, in all its dramatic passages, to Mrs. Nolan and another lady. Again Hugo was resentful and again he felt absurd. When he threw the keg, it broke.

"My!" Mrs. Nolan said in a startled tone.

"How awful!" the other woman murmured. "And he's just a child."

That made Hugo suddenly angry and he jumped. The woman screamed. Mrs. Nolan ran to tell whomever she could find. Mrs. Danner whipped her son and he cried softly.

Abednego Danner left the discipline of his son to his wife. He watched the child almost furtively. When Hugo was five, Mr. Danner taught him to read. It was a laborious process and required an entire winter. But Hugo emerged with a new world open to him—a world which he attacked with interest. No one bothered him when he read. He could be found often on sunny days, when other children were playing, prone on the floor, puzzling out sentences in the books of the family library and trying to catch their significance. During his fifth year he was not allowed to play with other children. The neighbourhood insisted on that.

With the busybodyness and contrariness of their kind the same neighbours insisted that Hugo be sent to school in the following fall. When, on the opening day, he did not appear, the truant officer called for him. Hugo heard the conversation between the officer and his mother. He was frightened. He vowed to himself that his abnormality should be hidden deeply.

After that he was dropped into that microcosm of human life to which so little attention is paid by adults. School frightened and excited Hugo. For one thing, there were girls in school—and Hugo knew nothing about them except that they were different from himself. There were teachers—and they made one work, whether one wished to work or not. They represented power, as a jailer represents power. The children feared teachers. Hugo feared them.

But the lesson of Hugo's first six years was fairly well planted. He blushingly ignored the direct questions of those children whom his fame had reached. He gave no reason to anyone for suspecting him of abnormality. He became so familiar to his comrades that their curiosity gradually vanished. He would not play games with them—his mother had forbidden that. But he talked to them and was as friendly as they allowed him to be. His sensitiveness and fear of ridicule made him a voracious student. He liked books. He liked to know things and to learn them.

Thus, bound by the conditionings of his babyhood, he reached the spring of his first year in school without accident. Such tranquillity could not long endure. The day which his mother had dreaded ultimately arrived. A lanky farmer's son, older than the other children in the first grade, chose a particularly quiet and balmy recess period to plague little Hugo. The farmer's boy was, because of his size, the bully and the leader of all the other boys. He had not troubled himself to resent Hugo's exclusiveness or Hugo's reputation until that morning when he found himself without occupation. Hugo was sitting in the sun, his dark eyes staring a little sadly over the laughing, rioting children.

The boy approached him. "Hello, strong man." He was shrewd enough to make his voice so loud as to be generally audible. Hugo looked both harmless and slightly pathetic.

"I'm not a strong man."

"Course you're not. But everybody thinks you are—except me. I'm not afraid of you."

"I don't want you to be afraid of me. I'm not afraid of you, either."

"Oh, you aren't, huh? Look." He touched Hugo's chest with his finger, and when Hugo looked down, the boy lifted his finger into Hugo's face.

"Go away and let me alone."

The tormentor laughed. "Ever see a fish this long?"

His hands indicated a small fish. Involuntarily Hugo looked at them. The hands flew apart and slapped him smartly. Several of the children had stopped their play to watch. The first insult made them giggle. The second brought a titter from Anna Blake, and Hugo noticed that. Anna Blake was a little girl with curly golden hair and blue eyes. Secretly Hugo admired her and was drawn to her. When she laughed, he felt a dismal loneliness, a sudden desertion. The farmer's boy pressed the occasion his meanness had made.

"I'll bet you ain't even strong enough to fight little Charlie Todd. Commere, Charlie."

"I am," Hugo replied with slow dignity.

"You're a sissy. You're a-scared to play with us."

The ring around Hugo had grown. He felt a tangible ridicule in it. He knew what it was to hate. Still, his inhibitions, his control, held him in check. "Go away," he said, "or I'll hurt you."

The farmer's boy picked up a stick and put it on his shoulder. "Knock that off, then, strong man."

Hugo knew the dare and its significance. With a gentle gesture he brushed the stick away. Then the other struck. At the same time he kicked Hugo's shins. There was no sense of pain with the kick. Hugo saw it as if it had happened to another person. The school-yard tensed with expectation. But the accounts of what followed were garbled. The farmer's boy fell on his face as if by an invisible agency. Then his body was lifted in the air. The children had an awful picture of Hugo standing for a second with the writhing form of his attacker above his head. Then he flung it aside, over the circle that surrounded him, and the body fell with a thud. It lay without moving. Hugo began to whimper pitifully.

That was Hugo's first fight. He had defended himself, and it made him ashamed. He thought he had killed the other boy. Sickening dread filled him. He hurried to his side and shook him, calling his name. The other boy came to. His arm was broken and his sides were purpling where Hugo had seized him. There was terror in his eyes when he saw Hugo's face above him, and he screamed shrilly for help. The teacher came. She sent Hugo to the blacksmith to be whipped.

That, in itself, was a stroke of genius. The blacksmith whipped grown boys in the high school for their misdeeds. To send a six-year-old child was crushing. But Hugo had risen above the standards set by his society. He had been superior to it for a moment, and society hated him for it. His teacher hated him because she feared him. Mothers of children, learning about the episode, collected to discuss it in high-pitched, hateful voices. Hugo was enveloped in hate. And, as the lash of the smith fell on his small frame, he felt the depths of misery. He was a strong man. There was damnation in his veins.

The minister came and prayed over him. The doctor was sent for and examined him. Frantic busybodies suggested that things be done to weaken him—what things, they did not say. And Hugo, suffering bitterly, saw that if he had beaten the farmer's boy in fair combat, he would have been a hero. It was the scale of his triumph that made it dreadful. He did not realize then that if he had been so minded, he could have turned on the blacksmith and whipped him, he could have broken the neck of the doctor, he could have run raging through the town and escaped unscathed. His might was a secret from himself. He knew it only as a curse, like a disease or a blemish.

During the ensuing four or five years Hugo's peculiar trait asserted itself but once. It was a year after his fight with the bully. He had been isolated socially. Even Anna Blake did not dare to tease him any longer. Shunned and wretched, he built a world of young dreams and confections and lived in it with whatever comfort it afforded.

One warm afternoon in a smoky Indian summer he walked home from school, spinning a top as he walked, stopping every few yards to pick it up and to let its eccentric momentum die on the palm of his hand. His pace thereby was made very slow and he calculated it to bring him to his home in time for supper and no sooner, because, despite his vigour, chores were as odious to him as to any other boy. A wagon drawn by two horses rolled toward him. It was a heavy wagon, piled high with grain-sacks, and a man sat on its rear end, his legs dangling.

As the wagon reached Hugo, it jolted over a rut. There was a grinding rip and a crash. Hugo pocketed his top and looked. The man sitting on the back had been pinned beneath the rear axle, and the load held him there. As Hugo saw his predicament, the man screamed in agony. Hugo's blood chilled. He stood transfixed. A man jumped out of a buggy. A Negro ran from a yard. Two women hurried from the spot. In an instant there were six or seven men around the broken wagon. A sound of pain issued from the mouth of the impaled man. The knot of figures bent at the sides of the cart and tried to lift. "Have to get a jack," Hugo heard them say.

Hugo wound up his string and put it beside his top. He walked mechanically into the road. He looked at the legs of the man on the ground. They were oozing blood where the backboard rested on them. The men gathered there were lifting again, without result. Hugo caught the side and bent his small shoulders. With all his might he pulled up. The wagon was jerked into the air. They pulled out the injured man. Hugo lowered the wagon slowly.

For a moment no attention was paid to him. He waited pridefully for the recognition he had earned. He dug in the dirt with the side of his shoe. A man with a mole on his nose observed him. "Funny how that kid's strength was just enough to turn the balance."

Hugo smiled. "I'm pretty strong," he admitted.

Another man saw him. "Get out of here," he said sharply. "This is no place for a kid."

"But I was the one—"

"I said beat it. And I meant beat it. Go home to your ma."

Slowly the light went from Hugo's eyes. They did not know—they could not know. He had lifted more than two tons. And the men stood now, waiting for the doctor, telling each other how strong they were when the instant of need came.

"Go on, kid. Run along. I'll smack you."

Hugo went. He forgot to spin his top. He stumbled a little as he walked.

IV

Days, months, years. They had forgotten that Hugo was different. Almost, for a while, he had forgotten it himself. He was popular in school. He fostered the unexpressed theory that his strength had been a phenomenon of his childhood—one that diminished as he grew older. Then, at ten, it called to him for exercise.

Each day he rose with a feeling of insufficiency. Each night he retired unrequited. He read. Poe, the Bible, Scott, Thackeray, Swift, Defoe—all the books he could find. He thrilled with every syllable of adventure. His imagination swelled. But that was not sufficient. He yearned as a New England boy yearns before he runs away to sea.

At ten he was a stalwart and handsome lad. His brow was high and surmounted by his peculiarly black hair. His eyes were wide apart, inky, unfathomable. He carried himself with the grace of an athlete. He studied hard and he worked hard for his parents, taking care of a cow and chickens, of a stable and a large lawn, of flowers and a vegetable garden.

Then one day he went by himself to walk in the mountains. He had not been allowed to go into the mountains alone. A Wanderlust that came half from himself and half from his books led his feet along a narrow, leafy trail into the forest depths. Hugo lay down and listened to the birds in the bushes, to the music of a brook, and to the sound of the wind. He wanted to be free and brave and great. By and by he stood up and walked again.

An easy exhilaration filled his veins. His pace increased. "I wonder," he thought, "how fast I can run, how far I can jump." He quickened his stride. In a moment he found that the turns in the trail were too frequent for him to see his course. He ran ahead, realizing that he was moving at an abnormal pace. Then he turned, gathered himself, and jumped carefully. He was astonished when he vaulted above the green covering of the trail. He came down heavily. He stood in his tracks, tingling.

"Nobody can do that, not even an acrobat," he whispered. Again he tried, jumping straight up. He rose fully forty feet in the air.

"Good Jesus!" he exulted. In those lonely, incredible moments Hugo found himself. There in the forest, beyond the eye of man, he learned that he was superhuman. It was a rapturous discovery. He knew at that hour that his strength was not a curse. He had inklings of his invulnerability.

He ran. He shot up the steep trail like an express train, at a rate that would have been measured in miles to the hour rather than yards to the minute. Tireless blood poured through his veins. Green streaked at his sides. In a short time he came to the end of the trail. He plunged on, careless of obstacles that would have stopped an ordinary mortal. From trunk to trunk he leaped a burned stretch. He flung himself from a high rock. He sped like a shadow across a pine-carpeted knoll. He gained the bare rocks of the first mountain, and in the open, where the horror of no eye would tether his strength, he moved in flying bounds to its summit.

Hugo stood there, panting. Below him was the world. A little world. He laughed. His dreams had been broken open. His depression was relieved. But he would never let them know—he, Hugo, the giant. Except, perhaps, his father. He lifted his arms—to thank God, to jeer at the world. Hugo was happy.

He went home wondering. He was very hungry—hungrier than he had ever been—and his parents watched him eat with hidden glances. Samson had eaten thus, as if his stomach were bottomless and his food digested instantly to make room for more. And, as he ate, Hugo tried to open a conversation that would lead to a confession to his father. But it seemed impossible.

Hugo liked his father. He saw how his mother dominated the little professor, how she seemed to have crushed and bewildered him until his mind was unfocused from its present. He could not love his mother because of that. He did not reason that her religion had made her blind and selfish, but he felt her blindness and the many cloaks that protected her and her interests. He held her in respect and he obeyed her. But often and wistfully he had tried to talk to his father, to make friends with him, to make himself felt as a person.

Abednego Danner's mind was buried in the work he had done. His son was a foreign person for whom he felt a perplexed sympathy. It is significant that he had never talked to Hugo about Hugo's prowess. The ten-year-old boy had not wished to discuss it. Now, however, realizing its extent, he felt he must go to his father. After dinner he said: "Dad, let's you and me take a walk."

Mrs. Danner's protective impulses functioned automatically. "Not to-night. I won't have it."

"But, mother—"

Danner guessed the reason for that walk. He said to his wife with rare firmness: "If the boy wants to walk with me, we're going."

After supper they went out. Mrs. Danner felt that she had been shut out of her own son's world. And she realized that he was growing up.

Danner and his son strolled along the leafy street. They talked about his work in school. His father seemed to Hugo more human than he had ever been. He even ventured the first step toward other conversation. "Well, son, what is it?"

Hugo caught his breath. "Well—I kind of thought I ought to tell you. You see—this afternoon—well—you know I've always been a sort of strong kid—"

Danner trembled. "I know—"

"And you haven't said much about it to me. Except to be gentle—"

"That's so. You must remember it."

"Well—I don't have to be gentle with myself, do I? When I'm alone—like in the woods, that is?"

The older one pondered. "You mean—you like to—ah—let yourself out—when you're alone?"

"That's what I mean." The usual constraint between them had receded. Hugo was grateful for his father's help. "You see, dad, I—well—I went walkin' to-day—and I—I kind of tried myself out."

Danner answered in breathless eagerness: "And?"

"Well—I'm not just a strong kid, dad. I don't know what's the matter with me. It seems I'm not like other kids at all. I guess it's been gettin' worse all these years since I was a baby."

"Worse?"

"I mean—I been gettin' stronger. An' now it seems like I'm about—well—I don't like to boast—but it seems like I'm about the strongest man in the world. When I try it, it seems like there isn't any stopping me. I can go on—far as I like. Runnin'. Jumpin'." His confession had commenced in detail. Hugo warmed to it. "I can do things, dad. It kind of scares me. I can jump higher'n a house. I can run faster'n a train. I can pull up big trees an' push 'em over."

"I see." Danner's spine tingled. He worshipped his son then. "Suppose you show me."

Hugo looked up and down the street. There was no one in sight. The evening was still duskily lighted by afterglow. "Look out then. I'm gonna jump."

Mr. Danner saw his son crouch. But he jumped so quickly that he vanished. Four seconds elapsed. He landed where he had stood. "See, dad?"

"Do it again."

On the second trial the professor's eyes followed the soaring form. And he realized the magnitude of the thing he had wrought.

"Did you see me?"

Danner nodded. "I saw you, son."

"Kind of funny, isn't it?"

"Let's talk some more." There was a pause. "Do you realize, son, that no one else on earth can do what you just did?"

"Yeah. I guess not."

Danner hesitated. "It's a glorious thing. And dangerous."

"Yeah."

The professor tried to simplify the biology of his discovery. He perceived that it was going to involve him in the mysteries of sex. He knew that to unfold them to a child was considered immoral. But Danner was far, far beyond his epoch. He put his hand on Hugo's shoulder. And Hugo set off the process.

"Dad, how come I'm—like this?"

"I'll tell you. It's a long story and a lot for a boy your age to know. First, what do you know about—well—about how you were born?"

Hugo reddened. "I—I guess I know quite a bit. The kids in school are always talkin' about it. And I've read some. We're born like—well—like the kittens were born last year."

"That's right." Banner knitted his brow. He began to explain the details of conception as it occurs in man—the biology of ova and spermatazoa, the differences between the anatomy of the sexes, and the reasons for those differences. He drew, first, a botanical analogy. Hugo listened intently. "I knew most of that. I've seen—girls."

"What?"

"Some of them—after school—let you."

Danner was surprised, and at the same time he was amused. He had forgotten the details of his young investigation. They are blotted out of the minds of most adults—to the great advantage of dignity. He did not show his amusement or his surprise.

"Girls like that," he answered, "aren't very nice. They haven't much modesty. It's rather indecent, because sex is a personal thing and something you ought to keep for the one you're very fond of. You'll understand that better when you're older. But what I was going to tell you is this. When you were little more than a mass of plasm inside your mother, I put a medicine in her blood that I had discovered. I did it with a hypodermic needle. That medicine changed you. It altered the structure of your bones and muscles and nerves and your blood. It made you into a different tissue from the weak fibre of ordinary people. Then—when you were born—you were strong. Did you ever watch an ant carry many times its weight? Or see a grasshopper jump fifty times its length? The insects have better muscles and nerves than we have. And I improved your body till it was relatively that strong. Can you understand that?"

"Sure. I'm like a man made out of iron instead of meat."

"That's it, Hugo. And, as you grow up, you've got to remember that. You're not an ordinary human being. When people find that out, they'll—they'll—"

"They'll hate me?"

"Because they fear you. So you see, you've got to be good and kind and considerate—to justify all that strength. Some day you'll find a use for it—a big, noble use—and then you can make it work and be proud of it. Until that day, you have to be humble like all the rest of us. You mustn't show off or do cheap tricks. Then you'd just be a clown. Wait your time, son, and you'll be glad of it. And—another thing—train your temper. You must never lose it. You can see what would happen if you did? Understand?"

"I guess I do. It's hard work—doin' all that."

"The stronger, the greater, you are, the harder life is for you. And you're the strongest of them all, Hugo."

The heart of the ten-year-old boy burned and vibrated. "And what about God?" he asked.

Danner looked into the darkened sky. "I don't know much about Him," he sighed.

Such was the soundest counsel that Hugo was given during his youth. Because it came to him accompanied by unadulterated truths that he was able to recognize, it exerted a profound effect on him. It is surprising that his father was the one to give it. Nevertheless, Professor Danner was the only person in all of Indian Creek who had sufficient imagination to perceive his son's problems and to reckon with them in any practical sense.

Hugo was eighteen before he gave any other indication of his strength save in that fantastic and Gargantuan play which he permitted himself. Even his play was intruded upon by the small-minded and curious world before he had found the completeness of its pleasure. Then Hugo fell into his coma.

Hugo went back to the deep forest to think things over and to become acquainted with his powers. At first, under full pressure of his sinews, he was clumsy and inaccurate. He learned deftness by trial and error. One day he found a huge pit in the tangled wilderness. It had been an open mine long years before. Sitting on its brink, staring into its pool of verdure, dreaming, he conceived a manner of entertainment suitable for his powers.

He jumped over its craggy edge and walked to its centre. There he selected a high place, and with his hands he cleared away the growth that covered it. Next he laid the foundations of a fort, over which he was to watch the fastnesses for imaginary enemies. The foundations were made of boulders. Some he carried and some he rolled from the floor of the man-made canyon. By the end of the afternoon he had laid out a square wall of rock some three feet in height. On the next day he added to it until the four walls reached as high as he could stretch. He left space for one door and he made a single window. He roofed the walls with the trunks of trees and he erected a turret over the door.

For days the creation was his delight. After school he sped to it. Until dark he strained and struggled with bare rocks. When it was finished, it was an edifice that would have withstood artillery fire creditably. Then Hugo experimented with catapults, but he found no engine that could hurl the rocks he used for ammunition as far as his arms. He cached his treasures in his fortress—an old axe, the scabbard of a sword, tops and marbles, two cans of beans for emergency rations—and he made a flag of blue and white cloth for himself.

Then he played in it. He pretended that Indians were stalking him. An imaginary head would appear at the rim of the pit. Hugo would see it through a chink. Swish! Crash! A puff of dust would show where rock met rock—with the attacker's head between. At times he would be stormed on all sides. To get the effect he would leap the canyon and hurl boulders on his own fort. Then he would return and defend it.

It was after such a strenuous sally and while he was waiting in high excitement for the enemy to reappear that Professors Whitaker and Smith from the college stumbled on his stronghold. They were walking together through the forest, bent on scaling the mountain to make certain observations of an ancient cirque that was formed by the seventh great glacier. As they walked, they debated matters of strata curvature. Suddenly Whitaker gripped Smith's arm. "Look!"

They stared through the trees and over the lip of Hugo's mine. Their eyes bulged as they observed the size and weight of the fortress.

"Moonshiners," Smith whispered.

"Rubbish. Moonshiners don't build like that. It's a second Stonehenge. An Indian relic."

"But there's a sign of fresh work around it."

Whitaker observed the newly turned earth and the freshly bared rock. "Perhaps—perhaps, professor, we've fallen upon something big. A lost race of Indian engineers. A branch of the Incas—or—"

"Maybe they'll be hostile."

The men edged forward. And at the moment they reached the edge of the pit, Hugo emerged from his fort. He saw the men with sudden fear. He tried to hide.

"Hey!" they said. He did not move, but he heard them scrambling slowly toward the spot where he lay.

"Dressed in civilized clothes," the first professor said in a loud voice as his eye located Hugo in the underbrush. "Hey!"

Hugo showed himself. "What?"

"Who are you?"

"Hugo Danner."

"Oh—old Danner's boy, eh?"

Hugo did not like the tone in which they referred to his father. He made no reply.

"Can you tell us anything about these ruins?"

"What ruins?"

They pointed to his fort. Hugo was hurt. "Those aren't ruins. I built that fort. It's to fight Indians in."

The pair ignored his answer and started toward the fort. Hugo did not protest. They surveyed its weighty walls and its relatively new roof.

"Looks recent," Smith said.

"This child has evidently renovated it. But it must have stood here for thousands of years."

"It didn't. I made it—mostly last week."

They noticed him again. Whitaker simpered. "Don't lie, young man."

Hugo was sad. "I'm not lying. I made it. You see—I'm strong." It was as if he had pronounced his own damnation.

"Tut, tut." Smith interrupted his survey. "Did you find it?"

"I built it."

"I said"—the professor spoke with increasing annoyance—"I said not to tell me stories any longer. It's important, young man, that we know just how you found this dolmen and in what condition."

"It isn't a dolly—whatever you said—it's a fort and I built it and I'm not lying."

The professor, in the interests of science, made a grave mistake. He seized Hugo by the arms and shook him. "Now, see here, young man, I'll have no more of your impertinent lip. Tell me just what you've done to harm this noble monument to another race, or, I swear, I'll slap you properly." The professor had no children. He tried, at the same time, another tack, which insulted Hugo further. "If you do, I'll give you a penny—to keep."

Hugo wrenched himself free with an ease that startled Smith. His face was dark, almost black. He spoke slowly, as if he was trying to piece words into sense. "You—both of you—you go away from here and leave me or I'll break your two rotten old necks."

Whitaker moved toward him, and Smith interceded. "We better leave him—and come back later." He was still frightened by the strength in Hugo's arms. "The child is mad. He may have hydrophobia. He might bite." The men moved away hastily. Hugo watched them climb the wall. When they reached the top, he called gently. They wheeled.

And Hugo, sobbing, tears streaming from his face, leaped into his fort. Rocks vomited themselves from it—huge rocks that no man could budge. Walls toppled and crashed. The men began to move. Hugo looked up. He chose a stone that weighed more than a hundred pounds.

"Hey!" he said. "I'm not a liar!" The rock arched through the air and Professors Whitaker and Smith escaped death by a scant margin. Hugo lay in the wreck of the first thing his hands had built, and wept.

After a little while he sprang to his feet and chased the retreating professors. When he suddenly appeared in front of them, they were stricken dumb. "Don't tell any one about that or about me," he said. "If you do—I'll break down your house just like I broke mine. Don't even tell my family. They know it, anyhow."

He leaped. Toward them—over them. The forest hid him. Whitaker wiped clammy perspiration from his brow. "What was it, Smith?"

"A demon. We can't mention it," he repeated, thinking of the warning. "We can't speak of it anyway. They'll never believe us."

V

Extremely dark of hair, of eyes and skin, moderately tall, and shaped with that compact, breath-taking symmetry that the male figure sometimes assumes, a brilliantly devised, aggressive head topping his broad shoulders, graceful, a man vehemently alive, a man with the promise of a young God. Hugo at eighteen. His emotions ran through his eyes like hot steel in a dark mould. People avoided those eyes; they contained a statement from which ordinary souls shrank.

His skin glowed and sweated into a shiny red-brown. His voice was deep and alluring. During twelve long and fierce years he had fought to know and control himself. Indian Creek had forgotten the terrible child.

Hugo's life at that time revolved less about himself than it had during his first years. That was both natural and fortunate. If his classmates in school and the older people of the town had not discounted his early physical precocity, even his splendid vitality might not have been sufficient to prevent him from becoming moody and melancholy.

But when with the passage of time he tossed no more bullies, carried no more barrels of temptation, built no more fortresses, and grew so handsome that the matrons of Indian Creek as well as the adolescent girls in high school followed him with wayward glances, when the men found him a gay and comprehending companion for any sport or adventure, when his teachers observed that his intelligence was often embarrassingly acute, when he played on three teams and was elected an officer in his classes each year, then that half of Hugo which was purely mundane and human dominated him and made him happy.

His adolescence, his emotions, were no different from those of any young man of his age and character. If his ultimate ambitions followed another trajectory, he postponed the evidence of it. Hugo was in love with Anna Blake, the girl who had attracted him when he was six. The residents of Indian Creek knew it. Her family received his calls with the winking tolerance which the middle class grants to young passion. And she was warm and tender and flirtatious and shy according to the policies that she had learned from custom.

The active part of Hugo did not doubt that he would marry her after he had graduated from the college in Indian Creek, that they would settle somewhere near by, and that they would raise a number of children. His subconscious thoughts made reservations that he, in moments when he was intimate with himself, would admit frankly. It made him a little ashamed of himself to see that on one night he would sit with Anna and kiss her ardently until his body ached, and on another he would deliberately plan to desert her. His idealism at that time was very great and untried and it did not occur to him that all men are so deliberately calculating in the love they disguise as absolute.

Anna had grown into a very attractive woman. Her figure was rounded and tall. Her hair was darker than the waxy curls of her childhood, and a vital gleam had come into it. Her eyes were still as blue and her voice, shorn of its faltering youngness, was sweet and clear. She was undoubtedly the prettiest girl in high school and the logical sweet-heart for Hugo Danner. A flower ready to be plucked, at eighteen.

When Hugo reached his senior year, that readiness became almost an impatience. Girls married at an early age in Indian Creek. She looked down the corridor of time during which he would be in college, she felt the pressure of his still slumbering passion, and she sensed his superiority over most of the town boys. Only a very narrow critic would call her resultant tactics dishonourable. They were too intensely human and too clearly born of social and biological necessity.

She had let him kiss her when they were sixteen. And afterwards, before she went to sleep, she sighed rapturously at the memory of his warm, firm lips, his strong, rough arms. Hugo had gone home through the dizzily spinning dusk, through the wind-strummed trees and the fragrant fields, his breath deep in his chest, his eyes hot and somewhat understanding.

Gradually Anna increased that license. She knew and she did not know what she was doing. She played a long game in which she said: "If our love is consummated too soon, the social loss will be balanced by a speedier marriage, because Hugo is honourable; but that will never happen." Two years after that first kiss, when they were floating on the narrow river in a canoe, Hugo unfastened her blouse and exposed the creamy beauty of her bosom to the soft moonlight and she did not protest. That night he nearly possessed her, and after that night he learned through her unspoken, voluptuous suggestion all the technique of love-making this side of consummation.

When, finally, he called one night at her house and found that she was alone and that her parents and her brother would not return until the next day, they looked at each other with a shining agreement. He turned the lights out and they sat on the couch in the darkness, listening to the passing of people on the sidewalk outside. He undressed her. He whispered halting, passionate phrases. He asked her if she was afraid and let himself be laughed away from his own conscience. Then he took her and loved her.

Afterwards, going home again in the gloom of late night, he looked up at the stars and they stood still. He realized that a certain path of life had been followed to its conclusion. He felt initiated into the adult world. And it had been so simple, so natural, so sweet.... He threw a great stone into the river and laughed and walked on, after a while.

Through the summer that followed, Hugo and Anna ran the course of their affair. They loved each other violently and incessantly and with no other evil consequence than to invite the open "humphs" of village gossips and to involve him in several serious talks with her father. Their courtship was given the benefit of conventional doubt, however, and their innocence was hotly if covertly protested by the Blakes. Mrs. Danner coldly ignored every fragment of insinuation. She hoped that Hugo and Anna would announce their engagement and she hinted that hope. Hugo himself was excited and absorbed. Occasionally he thought he was sterile, with an inclination to be pleased rather than concerned if it was true.

He added tenderness to his characteristics. And he loved Anna too much. Toward the end of that summer she lost weight and became irritable. They quarrelled once and then again. The criteria for his physical conduct being vague in his mind, Hugo could not gauge it correctly. And he did not realize that the very ardour of his relation with her was abnormal. Her family decided to send her away, believing the opposite of the truth responsible for her nervousness and weakness. A week before she left, Hugo himself tired of his excesses.

One evening, dressing for a last passionate rendezvous, he looked in his mirror as he tied his scarf and saw that he was frowning. Studying the frown, he perceived with a shock what made it. He did not want to see Anna, to take her out, to kiss and rumple and clasp her, to return thinking of her, feeling her, sweet and smelling like her. It annoyed him. It bored him. He went through it uneasily and quarrelled again. Two days later she departed.

He acted his loss well and she did not show her relief until she sat on the train, tired, shattered, and uninterested in Hugo and in life. Then she cried. But Hugo was through. They exchanged insincere letters. He looked forward to college in the fall. Then he received a letter from Anna saying that she was going to marry a man she had met and known for three weeks. It was a broken, gasping, apologetic letter. Every one was outraged at Anna and astounded that Hugo bore the shock so courageously.

The upshot of that summer was to fill his mind with fetid memories, which abated slowly, to make him disgusted with himself and tired of Indian Creek. He decided to go to a different college, one far away from the scene of his painful youth and his disillusioned maturity. He chose Webster University because of the greatness of its name. If Abednego Danner was hurt at his son's defection from his own college, he said nothing. And Mrs. Danner, grown more silent and reserved, yielded to her son's unexpected decision.

Hugo packed his bags one September afternoon, with a feeling of dreaminess. He bade farewell to his family. He boarded the train. His mind was opaque. The spark burning in it was one of dawning adventure buried in a mass of detail. He had never been far from his native soil. Now he was going to see cities and people who were almost foreign, in the sophisticated East. But all he could dwell on was a swift cinema of a defeated little boy, a strong man who could never be strong, a surfeited love, a truant and dimly comprehensible blonde girl, a muddy street and a red station, a clapboard house, a sonorous church with hushed puppets in the pews, fudge parties, boats on the little river, cold winter, and ice over the mountains, and a fortress where once upon a time he had felt mightier than the universe.

VI

The short branch line to which Hugo changed brought him to the fringe of the campus. The cars were full of boys, so many of them that he was embarrassed. They all appeared to know each other, and no one spoke to him. His dreams on the train were culminated. He had decided to become a great athlete. With his mind's eye, he played the football he would play—and the baseball. Ninety-yard runs, homers hit over the fence into oblivion. Seeing the boys and feeling their lack of notice of him redoubled the force of that decision. Then he stepped on to the station platform and stood facing the campus. He could not escape a rush of reverence and of awe; it was so wide, so green and beautiful. Far away towered the giant arches of the stadium. Near by were the sharp Gothic points of the chapel and the graduate college. Between them a score or more of buildings rambled in and out through the trees.

"Hey!"

Hugo turned a little self-consciously. A youth in a white shirt and white trousers was beckoning to him. "Freshman, aren't you?"

"Yes. My name's Danner. Hugo Danner."

"I'm Lefty Foresman. Chuck!" A second student separated himself from the bustle of baggage and young men. "Here's a freshman."

Hugo waited with some embarrassment. He wondered why they wanted a freshman. Lefty introduced Chuck and then said: "Are you strong, freshman?"

For an instant he was stunned. Had they heard, guessed? Then he realized it was impossible. They wanted him to work. They were going to haze him. "Sure," he said.

"Then get this trunk and I'll show you where to take it."

Hugo was handed a baggage check. He found the official and located the trunk. Tentatively he tested its weight, as if he were a normally husky youth about to undertake its transportation. He felt pleased that his strength was going to be tried so accidentally and in such short order. Lefty and Chuck heaved the trunk on his back. "Can you carry it?" they asked.

"Sure."

"Don't be too sure. It's a long way."

Peering from beneath the trunk under which he bent with a fair assumption of human weakness, Hugo had his first close glimpse of Webster. They passed under a huge arch and down a street lined with elms. Students were everywhere, carrying books and furniture, moving in wheelbarrows and moving by means of the backs of other freshmen. The two who led him were talking and he listened as he plodded.

"Saw Marcia just before I left the lake—took her out one night—and got all over the place with her—and then came down—she's coming to the first prom with me—and Marj to the second—got to get some beer in—we'll buzz out and see if old Snorenson has made any wine this summer. Hello, Eddie—glad to see you back—I've elected the dean's physics, though, God knows, I'll never get a first in them and I need it for a key. That damn Frosh we picked up sure must have been a porter—hey, freshmen! Want a rest?"

"No, thanks."

"Went down to the field this afternoon—looks all right to me. The team, that is. Billings is going to quarter it now—and me after that—hope to Christ I make it—they're going to have Scapper and Dwan back at Yale and we've got a lot of work to do. Frosh! You don't need to drag that all the way in one yank. Put it down, will you?"

"I'm not tired. I don't need a rest."

"Well, you know best—but you ought to be tired. I would. Where do you come from?"

"Colorado."

"Huh! People go to Colorado. Never heard of any one coming from there before. Whereabouts?"

"Indian Creek."

"Oh." There was a pause. "You aren't an Indian, are you?" It was asked bluntly.

"Scotch Presbyterian for twenty generations."

"Well, when you get through here, you'll be full of Scotch and emptied of the Presbyterianism. Put the trunk down."

Their talk of women, of classes, of football, excited Hugo. He was not quite as amazed to find that Lefty Foresman was one of the candidates for the football team as he might have been later when he knew how many students attended the university and how few, relatively, were athletes. He decided at once that he liked Lefty. The sophistication of his talk was unfamiliar to Hugo; much of it he could not understand and only guessed. He wanted Lefty to notice him. When he was told to put the trunk down, he did not obey. Instead, with precision and ease, he swung it up on his shoulder, held it with one hand and said in an unflustered tone: "I'm not tired, honestly. Where do we go from here?"

"Great howling Jesus!" Lefty said, "what have we here? Hey! Put that trunk down." There was excitement in his voice. "Say, guy, do that again."

Hugo did it. Lefty squeezed his biceps and grew pale. Those muscles in action lost their feel of flesh and became like stone. Lefty said: "Say, boy, can you play football?"

"Sure," Hugo said.

"Well, you leave that trunk with Chuck, here, and come with me."

Hugo did as he had been ordered and they walked side by side to the gymnasium. Hugo had once seen a small gymnasium, ill equipped and badly lighted, and it had appealed mightily to him. Now he stood in a prodigious vaulted room with a shimmering floor, a circular balcony, a varied array of apparatus. His hands clenched. Lefty quit him for a moment and came back with a man who wore knickers. "Mr. Woodman, this is—what the hell's your name?"

"Danner. Hugo Danner."

"Mr. Woodman is football coach."

Hugo took the man's hand. Lefty excused himself. Mr. Woodman said: "Young Foresman said you played football."

"Just on a high-school team in Colorado."

"Said you were husky. Go in my office and ask Fitzsimmons to give you a gym suit. Come out when you're ready."

Hugo undressed and put on the suit. Fitzsimmons, the trainer, looked at him with warm admiration. "You're sure built, son."

"Yeah. That's luck, isn't it?"

Then Hugo was taken to another office. Woodman asked him a number of questions about his weight, his health, his past medical history. He listened to Hugo's heart and then led him to a scale. Hugo had lied about his weight.

"I thought you said one hundred and sixty, Mr. Danner?"

The scales showed two hundred and eleven, but it was impossible for a man of his size and build to weigh that much. Hugo had lied deliberately, hoping that he could avoid the embarrassment of being weighed. "I did, Mr. Woodman. You see—my weight is a sort of freak. I don't show it—no one would believe it—and yet there it is." He did not go into the details of his construction from a plasm new to biology.

"Huh!" Mr. Woodman said. Together they walked out on the floor of the gymnasium. Woodman called to one of the figures on the track who was making slow, plodding circuits. "Hey, Nellie! Take this bird up and pace him for a lap. Make it fast."

A little smile came at the corners of Hugo's mouth. Several of the men in the gymnasium stopped work to watch the trial of what was evidently a new candidate. "Ready?" Woodman said, and the runners crouched side by side. "Set? Go!"

Nelson, one of the best sprinters Webster had had for years, dashed forward. He had covered thirty feet when he heard a voice almost in his ear. "Faster, old man."

Nelson increased. "Faster, boy, I'm passing you." The words were spoken quietly, calmly. A rage filled Nelson. He let every ounce of his strength into his limbs and skimmed the canvas. Half a lap. Hugo ran at his side and Nelson could not lead him. The remaining half was not a race. Hugo finished thirty feet in the lead.

Woodman, standing on the floor, wiped his forehead and bawled: "That the best you can do, Nellie?"

"Yes, sir."

"What in hell have you been doing to yourself?"

Nelson drew a sobbing breath. "I—haven't—done—a thing. Time—that man. He's—faster than the intercollegiate mark."

Woodman, still dubious, made Hugo run against time. And Hugo, eager to make an impression and unguided by a human runner, broke the world's record for the distance around the track by a second and three-fifths. The watch in Woodman's hands trembled.

"Hey!" he said, uncertain of his voice, "come down here, will you?"

Hugo descended the spiral iron staircase. He was breathing with ease. Woodman stared at him. "Lessee you jump."

Hugo was familiar with the distances for jumping made in track meets. He was careful not to overdo his effort. His running jump was twenty-eight feet, and his standing jump was eleven feet and some inches. Woodman's face ran water. His eyes gleamed. "Danner," he said, "where did you get that way?"

"What way?"

"I mean—what have you done all your life?"

"Nothing. Gone to school."

"Two hundred and eleven pounds," Woodman muttered, "run like an Olympic champ—jump like a kangaroo—how's your kicking?"

"All right, I guess."

"Passing?"

"All right, I guess."

"Come on outside. Hey, Fitz! Bring a ball."

An hour later Fitzsimmons found Woodman sitting in his office. Beside him was a bottle of whisky which he kept to revive wounded gladiators. "Fitz," said Woodman, looking at the trainer with dazed eyes, "did you see what I saw?"

"Yes, I did, Woodie."

"Tell me about it."

Fitzsimmons scratched his greying head. "Well, Woodie, I seen a young man—"

"Saw, Fitz."

"I saw a young man come into the gym an' undress. He looked like an oiled steam engine. I saw him go and knock hell out of three track records without even losing his breath. Then I seen him go out on the field an' kick a football from one end to the other an' pass it back. That's what I seen."

Woodman nodded his head. "So did I. But I don't believe it, do you?"

"I do. That's the man you—an' all the other coaches—have been wantin' to see. The perfect athlete. Better in everything than the best man at any one thing. Just a freak, Woodie—but, God Almighty, how New Haven an' Colgate are goin' to feel it these next years!"

"Mebbe he's dumb, Fitz."

"Mebbe. Mebbe not."

"Find out."

Fitz wasted no time. He telephoned to the registrar's office. "Mr. H. Danner," said the voice of a secretary, "passed his examinations with the highest honours and was admitted among the first ten."

"He passed his entrance exams among the first ten," Fitzsimmons repeated.

"God!" said Woodman, "it's the millennium!" And he took a drink.

Late in the afternoon of that day Hugo found his room in Thompson Dormitory. He unpacked his carpet-bag and his straw suitcase. He checked in his mind the things that he had done. It seemed a great deal for one day—a complete alteration of his life. He had seen the dean and arranged his classes: trigonometry, English, French, Latin, biology, physics, economics, hygiene. With a pencil and a ruler he made a schedule, which he pinned on the second-hand desk he had bought.

Then he checked his furniture: a desk, two chairs, a bed, bed-clothes, a rug, sheets and blankets, towels. He hung his clothes in the closet. For a while he looked at them attentively. They were not like the clothes of the other students. He could not quite perceive the difference, but he felt it, and it made him uncomfortable. The room to which he had been assigned was pleasant. It looked over the rolling campus on two sides, and both windows were framed in the leaves of nodding ivy.

It was growing dark. From a dormitory near by came the music of a banjo. Presently the player sang and other voices joined with him. A warm and golden sun touched the high clouds with lingering fire. Voices cried out, young and vigorous. Hugo sighed. He was going to be happy at Webster. His greatness was going to be born here.

At that time Woodman called informally on Chuck and Lefty. They were in a heated argument over the decorative arrangement of various liquor bottles when he knocked. "Come in!" they shouted in unison.

"Hello!"

"Oh, Woodie. Come in. Sit down. Want a drink—you're not in training?"

"No, thanks. Had one. And it would be a damn sight better if you birds didn't keep the stuff around."

"It's Chuck's." Lefty grinned.

"All right. I came to see about that bird you brought to me—Danner."

"Was he any good?"

Woodman hesitated. "Fellows, if I told you how good he was, you wouldn't believe me. He's so good—I'm scared of him."

"Whaddaya mean?"

"Just that. He gave Nellie thirty feet in a lap on the track."

"Great God!"

"He jumped twenty-eight and eleven feet—running and standing. He kicked half a dozen punts for eighty and ninety yards and he passed the same distance."

Lefty sat down on the window seat. His voice was hoarse. "That—can't be done, Woodie."

"I know it. But he did it. But that isn't what makes me frightened. How much do you think he weighs?"

"One fifty-five—or thereabouts."

Woodie shook his head. "No, Lefty, he weighs two hundred and eleven."

"Two eleven! He can't, Woodie. There's something wrong with your scales."

"Not a thing."

The two students stared at each other and then at the coach. They were able to grasp the facts intellectually, but they could not penetrate the reactions of their emotions. At last Lefty said: "But that isn't—well—it isn't human, Woodie."

"That's why I'm scared. Something has happened to this bird. He has a disease of some kind—that has toughened him. Like Pott's disease, that turns you to stone. But you wouldn't think it. There's not a trace of anything on the surface. I'm having a blood test made soon. Wait till to-morrow when you see him in action. It'll terrify you. Because you'll have the same damned weird feeling I have—that he isn't doing one tenth of what he can do—that he's really just playing with us all. By God, if I was a bit superstitious, I'd throw up my job and get as much distance between me and that bird as I could. I'm telling you simply to prepare you. There's something mighty funny about him, and the sooner we find out, the better."

Mr. Woodman left the dormitory. Lefty and Chuck stared at each other for the space of a minute, and then, with one accord, they went together to the registrar's office. There they found Hugo's address on the campus, and in a few minutes they were at his door.

"Come in," Hugo said. He smiled when he saw Lefty and Chuck. "Want some more trunks moved?"

"Maybe—later." They sat down, eying Hugo speculatively. Lefty acted as spokesman. "Listen here, guy, we've just seen Woodie and he says you're phenomenal—so much so that it isn't right."

Hugo reddened. He had feared that his exhibition was exaggerated by his eagerness to impress the coach. He said nothing and Lefty continued: "You're going to be here for four years and you're going to love this place. You're going to be willing to die for it. All the rest of your life the fact that you went to old Webster is going to make a difference. But there's one thing that Webster insists on—and that's fair play. And honesty—and courage. You've come from a little town in the West and you're a stranger here. Understand, this is all in a spirit of friendship. So far—we like you. We want you to be one of us. To belong. You have a lot to learn and a long way to go. I'm being frank because I want to like you. For instance, Chuck here is a millionaire. My old man is no dead stick in the Blue Book. Things like that will be different from what you've known before. But the important thing is to be a square shooter. Don't be angry. Do you understand?"

Hugo walked to the window and looked out into the thickened gloom. He had caught the worry, the repression, in Lefty's voice. The youth, his merry blue eyes suddenly grave, his poised self abnormally disturbed, had suggested a criticism of some sort. What was it? Hugo was hurt and a little frightened. Would his college life be a repetition of Indian Creek? Would the athletes and the others in college of his own age fear and detest him—because he was superior? Was that what they meant? He did not know. He was loath to offend Lefty and Chuck. But there seemed no alternative to the risk. No one had talked to him in that way for a long time. He sat on his bed. "Fellows," he said tersely, "I don't think I know what you're driving at. Will you tell me?"

The roommates fidgeted. They did not know exactly, either. They had come to fathom the abnormality in Hugo. Chuck lit a cigarette. Lefty smiled with an assumed ease. "Why—nothing, Danner. You see—well—I'm quarterback of the football team. And you'll probably be on it this year—we haven't adopted the new idea of keeping freshmen off the varsity. Just wanted to tell you those—well—those principles."

Hugo knew he had not been answered. He felt, too, that he would never in his life give away his secret. The defences surrounding it had been too immutably fixed. His joy at knowing that he had been accepted so soon as a logical candidate for the football team was tempered by this questioning. "I have principles, fellows."

"Good." Lefty rose. "Guess we'll be going. By the way, Woodie said you smashed a couple of track records to-day. Where'd you learn?"

"Nowhere."

"How come, then?"

"Just—natural."

Lefty summoned his will. "Sure it isn't—well—unhealthy. Woodie says there are a couple of diseases that make you—well—get tough—like stone."

Hugo realized the purpose of the visit. "Then—be sure I haven't any diseases. My father had an M.D." He smiled awkwardly. "Ever since I was a kid, I've been stronger than most people. And I probably have a little edge still. Just an accident, that's all. Is that what you were wondering about?"

Lefty smiled with instant relief. "Yes, it is. And I'm glad you take it that way. Listen—why don't you come over to the Inn and take dinner with Chuck and me? Let commons go for to-night. What say?"

At eleven Hugo wound his alarm clock and set it for seven. He yawned and smiled. All during supper he had listened to the glories of Webster and the advantages of belonging to the Psi Delta fraternity, to descriptions of parties and to episodes with girls. Lefty and Chuck had embraced him in their circle. They had made suggestions about what he should wear and whom he should know; they had posted him on the behaviour best suited for each of his professors. They liked him and he liked them, immensely. They were the finest fellows in the world. Webster was a magnificent university. And he was going to be one of its most glorious sons.

He undressed and went to bed. In a moment he slept, drawing in deep, swift breaths. His face was smiling and his arm was extended, whether to ward off shadows or to embrace a new treasure could not be told. In the bright sunshine of morning his alarm jangled and he woke to begin his career as an undergraduate.

VII

From the day of his arrival Webster University felt the presence of Hugo Danner. Classes, football practice, hazing, fraternity scouting began on that morning with a feverish and good-natured hurly-burly that, for a time, completely bewildered him. Hugo participated in everything. He went to the classroom with pleasure. It was never difficult for him to learn and never easier than in those first few weeks. The professors he had known (and he reluctantly included his own father) were dry-as-dust individuals who had none of the humanities. And at least some of the professors at Webster were brilliant, urbane, capable of all understanding. Their lectures were like tonic to Hugo.

The number of his friends grew with amazing rapidity. It seemed that he could not cross the campus without being hailed by a member of the football team and presented to another student. The Psi Deltas saw to it that he met the entire personnel of their chapter at Webster. Other fraternities looked at him with covetous eyes, but Lefty Foresman, who was chairman of the membership committee, let it be known that the Psi Deltas had marked Hugo for their own. And no one refused their bid.

On the second Monday after college opened, Hugo went to the class elections and found to his astonishment that he received twenty-eight votes for president. A boy from a large preparatory school was elected, but twenty-eight votes spoke well for the reputation he had gained in that short time. On that day, too, he learned the class customs. Freshmen had to wear black caps, black shoes and socks and ties. They were not allowed to walk on the grass or to ride bicycles. The ancient cannon in the center of the class square was defended annually by the sophomores, and its theft was always attempted by the freshmen. No entering class had stolen it in eight years. Those things amused Hugo. They gave him an intimate feeling of belonging to his school. He wrote to his parents about them.

Dean Aiken, the newly elected president of the freshman class, approached Hugo on the matter of the cannon. "We want a gang of good husky boys to pull it up some night and take it away. Are you with us?"

"Sure."

Left to his own considerations, Hugo recalled his promise and walked across the campus with the object of studying the cannon. It was a medium-sized piece of Revolutionary War vintage. It stood directly in the rear of Webster Hall, and while Hugo regarded it, he noticed that two sophomores remained in the vicinity. He knew that guard, changed every two hours, would be on duty day and night until Christmas was safely passed. Well, the cannon was secure. It couldn't be rolled away. The theft of it would require first a free-for-all with the sophomores and after a definite victory a mob assault of the gun. Hugo walked closer to it.

"Off the grass, freshman!"

He wheeled obediently. One of the guards approached him. "Get off the grass and stay off and don't look at that cannon with longing. It isn't healthy for young freshmen."

Hugo grinned. "All right, fella. But you better keep a double guard on that thing while I want it."

Two nights later, during a heavy rain that had begun after the fall of dark, Hugo clad himself in a slicker and moved vaguely into the night. Presently he reached the cannon yard, and in the shelter of an arch he saw the sophomore guards. They smoked cigarettes, and one of them sang softly. Day and night a pair of conscripted sentries kept watchful eyes on the gun. A shout from either of them would bring the whole class tumbling from its slumber in a very few moments. Hugo moved out of their vision. The campus was empty.

He rounded Webster Hall, the mud sucking softly under his feet and the rain dampening his face. From beneath his coat he took a flare and lighted the fuse. He heard the two sophomores running toward it in the thick murk. When they were very close, he stepped on to the stone flagging, looked up into the cloudy sky, gathered himself, and leaped over the three stories of Webster Hall. He landed with a loud thud ten feet from the cannon. When the sophomores returned, after extinguishing the flare, their cherished symbol of authority had vanished.

There was din on the campus. First the loud cries of two voices. Then the screech of raised windows, the babble of more voices, and the rush of feet that came with new gusts of rain. Flash-lights pierced the gloom. Where the cannon had been, a hundred and then two hundred figures gathered, swirled, organized search-parties, built a fire. Dawn came, and the cannon was still missing. The clouds lifted. In the wan light some one pointed up. There, on the roof of Webster Hall, with the numerals of the freshman class painted on its muzzle, was the old weapon. Arms stretched. An angry, incredulous hum waxed to a steady pitch and waned as the sophomores dispersed.

In the morning, theory ran rife. The freshmen were tight-lipped, pretending knowledge where they had none, exulting secretly. Dean Aiken was kidnapped at noon and given a third degree, which extorted no information. The theft of the cannon and its elevation to the roof of the hall entered the annals of Webster legend. And Hugo, watching the laborious task of its removal from the roof, seemed merely as pleased and as mystified as the other freshmen.

So the autumn commenced. The first football game was played and Hugo made a touchdown. He made another in the second game. They took him to New York in November for the dinner that was to celebrate the entrance of a new chapter to Psi Delta.

His fraternity had hired a private car. As soon as the college towers vanished, the entertainment committee took over the party. Glasses were filled with whisky and passed by a Negro porter. Hugo took his with a feeling of nervousness and of excited anticipation. The coach had given him permission to break training—advised it, in fact. And Hugo had never tasted liquor. He watched the others, holding his glass gingerly. They swallowed their drinks, took more. The effect did not seem to be great. He smelled the whisky, and the smell revolted him.

"Drink up, Danner!"

"Never use the stuff. I'm afraid it'll throw me."

"Not you. Come on! Bottoms up!"

It ran into his throat, hot and steaming. He swallowed a thousand needles and knew the warmth of it in his stomach. They gave another glass to him and then a third. Some of the brothers were playing cards. Hugo watched them. He perceived that his feet were loose on their ankles and that his shoulders lurched. It would not do to lose control of himself, he thought. For another man, it might be safe. Not for him. He repeated the thought inanely. Some one took his arm.

"Nice work in the game last week. Pretty."

"Thanks."

"Woodie says you're the best man on the team. Glad you went Psi Delt. Best house on the campus. Great school, Webster. You'll love it."

"Sure," Hugo said.

The railroad coach was twisting and writhing peculiarly. Hugo suddenly wanted to be in the air. He hastened to the platform of the car and stood on it, squinting his eyes at the countryside. When they reached the Grand Central Terminal he was cured of his faintness. They rode to the theatre in an omnibus and saw the matinée of a musical show. Hugo had never realized that so many pretty girls could be gathered together in one place. Their scant, glittering costumes flashed in his face. He wanted them. Between the acts the fraternity repaired in a body to the lavatory and drank whisky from bottles.

Hugo began to feel that he was living at last. He was among men, sophisticated men, and learning to be like them. Nothing like the camaraderie, the show, the liquor, in Indian Creek. He was wearing the suit that Lefty Foresman had chosen for him. He felt well dressed, cool, capable. He was intensely well disposed toward his companions. When the show was over, he stood in the bright lights, momentarily depressed by the disappearance of the long file of girls. Then he shouldered among his companions and went out of the theatre riotously.

Two long tables were drawn up at the Raven, a restaurant famous for its roast meats, its beer, and its lack of scruples about the behaviour of its guests. The Psi Deltas took their places at the tables. The dining-room they occupied was private. Hugo saw as if in a dream the long rows of silverware, the dishes of celery and olives, and the ranks of shining glasses. They sat. Waiters wound their way among them. There was a song. The toastmaster, a New York executive who had graduated from Webster twenty years before, understood the temper of his charge. He was witty, ribald, genial.

He made a speech, but not too long a speech. He called on the president of a bank, who rose totteringly and undid the toastmaster's good offices by making too long a speech. Its reiterated "dear old Websters" were finally lost in the ring and tinkle of glassware and cutlery.

At the end of the long meal Hugo realized that his being had undergone change. Objects approached and receded before his vision. The voice of the man sitting beside him came to his ears as if through water. His mind continually turned upon itself in a sort of infatuated examination. His attention could not be held even on his own words. He decided that he was feverish. Then some one said: "Well, Danner, how do you like being drunk?"

"Drunk?"

"Sure. You aren't going to tell me you're sober, are you?"

When the speaker had gone, Hugo realized that it was Chuck. There had been no feeling of recognition. "I'm drunk!" he said.

"Some one give Danner a drink. He has illusions."

"Drunk! Why, this man isn't drunk. It's monstrous. He has a weakened spine, that's all."

"I'm drunk," Hugo repeated. He knew then what it was to be drunk. The toastmaster was rising again. Hugo saw it dimly.

"Fellows!" A fork banged on a glass. "Fellows!" There was a slow increase in silence. "Fellows! It's eleven o'clock now. And I have a surprise for you."

"Surprise! Hey, guys, shut up for the surprise!"

"Fellows! What I was going to say is this: the girls from the show we saw this afternoon are coming over here—all thirty of 'em. We're going up to my house for a real party. And the lid'll be off. Anything goes—only anybody that fights gets thrown out straight off without an argument. Are you on?"

The announcement was greeted by a stunned quiet which grew into a bellow of approval. Plates and glasses were thrown on the floor. Lefty leaped on to the table and performed a dance. The proprietor came in, looked, and left hastily, and then the girls arrived.

They came through the door, after a moment of reluctant hesitation, like a flood of brightly colored water. They sat down in the laps of the boys, on chairs, on the edge of the disarrayed tables. They were served with innumerable drinks as rapidly as the liquor could be brought. They were working, that night, for the ten dollars promised to each one. But they were working with college boys, which was a rest from the stream of affluent and paunchy males who made their usual escort. Their gaiety was better than assumed.

Hugo had never seen such a party or dreamed of one. His vision was cleared instantly of its cobwebs. He saw three boys seize one girl and turn her heels over head. A piano was moved in. She jumped up and started dancing on the table. Then there was a voice at his side.

"Hello, good-looking. I could use that drink if you can spare it."

Hugo looked at the girl. She had brown hair that had been curled. Her lips and cheeks were heavily rouged and the corners of her mouth turned down in a sort of petulance or fatigue. But she was pretty. And her body, showing whitely above her evening dress, was creamy and warm. He gave the drink to her. She sat in his lap.

"Gosh," he whispered. She laughed.

"I saw her first," some one said, pulling at the girl's arm.

"Go 'way," Hugo shouted. He pushed the other from them. "What's your name?"

"Bessie. What's yours?"

"Hugo."

The girl accepted two glasses from a waiter. They drained them, looking at each other over the rims. "Got any money, Hugo?"

Hugo had. He carried on his person the total of his cash assets. Some fifty dollars. "Sure. I have fifty dollars," he answered.

He felt her red lips against his ear. "Let's you and me duck this party and have a little one of our own. I've got an apartment not far from here."

He could hear the pounding of his heart. "Let's."

They moved unostentatiously from the room. Outside, in the hall, she took his hand. They ran to the front door.

There was the echo of bedlam in his whirling mind when they walked through the almost deserted street. She called to a taxi and they were driven for several blocks. At a cheap dance hall they took a table and drank more liquor. When his head was turned, she narrowed her eyes and calculated the effect of the alcohol against the dwindling of his purse. They danced.

"Gee, you're a swell dancer."

"So are you, Bessie."

"Still wanna go home with Bessie?"

"Mmmm."

"Let's go."

Another taxi ride. The lights seethed past him. A dark house and three flights of rickety stairs. The gritty sound of a key in a lock. A little room with a table, a bed, two chairs, a gas-light turned low, a disheveled profusion of female garments.

"Here we are. Sit down."

Hugo looked at her tensely. He laughed then, with a harsh sound. She flew into his arms, returning his searching caresses with startling frankness. Presently they moved across the room. He could hear the noises on the street at long, hot intervals.

Hugo opened his eyes and the light smote them with pain. He raised his head wonderingly. His stomach crawled with a foul nausea. He saw the dirty room. Bessie was not in it. He staggered to the wash-bowl and was sick. He noticed then that her clothes were missing. The fact impressed him as one that should have significance. He rubbed his head and eyes. Then he thought accurately. He crossed the room and felt in his trousers pockets. The money was gone.

At first it did not seem like a catastrophe. He could telegraph to his father for more money. Then he realized that he was in New York, without a ticket back to the campus, separated from his friends, and not knowing the address of the toastmaster. He could not find his fraternity brothers and he could not get back to school without more money. Moreover, he was sick.

He dressed with miserable slowness and went down to the street. Served him right. He had been a fool. He shrugged. A sharp wind blew out of a bright sky.

Maybe, he thought, he should walk back to Webster. It was only eighty miles and that distance could be negotiated in less than two hours by him. But that was unwise. People would see his progress. He sat down in Madison Square Park and looked at the Flatiron Building with a leisurely eye. A fire engine surged up the street. A man came to collect the trash in a green can. A tramp lay down and was ousted by a policeman.

By and by he realized that he was hungry. A little man with darting eyes took a seat beside him. He regarded Hugo at short intervals. At length he said. "You got a dime for a cup of coffee?" His words were blurred by accent.

"No. I came here from school last night and my money was stolen."

"Ah," there was a tinge of discouragement in the other's voice. "And hungry, perhaps?"

"A little."

"Me—I am also hungry. I have not eaten since two days."

That impressed Hugo as a shameful and intolerable circumstance. "Let's go over there"—he indicated a small restaurant—"and eat. Then I'll promise to send the money by mail. At least, we'll be fed that way."

"We will be thrown to the street on our faces."

"Not I. Nobody throws me on my face. And I'll look out for you."

They crossed the thoroughfare and entered the restaurant. The little man ordered a quantity of food, and Hugo, looking guiltily at the waiter, duplicated the order. They became distantly acquainted during the filched repast. The little man's name was Izzie. He sold second-hand rugs. But he was out of work. Eventually they finished. The waiter brought the check. He was a large man, whose jowls and hips and shoulders were heavily weighted with muscle.

Hugo stood up. "Listen, fellow," he began placidly, "my friend and I haven't a cent between us. I'm Hugo Danner, from Webster University, and I'll mail you the price of this feed to-morrow. I'll write down my name and—"

He got no further. The waiter spoke in a thick voice. "So! One of them guys, eh? Tryin' to get away with it when I'm here, huh? Well, I tell you how you're gonna pay. You're gonna pay this check with a bloody mush, see?" His fist doubled and drew back. Hugo did not shift his position. The fist came forward, but an arm like stone blocked it. Hugo's free hand barely flicked to the waiter's jaw. He rolled under the table. "Come on," he said, but Izzie had already vanished through the door.

Hugo walked hurriedly up the street and turned a corner. A hand tugged at his coat. He turned and was confronted by Izzie. "I seen you through the window. Jeest, guy, you kin box. Say, I know where you kin clean up—if you got the nerve."

"Clean up? Where?"

"Come on. We better get out of here anyhow."

They made their way toward the river. The city changed character on the other side of the elevated railroad, and presently they were walking through a dirty, evil-smelling, congested neighborhood.

"Where are we going, Izzie?"

"Wait a minute, Mr. Danner."

"What's the idea?"

"You wait."

Another series of dirty blocks. Then they came to a bulky building that spread a canopy over the sidewalk. "Here," Izzie said, and pointed.

His finger indicated a sign, which Hugo read twice. It said: "Battling Ole Swenson will meet all comers in this gymnasium at three this afternoon and eight to-night. Fifty dollars will be given to any man, black or white, who can stay three rounds with him, and one hundred dollars cash money to the man who knocks out Battling Ole Swenson, the Terror of the Docks."

"See," Izzie said, rubbing his hands excitedly, "mebbe you could do it."

A light dawned on Hugo. He smiled. "I can," he replied. "What time is it?"

"Two o'clock."

"Well, let's go."

They entered the lobby of the "gymnasium." "Mr. Epstein," Izzie called, "I gotta fighter for the Swede."

Mr. Epstein was a pale fat man who ignored the handicap of the dank cigar in his mouth and roared when he spoke. He glanced at Hugo and then addressed Izzie. "Where is he?"

"There."

Epstein looked at Hugo and then was shaken by laughter. "There, you says, and there I looks and what do I see but a pink young angel face that Ole would swallow without chewing."

Hugo said: "I don't think so. I'm willing to try."

Epstein scowled. "Run away from here, kid, before you get hurt. Ole would laugh at you. This isn't easy money. It takes a man to get a look at it."

Izzie stamped impatiently. "I tell you, Mr. Epstein, I seen this boy fight. He's the goods. He can beat your Ole. I bet he can." His voice caught and he glanced nervously at Hugo. "I bet ten dollars he can."

"How much?" Epstein bellowed.

"Well—say twenty dollars."

"How much?"

"Fifty dollars. It's all I got, Epstein."

"All right—go in and sign up and leave your wad. Kid," he turned to Hugo, "you may think you're husky, but Ole is a killer. He's six nine in his socks and he weighs two hundred and eighty. He'll mash you."

"I don't think so," Hugo repeated.

"Well, you'll be meat. We'll put you second on the list. And the lights'll go out fast enough for yuh."

Hugo followed Izzie and reached him in time to see a fifty-dollar bill peeled from a roll which was extracted with great intricacy from Izzie's clothes. "I thought you hadn't eaten for two days!"

"It's God's truth," Izzie answered uneasily. "I was savin' this dough—an' it's lucky, too, isn't it?"

Hugo did not know whether to laugh or to be angry. He said: "And you'd have let me take a poke in the jaw from that waiter. You're a hell of a guy, Izzie."

Izzie moved his eyes rapidly. "I ain't so bad. I'm bettin' on you, ain't I? An' I got you a chancet at the Swede, didn't I?"

"How'd you know that waiter couldn't kill me?"

"Well—he didn't. Anyhow, what's a poke in the jaw to a square meal, eh?"

"When the other fellow gets the poke and you get the meal. All right, Izzie. I wish I thought Ole was going to lick me."

Hugo wrote his name under a printed statement to the effect that the fight managers were not responsible for the results of the combat. The man who led him to a dressing-room was filled with sympathy and advice. He told Hugo that one glance at Ole would discourage his reckless avarice. But Hugo paid no attention. The room was dirty. It smelled of sweat and rubber sneakers. He sat there for half an hour, reading a newspaper. Outside, somewhere, he could hear the mumble of a gathering crowd, punctuated by the voices of candy and peanut-hawkers.

At last they brought some clothes to him. A pair of trunks that flapped over his loins, ill-fitting canvas shoes, a musty bath robe. When the door of his room opened, the noise of the crowd was louder. Finally it was hushed. He heard the announcer. It was like the voice of a minister coming through the stained windows of a church. It rose and fell. Then the distant note of the gong. After that the crowd called steadily, sometimes in loud rage and sometimes almost in a whisper.

Finally they brought Ole's first victim into Hugo's cell. He was a man with the physique of a bull. His face was cut and his eyes were darkening. One of the men heaving his stretcher looked at Hugo.

"Better beat it, kid, while you can still do it on your own feet. You ain't even got the reach for Ole. He's a grizzly, bo. He'll just about kill you."

Hugo tightened his belt and swung the electric light back and forth with a slow-moving fist. Another man expertly strapped his fists with adhesive tape.

"When do I go out?" Hugo asked.

"You mean, when do you get knocked out?" the second laughed.

"Fight?"

"Well, if you're determined to get croaked, you do it now."

In the arena it was dazzling. A bank of noisy people rose on all sides of him. Hugo walked down the aisle and clambered into the ring. Ole was one of the largest men he had ever seen in his life. There was no doubt of his six feet nine inches and his two hundred and eighty pounds. Hugo imagined that the man was not a scientific fighter. A bruiser. Well, he knew nothing of fighting, either.

A man in his shirt sleeves stood up in the ring and bellowed, "The next contestant for the reward of fifty dollars to stay three rounds with battling Ole and one hundred dollars to knock him out is Mr. H. Smith." They cheered. It was a nasty sound, filled with the lust for blood. Hugo realized that he was excited. His knees wabbled when he rose and his hand trembled as he took the monstrous paw of the Swede and saw his unpleasant smile. Hugo's heart was pounding. For one instant he felt weak and human before Battling Ole. He whispered to himself: "Quit it, you fool; you know better; you can't even be hurt." It did not make him any more quiet.

Then they were sitting face to face. A bell rang. The hall became silent as the mountainous Swede lumbered from his corner. He towered over Hugo, who stood up and went out to meet him like David approaching Goliath. To the crowd the spectacle was laughable. There was jeering before they met. "Where's your mamma?" "Got your bottle, baby?" "Put the poor little bastard back in his carriage." "What's this—a fight or a freak show?" Laughter.

It was like cold water to Hugo. His face set. He looked at Ole. The Swede's fist moved back like the piston of a great engine into which steam has been let slowly. Then it came forward. Hugo, trained to see and act in keeping with his gigantic strength, dodged easily. "Atta boy!" "One for Johnny-dear!" The fist went back and came again and again, as if that piston, gathering speed, had broken loose and was flailing through the screaming air. Hugo dodged like a beam of light, and the murderous weapon never touched him. The spectators began to applaud his speed. He could beat the Swede's fist every time. "Run him, kiddo!" "It's only three rounds."

The bell. Ole was panting. As he sat in his corner, his coal-scuttle gloves dangling, he cursed in his native tongue. Too little to hit. Bell. The second round was the same. Hugo never attempted to touch the Swede. Only to avoid him. And the man worked like a Trojan. Sweat seethed over his big, blank face. His small eyes sharpened to points. He brought his whole carcass flinging through the air after his fist. But every blow ended in a sickening wrench that missed the target. The crowd grew more excited. During the interval between the second and third rounds there was betting on the outcome. Three to one that Ole would connect and murder the boy. Four to one. One to five that Hugo would win fifty dollars before he died beneath the trip-hammer.

The third round opened. The crowd suddenly tired of the sport. A shrill female voice reached Hugo's cold, concentrated mind: "Keep on running, yellow baby!"

So. They wanted a killing. They called him yellow. The Swede was on him, elephantine, sweating, sucking great, rumbling breaths of air, swinging his fists. Hugo studied the motion. That fist to that side, up, down, now!

Like hail they began to land upon the Swede. Bewilderingly, everywhere. No hope of guarding. Every blow smashed, stung, ached. No chance to swing back. Cover up. His arms went over his face. He felt rivets drive into his kidneys. He reached out and clinched. They rocked in each other's arms. Dazed by that bitter onslaught of lightning blows, Ole thought only to lock Hugo in his arms and crush him. When they clinched, the crowd, grown instantly hysterical, sank back in despair. It was over. Ole could break the little man's back. They saw his arms spring into knots. Jesus! Hugo's fist shot between their chests and Ole was thrown violently backward. Impossible. He lunged back, crimson to kill, one hand guarding his jaw. "Easy, now, for the love of God, easy," Hugo said to himself. There. On the hand at the chin. Hugo's gloves went out. Lift him! It connected. The Swede left the floor and crumpled slowly, with a series of bumping sounds. And how the hyenas yelled!

They crowded into his dressing-room afterwards. Epstein came to his side before he had dressed. "Come out and have a mug of suds, kid. That was the sweetest fight I ever hope to live to see. I can sign you up for a fortune right now. I can make you champ in two years."

"No, thanks," Hugo said.

The man persisted. He talked earnestly. He handed Hugo a hundred-dollar bill. Hugo finished his dressing. Izzie wormed his way in. "Fifty dollars I won yet! Didn't I tole you, Mr. Epstein!"

"Come here, Izzie!"

The little man ran to shake Hugo's hand, but it was extended for another reason. "I want that fifty you won," he said unsmilingly. "When a bird tracks along for a free feed and lets another guy fight for him and has a roll big enough to stop up a rainspout, he owes money. That lunch will set you back just exactly what you won on me."

There was laughter in the room. Izzie whimpered. "Ain't you got a hundred all ready that I got for you? Ain't it enough that you got it? Ain't I got a wife wit' kids yet?"

"No, it ain't, yet." Hugo snapped the fingers of his extended hand. The other hand doubled significantly. Izzie gave him the money. He was almost in tears. The others guffawed.

"Wait up, bo. Give us your address if you ever change your mind. You can pick up a nice livin' in this game."

"No, thanks. All I needed was railroad fare. Thank you, gentlemen—and—good-by."

No one undertook to hinder Hugo's departure.

VIII

Greatness seemed to elude Hugo, success such as he had earned was inadequate, and his friendships as well as his popularity were tinged with a sort of question that he never understood. By the end of winter he was well established in Webster as a great athlete. Psi Delta sang his praises and was envied his deeds. Lefty and Chuck treated him as a brother. And, Hugo perceived, none of that treatment and none of that society was quite real. He wondered if his personality was so meagre that it was not equal to his strength. He wondered if his strength was really the asset he had dreamed it would be, and if, perhaps, other people were not different from him in every way, so that any close human contact was impossible to him.

It was a rather tragic question to absorb a man so filled with life and ambition as he. Yet every month had raised it more insistently. He saw other men sharing their inmost souls and he could never do that. He saw those around him breaking their hearts and their lungs for the university, and, although it was never necessary for him to do that, he doubted that he could if he would. Webster was only a school. A sentiment rather than an ideal, a place rather than a goal of dreams. He thought that he was cynical. He thought that he was inhuman. It worried him.

His love was a similar experience. He fell in love twice during that first year in college. Once at a prom with a girl who was related to Lefty—a rich, socially secure girl who had studied abroad and who almost patronized her cousin.

Hugo had seen her dancing, and her long, slender legs and arms had issued an almost tangible challenge to him. She had looked over Lefty's shoulder and smiled vaguely. They had met. Hugo danced with her. "I love to come to a prom," she said; "it makes me feel young again."

"How old are you?"

She ignored the obvious temptation to be coy and he appreciated that. "Twenty-one."

It seemed reasonably old to Hugo. The three years' difference in their ages had given her a pinnacle of maturity.

"And that makes you old," he reflected.

She nodded. Her name was Iris. Afterwards Hugo thought that it should have been Isis. Half goddess, half animal. He had never met with the vanguard of emancipated American womanhood before then. "You're the great Hugo Danner, aren't you? I've seen your picture in the sporting sections." She read sporting sections. He had never thought of a woman in that light. "But you're really much handsomer. You have more sex and masculinity and you seem more intelligent."

Then, between the dances, Lefty had come. "She? Oh, she's a sort of cousin. Flies in all the high altitudes in town. Blue Book and all that. Better look out, Hugo. She plays rough."

"She doesn't look rough."

Both youths watched her. Long, dark hair, willowy body, high, pale forehead, thin nose, red mouth, smiling like a lewd agnostic and dancing close to her partner, enjoying even that. "Well, look out, Hugo. If she wants to play, don't let her play with your heart. Anything else is quite in the books."

"Oh."

She came to the stag line, ignoring a sequence of invitations, and asked him to dance. They went out on the velvet campus. "I could love you—for a little while," she said. "It's too bad you have to play football to-morrow."

"Is that an excuse?"

She smiled remotely. "You're being disloyal." Her fan moved delicately. "But I shan't chide you. In fact, I'll stay over for the game—and I'll enjoy the anticipation—more, perhaps. But you'll have to win it—to win me. I'm not a soothing type."

"It will be easy—to win," Hugo said and she peered through the darkness with admiration, because he had made his ellipsis of the object very plain.

"It is always easy for you to win, isn't it?" she countered with an easy mockery, and Hugo shivered.

The game was won. Hugo had made his touchdown. He unfolded a note she had written on the back of a score card. "At my hotel at ten, then."

"Then." Someone lifted his eyes to praise him. His senses swam in careful anticipation. They were cheering outside the dressing-room. A different sound from the cheers at the fight-arena. Young, hilarious, happy.

At ten he bent over the desk and was told to go to her room. The clerk shrugged. She opened the door. One light was burning. There was perfume in the air. She wore only a translucent kimono of pale-coloured silk. She taught him a great many things that night. And Iris learned something, too, so that she never came back to Hugo, and kept the longing for him as a sort of memory which she made hallowed in a shorn soul. It was, for her, a single asceticism in a rather selfish life.

Hugo loved her for two weeks after that, and then his emotions wearied and he was able to see what she had done and why she did not answer his letters. His subdued fierceness was a vehement fire to women. His fiercer appetite was the cause of his early growth in a knowledge of them. When most of his companions were finding their way into the mysteries of sex both unhandily and with much turmoil, he learned well and abnormally. It became a part of his secret self. Another barrier to the level of the society that surrounded him. When he changed the name of Iris to Isis in his thoughts, he moved away from the Psi Deltas, who would have been incapable of the notion. In person he stayed among them, but in spirit he felt another difference, which he struggled to reconcile.

In March the thaws came, and under the warming sun Hugo made a deliberate attempt to fall in love with Janice, who was the daughter of his French professor. She was a happy, innocent little girl, with gold hair, and brown eyes that lived oddly beneath it. She worshipped Hugo. He petted her, talked through long evenings to her, tried to be faithful to her in his most unfettered dreams, and once considered proposing to her. When he found himself unable to do that, he was compelled to resist an impulse to seduce her. Ashamed, believing himself unfit for a nice girl, he untangled that romance as painlessly as he could, separating himself from Janice little by little and denying every accusation of waning interest.

Then for a month he believed that he could never be satisfied by any woman, that he was superior to women. He read the lives of great lovers and adulterers and he wished that he could see Bessie, who had taken his money long before in New York City. She appealed to him then more than all the others—probably, he thought, because he was drunk and had not viewed her in sharp perspective. For hours he meditated on women, while he longed constantly to possess a woman.

But the habitual routine of his life did not suffer. He attended his classes and lectures, played on the basketball team, tried tentatively to write for the campus newspaper, learned to perform indifferently on the mandolin, and made himself into the semblance of an ideal college man. His criticism of college then was at its lowest ebb. He spent Christmas in New York at Lefty Foresman's parents' elaborate home, slightly intoxicated through the two weeks, hastening to the opera, to balls and parties, ill at ease when presented to people whose names struck his ears familiarly, seeing for the first time the exaggeration of scale on which the very rich live and wondering constantly why he never met Iris, wishing for and fearing that meeting while he wondered.

When his first year at college was near to its end, and that still and respectful silence that marks the passing of a senior class had fallen over the campus, Hugo realized with a shock that he would soon be on his way back to Indian Creek. Then, suddenly, he saw what an amazing and splendid thing that year at college had been. He realized how it had filled his life to the brim with activities of which he had not dreamed, how it had shaped him so that he would be almost a stranger in his own home, how it had aged and educated him in the business of living. When the time of parting with his new friends drew near, he understood that they were valuable to him, in spite of his questioning. And they made it clear that he would be missed by them. At last he shared a feeling with his classmates, a fond sadness, an illimitable poignancy that was young and unadulterated by motive. He was perversely happy when he became aware of it. He felt somewhat justified for being himself and living his life.

A day or two before college closed, he received a letter from his father. It was the third he had received during the year. It said:

Dear Son—

Your mother and I have decided to break the news to you before you leave for home, because there may be better opportunities for you in the East than here at Indian Creek. When you went away to Webster University, I agreed to take care of all your expenses. It was the least I could do, I felt, for my only son. The two thousand dollars your mother and I had saved seemed ample for your four years. But the bills we have received, as well as your own demands, have been staggering. In March, when a scant six hundred dollars of the original fund remained, I invested the money in a mine stock which, the salesman said, would easily net the six thousand dollars you appeared to need. I now find to my chagrin that the stock is worthless. I am unable to get back my purchase money.

It will be impossible during the coming year for me to let you have more than five hundred dollars. Perhaps, with what you earn this summer and with the exercise of economy, you can get along. I trust so. But, anxious as we are to see you again, we felt that, in the light of such information, you might prefer to remain in the East to earn what you can.

We are both despondent over the situation and we wish that we could do more than tender our regrets. But we hope that you will be able to find some solution to this situation. Thus, with our very warmest affection and our fondest hope, we wish you good fortune.

Your loving father,

Abednego Danner.

Hugo read the letter down to the last period after the rather tremulous signature. His emotions were confused. Touched by the earnest and pathetically futile efforts of his father and by the attempt of that lonely little man to express what was, perhaps, a great affection, Hugo was nevertheless aghast at a prospect that he had not considered. He was going to be thrown into the world on his own resources. And, resting his frame in his worn chair—a frame capable of smashing into banks and taking the needed money without fear of punishment—Hugo began to wonder dismally if he was able even to support himself. No trade, no occupation, suggested itself. He had already experienced some of the merciless coldness of the world. The boys would all leave soon. And then he would be alone, unprovided for, helpless.

Hugo was frightened. He read the letter again, his wistful thoughts of his parents diminishing before the reality of his predicament. He counted his money. Eighty dollars in the bank and twelve in his pockets. He was glad he had started an account after his experience with Bessie. He was glad that he had husbanded more than enough to pay his fare to Indian Creek. Ninety-two dollars. He could live on that for a long time. Perhaps for the summer. And he would be able to get some sort of job. He was strong, anyway. That comforted him. He looked out of his window and tried to enumerate the things that he could do. All sorts of farm work. He could drive a team in the city. He could work on the docks. He considered nothing but manual labor. It would offer more. Gradually his fear that he would starve if left to his own devices ebbed from him, and it was replaced by grief that he could not return to Webster. Fourteen hundred dollars—that was the cost of his freshman year. He made a list of the things he could do without, of the work he could do to help himself through college. Perhaps he could return. The fear slowly diminished. He would be a working student in the year to come. He hated the idea. His fraternity had taken no members from that class of humble young men who rose at dawn and scrubbed floors and waited on tables to win the priceless gem of education. Lefty and Chuck would be chilly toward such a step. They would even offer him money to avoid it. It was a sad circumstance, at best.

When that period of tribulation passed, Hugo became a man. But he suffered keenly from his unwonted fears for some time. The calm and suave youth who had made love to Iris was buried beneath his frightened and imaginative adolescence. It wore out the last of his childishness. Immediately afterwards he learned about money and how it is earned. He sat there in the dormitory, almost trembling with uncertainty and used mighty efforts to do the things he felt he must do. He wrote a letter to his father which began: "Dear Dad—Why in Sam Hill didn't you tell me you were being reamed so badly by your nit-witted son and I'd have shovelled out and dug up some money for myself long ago?" On rereading that letter he realized that its tone was false. He wrote another in which he apologized with simple sincerity for the condition he had unknowingly created, and in which he expressed every confidence that he could take care of himself in the future.

He bore that braver front through the last days of school. He shook Lefty's hand warmly and looked fairly into his eyes. "Well, so long, old sock. Be good."

"Be good, Hugo. And don't weaken. We'll need all your beef next year. Decided what you're going to do yet?"

"No. Have you?"

Lefty shrugged. "I suppose I've got to go abroad with the family as usual. They wrote a dirty letter about the allowance I'd not have next year if I didn't. Why don't you come with us? Iris'll be there."

Hugo grinned. "No, sir! Iris once is very nice, but no man's equal to Iris twice." His grin became a chuckle. "And that's a poem which you can say to Iris if you see her—and tell her I hope it makes her mad."

Lefty's blue eyes sparkled with appreciation. Danner was a wonderful boy. Full of wit and not dumb like most of his kind. Getting smooth, too. Be a great man. Too bad to leave him—even for the summer. "Well—so long, old man."

Hugo watched Lefty lift his bags into a cab and roll away in the warm June dust. Then Chuck:

"Well—by-by, Hugo. See you next September."

"Yeah. Take care of yourself."

"No chance of your going abroad, is there? Because we sure could paint the old Avenue de l'Opéra red if you did."

"Not this year, Chuck."

"Well—don't take any wooden money."

"Don't do anything you wouldn't eat."

Hugo felt a lump in his throat. He could not say any more farewells. The campus was almost deserted. No meals would be served after the next day. He stared at the vacant dormitories and listened to the waning sound of departures. A train puffed and fumed at the station. It was filled with boys. Going away. He went to his room and packed. He'd leave, too. When his suit-cases were filled, he looked round the room with damp eyes. He thought that he was going to cry, mastered himself, and then did cry. Some time later he remembered Iris and stopped crying. He walked to the station, recalling his first journey in the other direction, his pinch-backed green suit, the trunk he had carried. Grand old place, Webster. Suddenly gone dead all over. There would be a train for New York in half an hour. He took it. Some of the students talked to him on the trip to the city. Then they left him, alone, in the great vacuum of the terminal. The glittering corridors were filled with people. He wondered if he could find Bessie's house.

At a restaurant he ate supper. When he emerged, it was dark. He asked his way, found a hotel, registered in a one-dollar room, went out on the street again. He walked to the Raven. Then he took a cab. He remembered Bessie's house. An old woman answered the door. "Bessie? Bessie? No girl by that name I remember."

Hugo described her. "Oh, that tart! She ran out on me—owin' a week's rent."

"When was that?"

"Some time last fall."

"Oh." Hugo meditated. The woman spoke again. "I did hear from one of my other girls that she'd gone to work at Coney, but I ain't had time to look her up. Owes me four dollars, she does. But Bessie, as you calls her—her name's Sue—wasn't never much good. Still—" the woman scrutinized Hugo and giggled—"Bessie ain't the only girl in the world. I got a cute little piece up here named Palmerlee says only the other night she's lonely. Glad to interdooce you."

Hugo thought of his small capital. "No, thanks."

He walked away. A warm moon was dimly sensible above the lights of the street. He decided to go to Coney Island and look for the lost Bessie. It would cost him only a dime, and she owed him money. He smiled a little savagely and thought that he would collect its equivalent. Then he boarded the subway, cursing himself for a fool and cursing his appetite for the fool's master. Why did he chase that particular little harlot on an evening when his mind should be bent toward more serious purposes? Certainly not because he had any intention of getting back his money. Because he wished to surprise her? Because he was angry that she had cheated him? Or because she was the only woman in New York whom he knew? He decided it was the last reason. Finally the train reached Coney Island, and Hugo descended into the fantastic hurly-burly on the street below. He realized the ridiculousness of his quest as he saw the miles of thronging people in the loud streets.

"See the fat woman, see Esmerelda, the beautiful fat woman, she weighs six hundred pounds, she's had a dozen lovers, she's the fattest woman in the world, a sensation, dressed in the robes of Cleopatra, robes that took a bolt of cloth; but she's so fat they conceal nothing, ladies and gentlemen, see the beautiful fat woman...." A roller coaster circled through the skies with a noise that was audible above the crowd's staccato voice and dashed itself at the earth below. A merry-go-round whirled goldenly and a band struck up a strident march. Hugo smelled stale beer and frying food. He heard the clang of a bell as a weight was driven up to it by the shoulders of a young gentleman in a pink shirt.

"The strongest man in the world, ladies and gentlemen, come in and see Thorndyke, the great professor of physical culture from Munich, Germany. He can bend a spike in his bare hands, an elephant can pass over his body without harming him, he can lift a weight of one ton...." Hugo laughed. Two girls saw him and brushed close. "Buy us a drink, sport."

The strongest man in the world. Hugo wondered what sort of strong man he would make. Perhaps he could go into competition with Dr. Thorndyke. He saw himself pictured in gaudy reds and yellows, holding up an enormous weight. He remembered that he was looking for Bessie. Then he saw another girl. She was sitting at a table, alone. That fact was significant. He sat beside her.

"Hello, tough," she said.

"Hello."

"Wanna buy me a beer?"

Hugo bought a beer and looked at the girl. Her hair was black and straight. Her mouth was straight. It was painted scarlet. Her eyes were hard and dark. But her body, as if to atone for her face, was made in a series of soft curves that fitted exquisitely into her black silk dress. He tortured himself looking at her. She permitted it sullenly. "You can buy me a sandwich, if you want. I ain't eaten to-day."

He bought a sandwich, wondering if she was telling the truth. She ate ravenously. He bought another and then a second glass of beer. After that she rose. "You can come with me if you wanna."

Odd. No conversation, no vivacity, only a dull submission that was not in keeping with her appearance.

"Have you had enough to eat?" he asked.

"It'll do," she responded.

They turned into a side street and moved away from the shimmering lights and the morass of people. Presently they entered a dingy frame house and went upstairs. There was no one in the hall, no furniture, only a flickering gas-light. She unlocked a door. "Come in."

He looked at her again. She took off her hat and arranged her dark hair so that it looped almost over one eye. Hugo wondered at her silence. "I didn't mean to rush," he said.

"Well, I did. Gotta make some more. It'll be"—she hesitated—"two bucks."

The girl sat down and wept. "Aw, hell," she said finally, looking at him with a shameless defiance, "I guess I'm gonna make a rotten tart. I was in a show, an' I got busted out for not bein' nice to the manager. I says to myself: 'Well, what am I gonna do?' An' I starts to get hungry this morning. So I says to myself: 'Well, there ain't but one thing to do, Charlotte, but to get you a room,' I says, an' here I am, so help me God."

She removed her dress with a sweeping motion. Hugo looked at her, filled with pity, filled with remorse at his sudden surrender to her passionate good looks, intensely discomfited.

"Listen. I have a roll in my pocket. I'm damn glad I came here first. I haven't got a job, but I'll get one in the morning. And I'll get you a decent room and stake you till you get work. God knows, I picked you up for what I thought you were, Charlotte, and God knows too that I haven't any noble nature. But I'm not going to let you go on the street simply because you're broke. Not when you hate it so much."

Charlotte shut her eyes tight and pressed out the last tears, which ran into her rouge and streaked it with mascara. "That's sure white of you."

"I don't know. Maybe it's selfish. I had an awful yen for you when I sat down at that table. But let's not worry about it now. Let's go out and get a decent dinner."

"You mean—you mean you want me to go out and eat—now?"

"Sure. Why not?"

"But you ain't—?"

"Forget it. Come on."

Charlotte sniffled and buried her black tresses in her black dress. She pulled it over the curves of her hips. She inspected herself in a spotted mirror and sniffled again. Then she laughed. A throaty, gurgling laugh. Her hands moved swiftly, and soon she turned. "How am I?"

"Wonderful."

"Let's go!"

She tucked her hand under his arm when they reached the street. Hugo walked silently. He wondered why he was doing it and to what it would lead. It seemed good, wholly good, to have a girl at his side again, especially a girl over whom he had so strong a claim. They stopped before a glass-fronted restaurant that advertised its sea food and its steaks. She sat down with an apologetic smile. "I'm afraid I'm goin' to eat you out of house and home."

"Go ahead. I had a big supper, but I'll string along with some pie and cheese and beer."

Charlotte studied the menu. "Mind if I have a little steak?"

Hugo shook his head slowly. "Waiter! A big T-bone, and some lyonnaise potatoes, and some string beans and corn and a salad and ice cream. Bring some pie and cheese for me—and a beer."

"Gosh!" Charlotte said.

Hugo watched her eat the food. He knew such pity as he had seldom felt. Poor little kid! All alone, scared, going on the street because she would starve otherwise. It made him feel strong and capable. Before the meal was finished, she was talking furiously. Her pathetic life was unravelled. "I come from Brooklyn ... old man took to drink, an' ma beat it with a gent from Astoria ... never knew what happened to her.... I kept house for the old man till he tried to get funny with me.... Burlesque ... on the road ... the leading man.... He flew the coop when I told him, and then when it came, it was dead...." Another job ... the manager ... Coney and her dismissal. "I just couldn't let 'em have it when I didn't like 'em, mister. Guess I'm not tough like the other girls. My mother was French and she brought me up kind of decent. Well...." The little outward turning of her hands, the shrug of her shoulders.

"Don't worry, Charlotte. I won't let them eat you. To-morrow I'll set you up to a decent room and we'll go out and find some jobs here."

"You don't have to do that, mister. I'll make out. All I needed was a square and another day."

Charlotte sighed and smoked a cigarette with her coffee. Then they went out on the street and mixed with the throng. The voices of a score of barkers wheedled them. Hugo began to feel gay. He took Charlotte to see the strong man and watched his feats with a critical eye. He took her on the roller coaster and became taut and laughing when she screamed and held him. Then, laughing louder than before, they went through Steeplechase. She fell in the rolling barrel and he carried her out. They crossed over moving staircases and lost themselves in a maze, and slid down polished chutes into fountains of light and excited screaming. Always, afterwards, her hand found his arm, her great dark eyes looked into his and laughed. Always they turned toward the other men and girls with a proud and haughty expression that pointed to Hugo as her man, her conquest. Later they danced. They drank more beer.

"Golly," she whispered, as she snuggled against him, "you sure strut a mean fox trot."

"So do you, Charlotte."

"I been doin' it a lot, I guess."

The brazen crash of a finale. The table. A babble of voices, voices of people snatching pleasure from Coney Island's gaudy barrel of cheap amusements. Hugo liked it then. He liked the smell and touch of the multitude and the incessant hysteria of its presence. After midnight the music became more aggravating—muted, insinuating. Several of the dancers were drunk. One of them tried to cut in. Hugo shook his head.

"Gee!" Charlotte said, "I was sure hopin' you wouldn't let him."

"Why—I never thought of it."

"Most fellows would. He's a tough."

It was an introduction to an unfamiliar world. The "tough" came to their table and asked for a dance in thick accents. Charlotte paled and accepted. Hugo refused. "Say, bo, I'm askin' for a dance. I got concessions here. You can't refuse me, see? I guess you got me wrong."

"Beat it," Hugo said, "before I take a poke at you."

The intruder's answer was a swinging fist, which missed Hugo by a wide margin. Hugo stood and dropped him with a single clean blow. The manager came up, expostulated, ordered the tough's inert form from the floor, started the music.

"You shouldn't ought to have done it, mister. He'll get his gang."

"The hell with his gang."

Charlotte sighed. "That's the first time anybody ever stuck up for me. Jeest, mister, I've been wishin' an' wishin' for the day when somebody would bruise his knuckles for me."

Hugo laughed. "Hey, waiter! Two beers."

When she yawned, he took her out to the boulevard and walked at her side toward the shabby house. They reached the steps, and Charlotte began to cry.

"What's the matter?"

"I was goin' to thank you, but I don't know how. It was too nice of you. An' now I suppose I'll never see you again."

"Don't be silly. I'll show up at eight in the morning and we'll have breakfast together."

Charlotte looked into his face wistfully. "Say, kid, be a good guy and take me to your hotel, will you? I'm scared I'll lose you."

He held her hands. "You won't lose me. And I haven't got a hotel—yet."

"Then—come up an' stay with me. Honest, I'm all right. I can prove it to you. It'll be doin' me a favor."

"I ought not to, Charlotte."

She threw her arms around him and kissed him. He felt her breath on his lips and the warmth of her body. "You gotta, kid. You're all I ever had. Please, please."

Hugo walked up the stairs thoughtfully. In her small room he watched her disrobe. So willingly now—so eagerly. She turned back the covers of the bed. "It ain't much of a dump, baby, but I'll make you like it."

Much later, in the abyss of darkness, he heard her voice, sleepy and still husky. "Say, mister, what's your name?"

In the morning they went down to the boulevard together. The gay débris of the night before lay in the street, and men were sweeping it away. But their spirits were high. They had breakfast together in a quiet enchantment. Once she kissed him.

"Would you like to keep house—for me?" he asked.

"Do you mean it?" She seemed to doubt every instant that good fortune had descended permanently upon her. She was like a dreamer who anticipated a sombre awakening even while he clung to the bliss of his dream.

"Sure, I mean it. I'll get a job and we'll find an apartment and you can spend your spare time swimming and lying on the beach." He knew a twinge of unexpected jealousy. "That is, if you'll promise not to look at all the men who are going to look at you." He was ashamed of that statement.

Charlotte, however, was not sufficiently civilized to be displeased. "Do you think I'd two-time the first gent that ever worried about what I did in my spare moments? Why, if you brought home a few bucks to most of the birds I know, they wouldn't even ask how you earned it—they'd be so busy lookin' for another girl an' a shot of gin."

"Well—let's go."

Hugo went to one of the largest side shows. After some questioning he found the manager. "I'm H. Smith," he said, "and I want to apply for a job."

"Doin' what?"

"This is my wife." The manager stared and nodded. Charlotte took his arm and rubbed it against herself, thinking, perhaps, that it was a wifely gesture. Hugo smiled inwardly and then looked at the sprawled form of the manager. There, to that seamy-faced and dour man who was almost unlike a human being, he was going to offer the first sale of his majestic strength. A side-show manager, sitting behind a dirty desk in a dirty building.

"A strong-man act," Hugo said.

Charlotte tittered. She thought that the bravado of her new friend was over-stepping the limits of good sense. The manager sat up. "I'd like to have a good strong man, yes. The show needs one. But you're not the bird. You haven't got the beef. Go over and watch that damned German work."

Hugo bent over and fastened one hand on the back of the chair on which the manager sat. Without evidence of effort he lifted the chair and its occupant high over his head.

"For Christ's sake, let me down," the manager said.

Hugo swung him through the air in a wide arc. "I say, mister, that I'm three times stronger than that German. And I want your job. If I don't look strong enough, I'll wear some padded tights. And I'll give you a show that'll be worth the admission. But I want a slice of the entrance price—and maybe a separate tent, see? My name is Hogarth"—he winked at Charlotte—"and you'll never be sorry you took me on."

The manager, panting and astonished, was returned to the floor. His anger struggled with his pleasure at Hugo's showmanship. "Well, what else can you do? Weight-lifting is pretty stale."

Hugo thought quickly. "I can bend a railroad rail—not a spike. I can lift a full-grown horse with one—one shoulder. I can chin myself on my little finger. I can set a bear trap with my teeth—"

"That's a good number."

"I can push up just twice as much weight as any one else in the game and you can print a challenge on my tent. I can pull a boa constrictor straight—"

"We'll give you a chance. Come around here at three this afternoon with your stuff and we'll try your act. Does this lady work in it? That'll help."

"Yes," Charlotte said.

Hugo nodded. "She's my assistant."

They left the building, and when she was sure they were out of earshot, Charlotte said: "What do you do, strong boy, fake 'em?"

"No. I do them."

"Aw—you don't need to kid me."

"I'm not. You saw me lift him, didn't you? Well—that was nothing."

"Jeest! That I should live to see the day I got a bird like you."

Until three o'clock Hugo and Charlotte occupied their time with feverish activity. They found a small apartment not far from the sea-shore. It was clean and bright and it had windows on two sides. Its furniture was nearly new, and Charlotte, with tears in her eyes, sat in all the chairs, lay on the bed, took the egg-beater from the drawer in the kitchen table and spun it in an empty bowl. They went out together and bought a quantity and a variety of food. They ate an early luncheon and Hugo set out to gather the properties for his demonstration. At three o'clock, before a dozen men, he gave an exhibition of strength the like of which had never been seen in any museum of human abnormalities.

When he went back to his apartment, Charlotte, in a gingham dress which she had bought with part of the money he had given her, was preparing dinner. He took her on his lap. "Did you get the job?"

"Sure I did. Fifty a week and ten per cent of the gate receipts."

"Gee! That's a lot of money!"

Hugo nodded and kissed her. He was very happy. Happier, in a certain way, than he had ever been or ever would be again. His livelihood was assured. He was going to live with a woman, to have one always near to love and to share his life. It was that concept of companionship, above all other things, which made him glad.

Two days later, as Hugo worked to prepare the vehicles of his exhibition, he heard an altercation outside the tent that had been erected for him. A voice said: "Whatcha tryin' to do there, anyhow?"

"Why, I was making this strong man as I saw him. A man with the expression of strength in his face."

"But you gotta bat' robe on him. What we want is muscles. Muscles, bo. Bigger an' better than any picture of any strong man ever made. Put one here—an' one there—"

"But that isn't correct anatomy."

"To hell wit' that stuff. Put one there, I says."

"But he'll be out of drawing, awkward, absurd."

"Say, listen, do you want ten bucks for painting this sign or shall I give it to some one else?"

"Very well. I'll do as you say. Only—it isn't right."

Hugo walked out of the tent. A young man was bending over a huge sheet made of many lengths of oilcloth sewn together. He was a small person, with pale eyes and a white skin. Beside him stood the manager, eyeing critically the strokes applied to the cloth. In a semi-finished state was the young man's picture of the imaginary Hogarth.

"That's pretty good," Hugo said.

The young man smiled apologetically. "It isn't quite right. You can see for yourself you have no muscles there—and there. I suppose you're Hogarth?"

"Yes."

"Well—I tried to explain the anatomy of it, but Mr. Smoots says anatomy doesn't matter. So here we go." He made a broad orange streak.

Hugo smiled. "Smoots is not an anatomical critic of any renown. I say, Smoots, let him paint it as he sees best. God knows the other posters are atrocious enough."

The youth looked up from his work. "Good God, don't tell me you're really Hogarth!"

"Sure. Why not?"

"Well—well—I—I guess it was your English."

"That's funny. And I don't blame you." Hugo realized that the young sign-painter was a person of some culture. He was about Hugo's age, although he seemed younger on first glance. "As a matter of fact, I'm a college man." Smoots had moved away. "But, for the love of God, don't tell any one around here."

The painter stopped. "Is that so! And you're doing this—to make money?"

"Yes."

"Well, I'll be doggoned. Me, too. I study at the School of Design in the winter, and in the summer I come out here to do signs and lightning portraits and whatever else I can to make the money for it. Sometimes," he added, "I pick up more than a thousand bucks in a season. This is my fourth year at it."

There was in the young artist's eye a hint of amusement, a suggestion that they were in league. Hugo liked him. He sat down on a box. "Live here?"

"Yes. Three blocks away."

"Me, too. Why not come up and have supper with—my wife and me?"

"Are you married?" The artist commenced work again.

Hugo hesitated. "Yeah."

"Sure I'll come up. My name's Valentine Mitchel. I can't shake hands just now. It's been a long time since I've talked to any one who doesn't say 'deez' and 'doze.'"

When, later in the day, they walked toward Hugo's home, he was at a loss to explain Charlotte. The young painter would not understand why he, a college man, chose so ignorant a mate. On the other hand, he owed it to Charlotte to keep their secret and he was not obliged to make any explanation.

Valentine Mitchel was, however, a young man of some sensitivity. If he winced at Charlotte's "Pleased to meetcher," he did not show it. Later, after an excellent and hilarious meal, he must have guessed the situation. He went home reluctantly and Hugo was delighted with him. He had been urbane and filled with anecdotes of Greenwich Village and art-school life, of Paris, whither his struggling footsteps had taken him for a hallowed year. And with his acceptance of Hugo came an equally warm pleasure in Charlotte's company.

"He's a good little kid," Charlotte said.

"Yes. I'm glad I picked him up."

The gala opening of Hogarth's Studio of Strength took place a few nights afterwards. It proved even more successful than Smoots had hoped. The flamboyant advertising posters attracted crowds to see the man who could set a bear trap with his teeth, who could pull an angry boa constrictor into a straight line. Before ranks of gaping faces that were supplanted by new ranks every hour, Hugo performed. Charlotte, resplendent in a black dress that left her knees bare, and a red sash that all but obliterated the dress, helped Hugo with his ponderous props, setting off his strength by contrast, and sold the pamphlets Hugo had written at Smoots's suggestion—pamphlets that purported to give away the secret of Hogarth's phenomenal muscle power. Valentine Mitchel watched the entire performance.

When it was over, he said to Hugo: "Now you better beat it back and get a hot bath. You're probably all in."

"Yes," Charlotte said. "Come. I myself will bathe you."

Hugo grinned. "Hell, no. Now we're all going on a bender to celebrate. We'll eat at Villapigue's and we'll take a moonlight sail."

They went together, marvelling at his vitality, gay, young, and living in a world that they managed to forget did not exist. The night was warm. The days that followed were warmer. The crowds came and the brassy music hooted and coughed over them night and day.

There are, in the lives of almost every man and woman, certain brief episodes that, enduring for a long or a short time, leave in the memory a sense of completeness. To those moments humanity returns for refuge, for courage, and for solace. It was of such material that Hugo's next two months were composed. The items of it were nearly all sensuous: the sound of the sea when he sat in the sand late at night with Charlotte; the whoop and bellow of the merry-go-round that spun and glittered across the street from his tent; the inarticulate breathing and the white-knuckled clenchings of the crowd as it lifted its face to his efforts, for each of which he assumed a slow, painful motion that exaggerated its difficulty; the smell of the sea, intermingled with a thousand man-made odors; the faint, pervasive scent of Charlotte that clung to him, his clothes, his house; the pageant of the people, always in a huge parade, going nowhere, celebrating nothing but the functions of living, loud, garish, cheap, splendid; breakfasts at his table with his woman's voluptuousness abated in the bright sunlight to little more than a reminiscence and a promise; the taste of beer and pop-corn and frankfurters and lobster and steak; the affable, talkative company of Valentine Mitchel.

Only once that he could recall afterwards did he allow his intellect to act in any critical direction, and that was in a conversation with the young artist. They were sitting together in the sand, and Charlotte, browned by weeks of bathing, lay near by. "Here I am," Mitchel said with an unusual thoughtfulness, "with a talent that should be recognized, wanting to be an illustrator, able to be one, and yet forced to dawdle with this horrible business to make my living."

Hugo nodded. "You'll come through—some winter—and you won't ever return to Coney Island."

"I know it. Unless I do it for sentimental reasons some day—in a limousine."

"It's myself," Hugo said then, "and not you who is doomed to—well, to this sort of thing. You have a talent that is at least understandable and—" he was going to say mediocre. He checked himself—"applicable in the world of human affairs. My talent—if it is a talent—has no place, no application, no audience."

Mitchel stared at Hugo, wondering first what that talent might be and then recognizing that Hugo meant his strength. "Nonsense. Any male in his right senses would give all his wits to be as strong as you are."

It was a polite, friendly thing to say. Hugo could not refrain from comparing himself to Valentine Mitchel. An artist—a clever artist and one who would some day be important to the world. Because people could understand what he drew, because it represented a level of thought and expression. He was, like Hugo, in the doldrums of progress. But Mitchel would emerge, succeed, be happy—or at least satisfied with himself—while Hugo was bound to silence, was compelled never to allow himself full expression. Humanity would never accept and understand him. They were not similar people, but their case was, at that instant, ironically parallel. "It isn't only being strong," he answered meditatively, "but it's knowing what to do with your strength."

"Why—there are a thousand things to do."

"Such as?"

Mitchel raised himself on his elbows and turned his water-coloured eyes on the populous beach. "Well—well—let's see. You could, of course, be a strong man and amuse people—which you're doing. You could—oh, there are lots of things you could do."

Hugo smiled. "I've been thinking about them—for years. And I can't discover any that are worth the effort."

"Bosh!"

Charlotte moved close to him. "There's one thing you can do, honey, and that's enough for me."

"I wonder," Hugo said with a seriousness the other two did not perceive.

The increased heat of August suggested by its very intensity a shortness of duration, an end of summer. Hugo began to wonder what he would do with Charlotte when he went back to Webster. He worried about her a good deal and she, guessing the subject of his frequent fits of silence, made a resolve in her tough and worldly mind. She had learned more about certain facets of Hugo than he knew himself. She realized that he was superior to her and that, in almost any other place than Coney Island, she would be a liability to him. The thought that he would have to desert her made Hugo very miserable. He knew that he would miss Charlotte and he knew that the blow to her might spell disaster. After all, he thought, he had not improved her morals or raised her vision. He did not realize that he had made both almost sublime by the mere act of being considerate. "White," Charlotte called it.

Nevertheless she was not without an intense sense of self-protection, despite her condition on the night he had found her. She knew that womankind lived at the expense of mankind. She saw the emotional respect in which Valentine Mitchel unwittingly held Hugo. He had scarcely spoken ten serious words to her. She realized that the artist saw her as a property of his friend. That, in a way, made her valuable. It was a subtle advantage, which she pressed with all the skill it required. One night when Hugo was at work and the chill of autumn had breathed on the hot shore, she told Valentine that he was a very nice boy and that she liked him very much. He went away distraught, which was what she had intended, and he carried with him a new and as yet inarticulate idea, which was what she had foreseen.

He believed that he loved her. He told himself that Hugo was going to desert her, that she would be forsaken and alone. At that point, she recited to him the story of her life and the tale of her rescue by Hugo and said at the end that she would be very lonely when Hugo was gone. Because Hugo had loved her, Mitchel thought she contained depths and values which did not appear. That she contained such depths neither man really knew then. Both of them learned it much later. Mitchel found himself in that very artistic dilemma of being in love with his friend's mistress. It terrified his romantic soul and it involved him inextricably.

When she felt that the situation had ripened to the point of action, she waited for the precise moment. It came swiftly and in a better guise than she had hoped. On a night in early September, when the crowds had thinned a little, Hugo was just buckling himself into the harness that lifted the horse. The spectators were waiting for the dénouement with bickering patience. Charlotte was standing on the platform, watching him with expressionless eyes. She knew that soon she would not see Hugo any more. She knew that he was tired of his small show, that he was chafing to be gone; and she knew that his loyalty to her would never let him go unless it was made inevitable by her. The horse was ready. She watched the muscles start out beneath Hugo's tawny skin. She saw his lips set, his head thrust back. She worshipped him like that. Unemotionally, she saw the horse lifted up from the floor. She heard the applause. There was a bustle at the gate.

Half a dozen people entered in single file. Three young men. Three girls. They were intoxicated. They laughed and spoke in loud voices. She saw by their clothes and their manner that they were rich. Slumming in Coney Island. She smiled at the young men as she had always smiled at such young men, friendlily, impersonally. Hugo did not see their entrance. They came very near.

"My God, it's Hugo Danner!"

Hugo heard Lefty's voice and recognized it. The horse was dropped to the floor. He turned. An expression of startled amazement crossed his features. Chuck, Lefty, Iris, and three people whom he did not know were staring at him. He saw the stupefied recognition on the faces of his friends. One despairing glance he cast at Charlotte and then he went on with his act.

They waited for him until it was over. They clasped him to their bosoms. They acknowledged Charlotte with critical glances. "Come on and join the party," they said.

After that, their silence was worse than any questions. They talked freely and merrily enough, but behind their words was a deep reserve. Lefty broke it when he had an opportunity to take Hugo aside. "What in hell is eating you? Aren't you coming back to Webster?"

"Sure. That is—I think so. I had to do this to make some money. Just about the time school closed, my family went broke."

"But, good God, man, why didn't you tell us? My father is an alumnus and he'd put up five thousand a year, if necessary, to see you kept on the football team."

Hugo laughed. "You don't think I'd take it, Lefty?"

"Why not?" A pause. "No, I suppose you'd be just the God-damned kind of a fool that wouldn't. Who's the girl?"

Hugo did not falter. "She's a tart I've been living with. I never knew a better one—girl, that is."

"Have you gone crazy?"

"On the contrary, I've got wise."

"Well, for Christ's sake, don't say anything about it on the campus."

Hugo bit his lip. "Don't worry. My business is—my own."

They joined the others, drinking at the table. Charlotte was telling a joke. It was not a nice joke. He had not thought of her jokes before—because Iris and Chuck and Lefty had not been listening to them. Now, he was embarrassed. Iris asked him to dance with her. They went out on the floor.

"Lovely little thing, that Charlotte," she said acidly.

"Isn't she!" Hugo answered with such enthusiasm that she did not speak during the rest of the dance.

Finally the ordeal ended. Lefty and his guests embarked in an automobile for the city.

"You know such people," Charlotte half-whispered. Hugo's cheeks still flamed, but his heart bled for her.

"I guess they aren't much," he replied.

She answered hotly: "Don't you be like that! They're nice people. They're fine people. That Iris even asked me to her house. Gave me a card to see her." Charlotte could guess what Iris wanted. So could Hugo. But Charlotte pretended to be innocent.

He kissed Charlotte good-night and walked in the streets until morning. Hugo could see no solution. Charlotte was so trusting, so good to him. He could not imagine how she would receive any suggestion that she go to New York and get a job, while he returned to college, that he see her during vacations, that he send money to her. But he knew that a hot fire dwelt within her and that her fury would rise, her grief, and that he would be made very miserable and ashamed. She chided him at breakfast for his walk in the dark. She laughed and kissed him and pushed him bodily to his work. He looked back as he walked down to the curb. She was leaning out of the window. She waved her hand. He rounded the corner with wretched, leaden steps. The morning, concerned with the petty business of receipts, refurbishings, cleaning, went slowly. When he returned for lunch it was with the decision to tell her the truth about his life and its requirements and to let her decide.

She did not come to the door to kiss him. (She had imagined that lonely return.) She did not answer his brave and cheerful hail. (She had let the sound of it ring upon her ear a thousand times.) She was gone. (She knew he would sit down and cry.) Then, stumbling, he found the two notes. But he already understood.

The message from Valentine Mitchel was reckless, impetuous. "Dear Hugo—Charlotte and I have fallen in love with each other and I've run away with her. I almost wish you'd come after us and kill me. I hate myself for betraying you. But I love her, so I cannot help it. I've learned to see in her what you first saw in her. Good-bye, good luck."

Hugo put it down. Charlotte would be good to him. In a way, he didn't deserve her. And when he was famous, some day, perhaps she would leave him, too. He hesitated to read her note. "Good-bye, darling, I do not love you any more. C."

It was ludicrous, transparent, pitiful, and heroic. Hugo saw all those qualities. "Good-bye, darling, I do not love you any more." She had written it under Valentine's eyes. But she was shrewd enough to placate her new lover while she told her sad little story to her old. She would want him to feel bad. Well, God knew, he did. Hugo looked at the room. He sobbed. He bolted into the street, tears streaming down his cheeks; he drew his savings from the bank—seven hundred and eighty-four dollars and sixty-four cents; he rushed to the haunted house, flung his clothes into a bag; he sat drearily on a subway for an hour. He paced the smooth floor of a station. He swung aboard a train. He came to Webster, his head high, feeling a great pride in Charlotte and in his love for her, walking in glad strides over the familiar soil.

IX

Hugo sat alone and marvelled at the exquisite torment of his Weltschmertz. Far away, across the campus, he heard singing. Against the square segment of sky visible from the bay window of his room he could see the light of the great fire they had built to celebrate victory—his victory. The light leaped into the darkness above like a great golden ghost in some fantastic ascension, and beneath it, he knew, a thousand students were dancing. They were druid priests at a rite to the god of football. His fingers struggled through his black hair. The day was fresh in his mind—the bellowing stands, the taut, almost frightened faces of the eleven men who faced him, the smack and flight of the brown oval, the lumbering sound of men running, the sucking of the breath of men and their sharp, painful fall to earth.

In his mind was a sharp picture of himself and the eyes that watched him as he broke away time and again, with infantile ease, to carry that precious ball. He let them make a touchdown that he could have averted. He made one himself. Then another. The bell on Webster Hall was booming its pæan of victory. He stiffened under the steady monody. He remembered again. Lefty barking signals with a strange agony in his voice. Lefty pounding on his shoulder. "Go in there, Hugo, and give it to them. I can't." Lefty pleading. And the captain, Jerry Painter, cursing in open jealousy of Hugo, vying hopelessly with Hugo Danner, the man who was a god.

It was not fair. Not right. The old and early glory was ebbing from it. When he put down the ball, safely across the goal for the winning touchdown, he saw three of the men on the opposing team lie down and weep. There he stood, pretending to pant, feigning physical distress, making himself a hero at the expense of innocent victims. Jackstraws for a giant. There was no triumph in that. He could not go on.

Afterwards they had made him speak, and the breathless words that had once come so easily moved heavily through his mind. Yet he had carried his advantage beyond the point of turning back. He could not say that the opponents of Webster might as well attempt to hold back a Juggernaut, to throw down a siege-gun, to outrace light, as to lay their hands on him to check his intent. Webster had been good to him. He loved Webster and it deserved his best. His best! He peered again into the celebrating night and wondered what that awful best would be.

He desired passionately to be able to give that—to cover the earth, making men glad and bringing a revolution into their lives, to work himself into a fury and to fatigue his incredible sinews, to end with the feeling of a race well run, a task nobly executed. And, for a year, that ambition had seemed in some small way to be approaching fruition. Now it was turned to ashes. It was not with the muscles of men that his goal was to be attained. They could not oppose him.

As he sat gloomy and distressed, he wondered for what reason there burned in him that wish to do great deeds. Humanity itself was too selfish and too ignorant to care. It could boil in its tiny prejudices for centuries to come and never know that there could be a difference. Moreover, who was he to grind his soul and beat his thoughts for the benefit of people who would never know and never care? What honour, when he was dead, to lie beneath a slab on which was punily graven some note of mighty accomplishment? Why could he not content himself with the food he ate, the sunshine, with wind in trees, and cold water, and a woman? It was that sad and silly command within to transcend his vegetable self that made him human. He tried to think about it bitterly: fool man, grown suddenly more conscious than the other beasts—how quickly he had become vain because of it and how that vanity led him forever onward! Or was it vanity—when his aching soul proclaimed that he would gladly achieve and die without other recognition or acclaim than that which rose within himself? Martyrs were made of such stuff. And was not that, perhaps, an even more exaggerated vanity? It was so pitiful to be a man and nothing more. Hugo bowed his head and let his body tremble with strange agony. Perhaps, he thought, even the agony was a selfish pleasure to him. Then he should be ashamed. He felt shame and then thought that the feeling rose from a wish for it and foundered angrily in the confusion of his introspection. He knew only and knew but dimly that he would lift himself up again and go on, searching for some universal foe to match against his strength. So pitiful to be a man! So Christ must have felt in Gethsemane.

"Hey, Hugo!"

"Yeah?"

"What the hell did you come over here for?"

"To be alone."

"Is that a hint?" Lefty entered the room. "They want you over at the bonfire. We've been looking all over for you."

"All right. I'll go. But, honest to God, I've had enough of this business for to-day."

Lefty slapped Hugo's shoulders. "The great must pay for their celebrity. Come on, you sap."

"All right."

"What's the matter? Anything the matter?"

"No. Nothing's the matter. Only—it's sort of sad to be—" Hugo checked himself.

"Sad? Good God, man, you're going stale."

"Maybe that's it." Hugo had a sudden fancy. "Do you suppose I could be let out of next week's game?"

"What for? My God—"

Hugo pursued the idea. "It's the last game. I can sit on the lines. You fellows all play good ball. You can probably win. If you can't—then I'll play. If you only knew, Lefty, how tired I get sometimes—"

"Tired! Why don't you say something about it? You can lay off practice for three or four days."

"Not that. Tired in the head, not the body. Tired of crashing through and always getting away with it. Oh, I'm not conceited. But I know they can't stop me. You know it. It's a gift of mine—and a curse. How about it? Let's start next week without me."

The night ended at last. A new day came. The bell on Webster Hall stopped booming. Woodie, the coach, came to see Hugo between classes. "Lefty says you want us to start without you next week. What's the big idea?"

"I don't know. I thought the other birds would like a shot at Yale without me. They can do it."

Mr. Woodman eyed his player. "That's pretty generous of you, Hugo. Is there any other reason?"

"Not—that I can explain."

"I see." The coach offered Hugo a cigarette after he had helped himself. "Take it. It'll do you good."

"Thanks."

"Listen, Hugo. I want to ask you a question. But, first, I want you to promise you'll give me a plain answer."

"I'll try."

"That won't do."

"Well—I can't promise."

Woodman sighed. "I'll ask it anyway. You can answer or not—just as you wish." He was silent. He inhaled his cigarette and blew the smoke through his nostrils. His eyes rested on Hugo with an expression of intense interest, beneath which was a softer light of something not unlike sympathy. "I'll have to tell you something, first, Hugo. When you went away last summer, I took a trip to Colorado."

Hugo started, and Woodman continued: "To Indian Creek. I met your father and your mother. I told them that I knew you. I did my best to gain their confidence. You see, Hugo, I've watched you with a more skilful eye than most people. I've seen you do things, a few little things, that weren't—well—that weren't—"

Hugo's throat was dry. "Natural?"

"That's the best word, I guess. You were never like my other boys, in any case. So I thought I'd find out what I could. I must admit that my efforts with your father were a failure. Aside from the fact that he is an able biology teacher and that he had a number of queer theories years ago, I learned nothing. But I did find out what those theories were. Do you want me to stop?"

A peculiar, almost hopeful expression was on Hugo's face. "No," he answered.

"Well, they had to do with the biochemistry of cellular structure, didn't they? And with the production of energy in cells? And then—I talked to lots of people. I heard about Samson."

"Samson!" Hugo echoed, as if the dead had spoken.

"Samson—the cat."

Hugo was as pale as chalk. His eyes burned darkly. He felt that his universe was slipping from beneath him. "You know, then," he said.

"I don't know, Hugo. I merely guessed. I was going to ask. Now I shall not. Perhaps I do know. But I had another question, son—"

"Yes?" Hugo looked at Woodman and felt then the reason for his success as a coach, as a leader and master of youth. He understood it.

"Well, I wondered if you thought it was worth while to talk to your father and discover—"

"What he did?" Hugo suggested hoarsely.

Woodman put his hand on Hugo's knee. "What he did, son. You ought to know by this time what it means. I've been watching you. I don't want your head to swell, but you're a great boy, Hugo. Not only in beef. You have a brain and an imagination and a sense of moral responsibility. You'll come out better than the rest—you would even without your—your particular talent. And I thought you might think that the rest of humanity would profit—"

Hugo jumped to his feet. "No. A thousand times no. For the love of Christ—no! You don't know or understand, you can't conceive, Woodie, what it means to have it. You don't have the faintest idea of its amount—what it tempts you with—what they did to me and I did to myself to beat it—if I have beaten it." He laughed. "Listen, Woodie. Anything I want is mine. Anything I desire I can take. No one can hinder. And sometimes I sweat all night for fear some day I shall lose my temper. There's a desire in me to break and destroy and wreck that—oh, hell—"

Woodman waited. Then he spoke quietly. "You're sure, Hugo, that the desire to be the only one—like that—has nothing to do with it?"

Hugo's sole response was to look into Woodman's eyes, a look so pregnant with meaning, so tortured, so humble, that the coach swore softly. Then he held out his hand. "Well, Hugo, that's all. You've been damn swell about it. The way I hoped you would be. And I think my answer is plain. One thing. As long as I live, I promise on my oath I'll never give you away or support any rumour that hurts your secret."

Even Hugo was stirred to a consciousness of the strength of the other man's grip.

Saturday. A shrill whistle. The thump of leather against leather. The roar of the stadium.

Hugo leaned forward. He watched his fellows from the bench. They rushed across the field. Lefty caught the ball. Eddie Carter interfered with the first man, Bimbo Gaines with the second. The third slammed Lefty against the earth. Three downs. Eight yards. A kick. New Haven brought the ball to its twenty-one-yard line. The men in helmets formed again. A coughing voice. Pandemonium. Again in line. The voice. The riot of figures suddenly still. Again. A kick. Lefty with the ball, and Bimbo Gaines leading him, his big body a shield. Down. A break and a run for twenty-eight yards. Must have been Chuck. Good old Chuck. He'd be playing the game of his life. Graduation next spring. Four, seven, eleven, thirty-two, fifty-five. Hugo anticipated the spreading of the players. He looked where the ball would be thrown. He watched Minton, the end, spring forward, saw him falter, saw the opposing quarterback run in, saw Lefty thrown, saw the ball received by the enemy and moved up, saw the opposing back spilled nastily. His heart beat faster.

No score at the end of the first half. The third quarter witnessed the crossing of Webster's goal. Struggling grimly, gamely, against a team that was their superior without Hugo, against a team heartened by the knowledge that Hugo was not facing it, Webster's players were being beaten. The goal was not kicked. It made the score six to nothing against Webster. Hugo saw the captain rip off his headgear and throw it angrily on the ground. He understood all that was going on in the minds of his team in a clear, although remote, way. They went out to show that they could play the game without Hugo Danner. And they were not showing what they had hoped to show. A few minutes later their opponents made a second touchdown.

Thirteen to nothing. Mr. Woodman moved beside Hugo. "They can't do it—and I don't altogether blame them. They've depended on you too much. It's too bad. We all have."

Hugo nodded. "Shall I go in?"

The coach watched the next play. "I guess you better."

When Hugo entered the line, Jerry Painter and Lefty spoke to him in strained tones. "You've got to take it over, Hugo—all the way."

"All right."

The men lined up. A tense silence had fallen on the Yale line. They knew what was going to happen. The signals were called, the ball shot back to Lefty, Hugo began to run, the men in front rushed together, and Lefty stuffed the ball into Hugo's arms. "Go on," he shouted. The touchdown was made in one play. Hugo saw a narrow hole and scooted into it. A man met his outstretched arm on the other side. Another. Hugo dodged twice. The crescendo roar of the Webster section came to him dimly. He avoided the safety man and ran to the goal. In the pandemonium afterwards, Jerry kicked the goal.

A new kick-off. Hugo felt a hand on his shoulder. "You've gotta break this up." Hugo broke it up. He held Yale almost single-handed. They kicked back. Hugo returned the kick to the middle of the field. He did not dare to do more.

Then he stood in his leather helmet, bent, alert, waiting to run again. They called the captain's signal. He made four yards. Then Lefty's. He made a first down. Then Jerry's. Two yards. Six yards. Five yards. Another first down. The stands were insane. Hugo was glad they were not using him—glad until he saw Jerry Painter's face. It was pale with rage. Blood trickled across it from a small cut. Three tries failed. Hugo spoke to him. "I'll take it over, Jerry, if you say so."

Jerry doubled his fist and would have struck him if Hugo had not stepped back. "God damn you, Danner, you come out here in the last few minutes all fresh and make us look like a lot of fools. I tell you, my team and I will take that ball across and not you with your bastard tricks."

"But, good God, man—"

"You heard me."

"This is your last down."

There was time for nothing more. Lefty called Jerry's signal, and Jerry failed. The other team took the ball, rushed it twice, and kicked back into the Webster territory. Again the tired, dogged players began a march forward. The ball was not given to Hugo. He did his best, using his body as a ram to open holes in the line, tripping tacklers with his body, fighting within the limits of an appearance of human strength to get his teammates through to victory. And Jerry, still pale and profane, drove the men like slaves. It was useless. If Hugo had dared more, they might have succeeded. But they lost the ball again. It was only in the last few seconds that an exhausted and victorious team relinquished the ball to Webster.

Jerry ordered his own number again. Hugo, cold and somewhat furious at the vanity and injustice of the performance, gritted his teeth. "How about letting me try, Jerry? I can make it. It's for Webster—not for you."

"You go to hell."

Lefty said: "You're out of your head, Jerry."

"I said I'd take it."

For one instant Hugo looked into his eyes. And in that instant the captain saw a dark and flickering fury that filled him with fear. The whistle blew. And then Hugo, to his astonishment, heard his signal. Lefty was disobeying the captain. He felt the ball in his arms. He ran smoothly. Suddenly he saw a dark shadow in the air. The captain hit him on the jaw with all his strength. After that, Hugo did not think lucidly. He was momentarily berserk. He ran into the line raging and upset it like a row of tenpins. He raced into the open. A single man, thirty yards away, stood between him and the goal. The man drew near in an instant. Hugo doubled his arm to slug him. He felt the arm straighten, relented too late, and heard, above the chaos that was loose, a sudden, dreadful snap. The man's head flew back and he dropped. Hugo ran across the goal. The gun stopped the game. But, before the avalanche fell upon him, Hugo saw his victim lying motionless on the field. What followed was nightmare. The singing and the cheering. The parade. The smashing of the goal posts. The gradual descent of silence. A pause. A shudder. He realized that he had been let down from the shoulders of the students. He saw Woodman, waving his hands, his face a graven mask. The men met in the midst of that turbulence.

"You killed him, Hugo."

The earth spun and rocked slowly. He was paying his first price for losing his temper. "Killed him?"

"His neck was broken-in three places."

Some of the others heard. They walked away. Presently Hugo was standing alone on the cinders outside the stadium. Lefty came up. "I just heard about it. Tough luck. But don't let it break you."

Hugo did not answer. He knew that he was guilty of a sort of murder. In his own eyes it was murder. He had given away for one red moment to the leaping, lusting urge to smash the world. And killed a man. They would never accuse him. They would never talk about it. Only Woodman, perhaps, would guess the thing behind the murder—the demon inside Hugo that was tame, except then, when his captain in jealous and inferior rage had struck him.

It was night. Out of deference to the body of the boy lying in the Webster chapel there was no celebration. Every ounce of glory and joy had been drained from the victory. The students left Hugo to a solitude that was more awful than a thousand scornful tongues. They thought he would feel as they would feel about such an accident. They gave him respect when he needed counsel. As he sat by himself, he thought that he should tell them the truth, all of them, confess a crime and accept the punishment. Hours passed. At midnight Woodman called.

"There isn't much to say, Hugo. I'm sorry, you're sorry, we're all sorry. But it occurred to me that you might do something foolish—tell these people all about it, for example."

"I was going to."

"Don't. They'd never understand. You'd be involved in a legal war that would undoubtedly end in your acquittal. But it would drag in all your friends—and your mother and father—particularly him. The papers would go wild. You might, on the other hand, be executed as a menace. You can't tell."

"It might be a good thing," Hugo answered bitterly.

"Don't let me hear you say that, you fool! I tell you, Hugo, if you go into that business, I'll get up on the stand and say I knew it all the time and I let a man play on my team when I was pretty sure that sooner or later he'd kill someone. Then I'll go to jail surely."

"You're a pretty fine man, Mr. Woodman."

"Hell!"

"What shall I do?" Hugo's voice trembled. He suffered as he had not dreamed it was possible to suffer.

"That's up to you. I'd say, live it down."

"Live it down! Do you know what that means—in a college?"

"Yes, I think I do, Hugo."

"You can live down almost anything, except that one thing—murder. It's too ugly, Woodie."

"Maybe. Maybe. You've got to decide, son. If you decide against trying—and, mind you, you might be justified—I've got a brother-in-law who has a ranch in Alberta. A couple of hundred miles from any place. You'd be welcome there."

Hugo did not reply. He took the coach's hand and wrung it. Then for an hour the two men sat side by side in the darkness. At last Woodman rose and left. He said only: "Remember that offer. It's cold and bleak and the work is hard. Good-night, Hugo."

"Good-night, Woodie. Thanks for coming up."

When the campus was still with the quiet of sleep, Hugo crossed it as swiftly as a spectre. All night he strode remorselessly over country roads. His face was set. His eyes burned. He ignored the trembling of his joints. When the sky faded, he went back. He packed his clothes in two suit-cases. With them swinging at his side, he stole out of the Psi Delta house, crossed the campus, stopped. For a long instant he stared at Webster Hall. The first light of morning was just touching it. The débris collected for a fire that was never lighted was strewn around the cannon. He saw the initials he had painted there a year and more ago still faintly legible. A lump rose in his throat.

"Good-by, Webster," he said. He lifted the suitcase and vanished. In a few minutes the campus was five miles behind him—six—ten—twenty. When he saw the first early caravan of produce headed toward the market, he slowed to a walk. The sun came over a hill and sparkled on a billion drops of dew. A bird flew singing from his path. Hugo Danner had fled beyond the gates of Webster.

X

A year passed. In the harbour of Cristobal, at the northern end of the locks, waiting for the day to open the great steel jaws that dammed the Pacific from the Atlantic, the Katrina pulled at her anchor chain in the gentle swell. A few stars, liquid bright, hung in the tropical sky. A little puff of wind coming occasionally from the south carried the smell of the jungle to the ship. The crew was awakening.

A man with a bucket on a rope went to the rail and hauled up a brimming pail from the warm sea. He splashed his face and hands into it. Then he poured it back and repeated the act of dipping up water.

"Hey!" he said.

Another man joined him. "Here. Swab off your sweat. Look yonder."

The dorsal fin of a shark rippled momentarily on the surface and dipped beneath it. A third man appeared. He accepted the proffered water and washed himself. His roving eye saw the shark as it rose for the second time. He dried on a towel. The off-shore breeze stirred his dark hair. There was a growth of equally dark beard on his tanned jaw and cheek. Steely muscles bulged under his shirt. His forearm, when he picked up the pail, was corded like cable. A smell of coffee issued from the galley, and the smoke of the cook's fire was wafted on deck for a pungent moment. Two bells sounded. The music went out over the water in clear, humming waves.

The man who had come first from the forecastle leaned his buttocks against the rail. One end of it had been unhooked to permit the discharge of mail. The rail ran, the man fell back, clawing, and then, thinking suddenly of the sharks, he screamed. The third man looked. He saw his fellow-seaman go overboard. He jumped from where he stood, clearing the scuppers and falling through the air before the victim of the slack rail had landed in the water. The two splashes were almost simultaneous. A boatswain, hearing the cry, hastened to the scene. He saw one man lifted clear of the water by the other, who was treading water furiously. He shouted for a rope. He saw the curve and dip of a fin. The first man seized the rope and climbed and was pulled up. The second, his rescuer, dived under water as if aware of something there that required his attention. The men above him could not know that he had felt the rake of teeth across his leg—powerful teeth, which nevertheless did not penetrate his skin. As he dived into the green depths, he saw a body lunge toward him, turn, yawn a white-fringed mouth. He snatched the lower jaw in one hand, and the upper in the other. He exerted his strength. The mouth gaped wider, a tail twelve feet behind it lashed, the thing died with fingers like steel claws tearing at its brain. It floated belly up. The man rose, took the rope, climbed aboard. Other sharks assaulted the dead one.

The dripping sailor clasped his saviour's hand. "God Almighty, man, you saved my life. Jesus!"

"That's four," Hugo Danner said abstractedly, and then he smiled. "It's all right. Forget it. I've had a lot of experience with sharks." He had never seen one before in his life. He walked aft, where the men grouped around him.

"How'd you do it?"

"It's a trick I can't explain very well," Hugo said. "You use their rush to break their jaws. It takes a good deal of muscle."

"Anyway—guy—thanks."

"Sure."

A whistle blew. The ships were lining up in the order of their arrival for admission to the Panama Canal. Gatun loomed in the feeble sun of dawn. The anchor chain rumbled. The Katrina edged forward at half speed.

The sea. Blue, green, restless, ghost-ridden, driven in empty quarters by devils riding the wind, secretive, mysterious, making a last gigantic, primeval stand against the conquest of man, hemming and isolating the world, beautiful, horrible, dead god of ten thousand voices, universal incubator, universal grave.

The Katrina came to the islands in the South Pacific. Islands that issued from the water like green wreaths and seemed to float on it. The small boats were put out and sections of the cargo were sent to rickety wharves where white men and brown islanders took charge of it and carried it away into the fringe of the lush vegetation. Hugo, looking at those islands, was moved to smile. The place where broken men hid from civilization, where the derelicts of the world gathered to drown their shame in a verdant paradise that had no particular position in the white man's scheme of the earth.

At one of the smaller islands an accident to the engine forced the Katrina to linger for two weeks. It was during those two weeks, in a rather extraordinary manner, that Hugo Danner laid the first foundation of the fortune that he accumulated in his later life. One day, idling away a leave on shore in the shade of a mighty tree, he saw the outriggers of the natives file away for the oyster beds, and, out of pure curiosity, he followed them. For a whole day he watched the men plunge under the surface in search of pearls. The next day he came back and dove with one of them.

On the bizarre floor of the ocean, among the colossal fronds of its flora, the two men swam. They were invaders from the brilliance above the surface, shooting like fish, horizontally, through the murk and shadow, and the denizens of that world resented their coming. Great fish shot past them with malevolent eyes, and the vises of giant clams shut swiftly in attempts to trap their moving limbs. Hugo was entranced. He watched the other man as he found the oyster bed and commenced to fill his basket with frantic haste. When his lungs stung and he could bear the agony no longer, he turned and forged toward the upper air. Then they went down again.

Hugo's blood, designed to take more oxygen from the air, and his greater density fitted him naturally for the work. The pressure did not make him suffer and the few moments granted to the divers beneath the forbidding element stretched to a longer time for him.

On the second day of diving he went alone. His amateur attempt had been surprisingly fruitful. Standing erect in the immense solitude, he searched the hills and valleys. At length, finding a promising cluster of shellfish, he began to examine them one by one, pulling them loose, feeling in their pulpy interior for the precious jewels. He occupied himself determinedly while the Katrina was waiting in Apia, and at the end of the stay he had collected more than sixty pearls of great value and two hundred of moderate worth.

It was, he thought, typical of himself. He had decided to make a fortune of some sort after the first bitter rage over his debacle at Webster had abated in his heart. He realized that without wealth his position in the world would be more difficult and more futile than his fates had decreed. Poverty, at least, he was not forced to bear. He could wrest fortune from nature by his might. That he had begun that task by diving for pearls fitted into his scheme. It was such a method as no other man would have considered and its achievement robbed no one while it enriched him.

When the Katrina turned her prow westward again, Hugo worked with his shipmates in a mood that had undergone considerable change. There was no more despair in him, little of the taciturnity that had marked his earliest days at sea, none of the hatred of mankind. He had buried that slowly and carefully in a dull year of work ashore and a month of toil on the heaving deck of the ship. For six months he had kept himself alive in a manner that he could scarcely remember. Driving a truck. Working on a farm. Digging in a road. His mind a bitter blank, his valiant dreams all dead.

One day he had saved a man's life. The reaction to that was small, but it was definite. The strength that could slay was also a strength that could succour. He had repeated the act some time later. He felt it was a kind of atonement. After that, he sought deliberately to go where he might be of assistance. In the city, again, in September, when a fire engine clanged and whooped through the streets, he followed and carried a woman from a blazing roof as if by a miracle. Then the seaman. He had counted four rescues by that time. Perhaps his self-condemnation for the boy who had fallen on the field at Webster could be stifled eventually. Human life seemed very precious to Hugo then.

He sold his pearls when the ship touched at large cities—a handful here and a dozen there, bargaining carefully and forwarding the profit to a bank in New York. He might have continued that voyage, which was a voyage commenced half in new recognition of his old wish to see and know the world and half in the quest of forgetfulness; but a slip and shifts in the history of the world put an abrupt end to it. When the Katrina rounded the Bec d'Aiglon and steamed into the blue and cocoa harbour of Marseilles, Hugo heard that war had been declared by Germany, Austria, France, Russia, England....

XI

In a day the last veil of mist that had shrouded his feelings and thoughts, making them numb and sterile, vanished; in a day Hugo found himself—or believed that he had; in a day his life changed and flung itself on the course which, in a measure, destined its fixation. He never forgot that day.

It began in the early morning when the anchor of the freighter thundered into the harbour water. The crew was not given shore leave until noon. Then the mysterious silence of the captain and the change in the ship's course was explained. Through the third officer he sent a message to the seamen. War had been declared. The seaways were unsafe. The Katrina would remain indefinitely at Marseilles. The men could go ashore. They would report on the following day.

The first announcement of the word sent Hugo's blood racing. War! What war? With whom? Why? Was America in it, or interested in it? He stepped ashore and hurried into the city. The populace was in feverish excitement. Soldiers were everywhere, as if they had sprung up magically like the seed of the dragon. Hugo walked through street after street in the furious heat. He bought a paper and read the French accounts of mobilizations, of a battle impending. He looked everywhere for some one who could tell him. Twice he approached the American Consulate, but it was jammed with frantic and frightened people who were trying only to get away. Hugo's ambition, growing in him like a fire, was in the opposite direction. War! And he was Hugo Danner!

He sat at a café toward the middle of the afternoon. He was so excited by the contagion in his veins that he scarcely thrilled at the first use of his new and half-mastered tongue. The garçon hurried to his table.

"De la bière," Hugo said.

The waiter asked a question which Hugo could not understand, so he repeated his order in the universal language of measurement of a large glass by his hands. The waiter nodded. Hugo took his beer and stared out at the people. They hurried along the sidewalk, brushing the table at which he sat. They called to each other, laughed, cried sometimes, and shook hands over and over. "La guerre" was on every tongue. Old men gestured the directions of battles. Young men, a little more serious perhaps, and often very drunk, were rushing into uniform as order followed order for mobilization. And there were girls, thousands of them, walking with the young men.

Hugo wanted to be in it. He was startled by the impact of that desire. All the ferocity of him, all the unleashed wish to rend and kill, was blazing in his soul. But it was a subtle conflagration, which urged him in terms of duty, in words that spoke of the war as his one perfect opportunity to put himself to a use worthy of his gift. A war. In a war what would hold him, what would be superior to him, who could resist him? He swallowed glass after glass of the brackish beer, quenching a mighty thirst and firing a mightier ambition. He saw himself charging into battle, fighting till his ammunition was gone, till his bayonet broke; and then turning like a Titan and doing monster deeds with bare hands. And teeth.

Bands played and feet marched. His blood rose to a boiling-point. A Frenchman flung himself at Hugo's table. "And you—why aren't you a soldier?"

"I will be," Hugo replied.

"Bravo! We shall revenge ourselves." The man gulped a glass of wine, slapped Hugo's shoulder, and was gone. Then a girl talked to Hugo. Then another man.

Hugo dwelt on the politics of the war and its sociology only in the most perfunctory manner. It was time the imperialistic ambitions of the Central Powers were ended. A war was inevitable for that purpose. France and England had been attacked. They were defending themselves. He would assist them. Even the problem of citizenship and the tangle of red tape his enlistment might involve did not impress him. He could see the field of battle and hear the roar of guns, a picture conjured up by his knowledge of the old wars. What a soldier he would be!

While his mind was still leaping and throbbing and his head was whirling, darkness descended. He would give away his life, do his duty and a hundred times more than his duty. Here was the thing that was intended for him, the weapon forged for his hand, the task designed for his undertaking. War. In war he could bring to a full fruition the majesty of his strength. No need to fear it there, no need to be ashamed of it. He felt himself almost the Messiah of war, the man created at the precise instant he was required. His call to serve was sounding in his ears. And the bands played.

The chaos did not diminish at night, but, rather, it increased. He went with milling crowds to a bulletin board. The Germans had commenced to move. They had entered Belgium in violation of treaties long held sacred. Belgium was resisting and Liége was shaking at the devastation of the great howitzers. A terrible crime. Hugo shook with the rage of the crowd. The first outrages and violations, highly magnified, were reported. The blond beast would have to be broken.

"God damn," a voice drawled at Hugo's side. He turned. A tall, lean man stood there, a man who was unquestionably American. Hugo spoke in instant excitement.

"There sure is hell to pay."

The man turned his head and saw Hugo. He stared at him rather superciliously, at his slightly seedy clothes and his strong, unusual face. "American?"

"Yeah."

"Let's have a drink."

They separated themselves from the mob and went to a crowded café. The man sat down and Hugo took a chair at his side. "As you put it," the man said, "there is hell to pay. Let's drink on the payment."

Hugo felt in him a certain aloofness, a detachment that checked his desire to throw himself into flamboyant conversation. "My name's Danner," he said.

"Mine's Shayne, Thomas Mathew Shayne. I'm from New York."

"So am I, in a way. I was on a ship that was stranded here by the war. At loose ends now."

Shayne nodded. He was not particularly friendly for a person who had met a countryman in a strange city. Hugo did not realize that Shayne had been besieged all day by distant acquaintances and total strangers for assistance in leaving France, or that he expected a request for money from Hugo momentarily. And Shayne did not seem particularly wrought up by the condition of war. They lifted their glasses and drank. Hugo lost a little of his ardour.

"Nice mess."

"Time, though. Time the Germans got their answer."

Shayne's haughty eyebrows lifted. His wide, thin mouth smiled. "Perhaps. I just came from Germany. Seemed like a nice, peaceful country three weeks ago."

"Oh." Hugo wondered if there were many pro-German Americans. His companion answered the thought.

"Not that I don't believe the Germans are wrong. But war is such—such a damn fool thing."

"Well, it can't be helped."

"No, it can't. We're all going to go out and get killed, though."

"We?"

"Sure. America will get in it. That's part of the game. America is more dangerous to Germany than France—or England, for that matter."

"That's a rather cold-blooded viewpoint."

Shayne nodded. "I've been raised on it. Garçon, l'addition, s'il vous plaît." He reached for his pocketbook simultaneously with Hugo. "I'm sorry you're stranded," he said, "and if a hundred francs will help, I'll be glad to let you have it. I can't do more."

Hugo's jaw dropped. He laughed a little. "Good lord, man, I said my ship was stuck. Not me. And these drinks are mine." He reached into his pocket and withdrew a huge roll of American bills and a packet of French notes.