and there were no more argosies drifting Gastonward for the bucaneers to sack and scuttle, it was Jasper G. Bucks who called a conference of his fellow werwolves, set forth his new cast for fortune, and brought the junto, the child of sheer desperation fiercely at bay, into being.

It was in the autumn of that first cataclysmic year that Secretary Loring, traveling from Boston to the State capital on a mission for the Western Pacific, stopped over a train with Kent. After a rather dispiriting dinner in the deserted Mid-Continent café, and some plowing of the field of recollection in Kent's rooms in the Farquhar Building, they took the deserted street in the golden twilight to walk to the railway station.

"It was a decent thing for you to do—stopping over a train with me, Grantham," said the host, when the five squares intervening had been half measured. "I have had all kinds of a time out here in this God-forsaken desert, but never until to-day anything approaching a chummy hour with a man I know and care for."

Kent had not spoken since they had felt their way out of the dark lower hall of the Farquhar Building. Up to this point the talk had been pointedly reminiscent; of the men of their university year, of mutual friends in the far-away "God's country" to the eastward, of the Gastonian epic, of all things save only two—the exile's cast for fortune in the untamed West, and one other.

"That brings us a little nearer to the things that be—and to your prospects, David," said the guest. "How are you fixed here?"

Kent shrugged.

"Gaston is dead, as you see; too dead to bury."

"Why don't you get out of it, then?"

"I shall some day, perhaps. Up to date there has been no place to go to, and no good way to arrive. Like some thousands of others, I've made an ass of myself here, Loring."

"By coming, you mean? Oh, I don't know about that. You have had some hard knocks, I take it, but if you are the same David Kent I used to know, they have made a bigger man of you."

"Think so?"

"I'd bet on it. We have had the Gaston epic done out for us in the newspapers. No man could live through such an experience as you must have had without growing a few inches. Hello! What's 

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