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IN HIS hot little room on the west side of the Scovell House with the sun, a little past vertical, slating into his window, Abner Teeftallow had immured himself until the appointed hour of three in the afternoon.

The fact that he was under instructions to secrete himself, that he was hiding in his own room until the time came for him to hurry out and take part in a sharp and tragic and illegal spectacle—this filled Abner with his first sense of civic importance and, at the same time, kept him in nervous suspense like that of a new actor in the wings of the stage.

Time apparently had stopped in Irontown. The teamster glanced once more at the clock, a cheap tin affair which Tug Beavers had bought for their room. The hand seemed not a millimeter advanced since he had glanced at it before. In an hour and a half it would be time to start—an hour and a half. The timepiece ticked loudly in the hot little room; as Abner looked at it it broke into a startled double beat, ticketty-tick, ticketty-tick, as if it, too, somehow had become infected with the pervading nervousness.

At four- or five-minute intervals Abner would take his automatic from his pocket (he had bought one now) and reassure himself that its clip was full of cartridges. Then he would reinspect the bandanna handkerchief which he had cut into a mask, trying it on to see that the holes for the eyes and mouth fitted. He was apprehensive that in the moment of action the mask would not fit; that he would find himself working at it, adjusting it when all the other masks had marched out from behind the lumber pile to the lock-up, and he would be left. A vision of masked men hauling Peck Bradley out of his cell filled Abner's eyes. It reminded him