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it, Bertie; I don't want to have to take the stand and testify against your father's boy. Besides, it ain't no kind o' use. You done it yourself when you was up at Abel Geddis's house las' night. Two of the d'rectors, Tom Fitch and old man Withers, was settin' behind the window curtains in the front room whilst you was talkin' to Miss Agathy on the porch. You know, better'n I do, what they heard you say."
For a second the familiar interior of the bank went black for me. I was young in those days; much too young to know that human nature in the lump is neither all saint nor all devil; that a man may be a second father to you for years, and then turn and hold your head under water until you drown when he is fighting for himself. It had been a trap, deliberately set and baited with Agatha. I remembered now that she had not spoken loud enough to be overheard; while I, with my back to the open window, had talked in ordinary tones. Fitch and Withers had heard me say that the investigating committee would find nothing against Abel Geddis, and they had naturally taken it as a confession of my own guilt.
I remember that I went quite methodically about putting things away while Runnels waited, though every move was dumbly mechanical. Something seemed to have died inside of me, and I suppose the psychologists would say that it was the subconscious Bert Weyburn who put the books in the vault, locked the iron door, set the high desk in order, and turned off all the lights save the one we always left turned on in front of the vault.
Afterward, when we were in the street together, and Runnels was walking me around the square to the police station, the dead thing inside of me came alive. It had gone to sleep a pretty decent young fellow, with a soft spot in his heart for his fellow men, and a boy's belief in the ultimate goodness of all women. It awoke a raging devil. It was all I could do to keep from throttling unsuspecting John Runnels as we tramped along side by side. I could have done it. I had inherited my father's well-knit frame and serviceable muscles, and all through my office experience I had kept myself fit with long walks and a few bits of home-made gymnastic apparatus in my room at Mrs. Thompson's. And the new-born devil was ready with the suggestion.
I have been glad many times since that old John never knew; glad that the frenzied curses that came boiling up out of that inner hell were wordless. I contrived to hold in while Runnels was hurrying me through the station office and past the sleepy sergeant at the desk. But when the cell door had opened and closed for me, and old John's heavy footsteps were no longer echoing in the iron-floored corridor, the newly hatched devil broke loose and I made a pretty bad night of it.

II
The Searing Touch
Out of the first twenty-four hours, when my little raft of respectability and good report was going to pieces under me, I have brought one heart-mellowing recollection. In the morning it was old John Runnels himself who brought me my cell breakfast, and he did it to spare me the shame of being served by the police-station turnkey. Past that, he sat on the edge of the iron cot and talked to me while I tried to eat.
"They was aimin' to telegraph the sheriff and have you railroaded slap up to the county seat las' night, but I told 'em nary," he confided. "I wasn't allowin' to have 'em jerk you out of your home town before you'd had a chance to pick a lawyer and talk to your friends; no sir-ee, I wasn't."
"I guess I haven't any friends any more," I was still bitter enough to say. And then: "Tell me, if you can, Uncle John, just what the charge against me is."
"I reckon you know a heap better'n I do, Bertie," was his sober rejoinder, "but I can tell you what I heard. They say you've been takin' the bank's money to put into a gold mine somewheres out yonder in the Rocky Mountains."
"Who swore out the warrant for my arrest?"
"Ab Withers."
Abner Withers, town miser, note-shaver and skinflint, was the one man on the board of directors of the bank whom I had always most cordially detested. Back in my childhood, before my father had got upon his feet, Withers had planned to foreclose a mortgage on the home farm, making the hampering of my father so that he could not pay the debt a part of the plan. More than once I had