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of pictures he had seen in the dime novels. He wondered if Peck would fight. The alarm clock suddenly set up its double knock again, as if the scene somehow had got into its wheels and stirred it to violent action.

Abner paused with his mask to look at the clock. Its miniature violence was the only sound he could hear. Indeed, the silence, now that the teamster noticed it, was extraordinary. He sat listening with mouth open to catch the faintest noise, but could hear nothing at all. And yet there seemed something strained about the stillness, as if on the verge of an outbreak.

The teamster arose with a little shudder and walked to his window. He did not thrust out his head as ordinarily he would, but surveyed the street from the inside, moving about, well back of the window, to obtain the whole view. From one shabby end to the other, not a person was on it, not even a child at play. This very absence of life reinforced in the youth his sense of an impending cataclysm. The village in the still sunshine looked to Abner like some sort of gigantic trap, baited, set, ready to clash into swift and fatal action, but for the present, as silent and patient as the very sunshine itself.

At this normally busy time of day for the streets to be deserted advertised that every man, woman, and child in Irontown knew what was going to happen; that this solitude of street was the collective alibi of the village to prove before some future grand jury that Irontown knew nothing whatever about the tragedy it was about to perform. This was the acme of hill-country finesse and social solidarity.

Amid this crouching silence it became impossible for Abner to remain in his room. He glanced once more at the clock, felt the mask in his pocket, then arose and took a turn in the hall.

The hallway was faintly cooler than his own room and was a kind of clearing house for the odours of the whole establishment; smells from the dining room below, from the bedrooms, the penetrating odour of an insecticide which Miss Scovell