acter, and cunning; those nights I was away from you I found a way to skirt the Country of the Waiting. This camp I make, and another one day's journey on-good camps, safe! And in one day his and one night we are clear of country. You think it is for my fear I do it,-it is for you. No white man has ever set foot there alive, and why should you? It is not my fear! I heard nothing, I saw nothing those days I was away: why should I fear? Besides, for all I know it is a lie that he who waits here never forgives, and that he can bring the dead out of their graves to call you to him. Why do you suppose I trapped and trapped at your camp when you forbade me? It was my vengeance: they say the beasts are all his servants, the marten most of all; that it is they who call to you with dead men's voices. But I believe that is a lie, too!" He leaned suddenly over me. "Why do you laugh?" he demanded.

I had not made a sound, but I answered as I saw fit: the man was worn out with his three days' running in my service. I could make no sense of his rigmarole not then; but there was no doubt that he was afraid; all day I had known that he thought some one followed us. I had heard nothing, but after he slept I listened. I was satisfied that there was no sound anywhere when Louis spoke in his sleep.

"Continually he screams behind me!" he cried in Indian. I heard him move toward the door, and as I clutched him he trembled with the shock of waking. I was sorry to have startled him, but it was no place for a blind man to be alone in; and I took the string that was round his waist and tied it to my waist as it had been tied all day. It was Louis's fingers on the hitch in the cold of morning that woke me. When we started I was stone blind. I asked if it were snowing, for there was a cold dampness on my face. "Frost fog! Kind of dark," Louis answered absently. I felt him lean forward, look, and listen. But I had never

been in such quiet woods; not a stick cracked nor a branch creaked. Through that silence we moved, the frosty crush of our steps loud on dead bracken, then on stiffened swamp, then on rising ground; and we moved slowly. It went through me that Louis was fumbling, but just as I would have given the world and all to be able to see he spoke confidently: "Almost we miss our trail, but we find it now!" And apparently we did, for we made as good going for some hours as was possible to the blind and the leader of the blind. It was afternoon when Louis checked so sharply that I ran hard against him. "He cries to me in the daytime!" he shrieked.

"Who cries?" I caught his hand, and felt him loosening my string.

"My brother that was younger than I!' I dragged him round to face my blind"He's dead," I said brutally. "How could he be here?"

ness.

"You ask me. I tell you." He shook under my hand, but that was all he said. Perhaps he was ashamed, for he went on quietly.

The weather had not cleared as the sun arched; it kept thick and chill against my face, and in the thickness I felt Louis alter his direction three times. But it was not till I could not take another step that he owned he was lost. There was nothing to fuss about: either the sun or the stars would show in time, and we had plenty of food; yet I should have been happier if Louis had been troubled. He made a scratch sort of camp just where we happened to be standing, and last night's fear had dropped from him like a garment and left a different Louis bare. He was all ears and waiting, and, being blind, it worried me a little in a silent place where there was nothing to wait for. Besides, he did not eat; and when I asked him how he had missed his second camp he said he had not looked for it, because all he told me the night before was stuff and nonsense; and he untied my string and threw it away. I said roughly that I wished I had stuck

to Martin, but the jealousy had gone out of Louis. He laughed. From somewhere behind the camp came a cold echo, and it took me out into the dark. On my hands and knees I found we were in the gully of a dead river, close under a low cliff, and bare stones, big and little, ran past us like the paving of a road. A small cold wind sighed up the valley of it, and shale dropped now and then from the crumbling sides.

It was not a cheerful place to make camp. I asked Louis if he had crossed it on that survey journey of his, and he said carelessly that he did not know. I was cold and tired and angry; Louis lay down and slept. And if last night had been silent, this night was not. There were sudden whisperings round us, like the rustling in thick underbrush, - and the place was all stones. I got to an uneasy sleep at last, and it may have been midnight when it woke me. I say it, because I have no mind to own what I thought. The darkness did not make the difference to me that it does to people who can see: I caught hold of Louis.

"He walks beside me," he said very softly; and struck me in the face. He was gone before I could get up off the ground.

I went out after him, calling myself hoarse. There was nothing to hold a track, even if I could have followed one without my eyes. I was afraid to leave the camp, yet when I heard something I went to it. There was not much sense in a blind man choosing a place to die in, and one would be the same as another to me if Louis abandoned me.

"Louis!" I shouted; and a voice too close to me said something. I knew it; and I may as well tell the truth. When I heard the pat of moccasins on those stones I tried to feel relief, and was aware of senseless dread.

"You have been a long time coming," said the tall man coolly. "I was afraid you had missed the way."

"We got lost!" I made a step to him,

but he must have receded; I did not touch him. "Why did you run out of my camp just now?" "It was not I."

I had known it was not when I asked him, but I answered obstinately, "Louis went out with some one! You must have seen him, even if it were not you."

"No;" and the voice held no interest whatever.

"He said his brother came into the camp. I mean"- the start the man had given me was natural enough. I began to get hold of myself, the more easily that I could not see his eyes; and I stopped some foolishness that was on my tongue. "Louis says his dead brother has been calling him all day," I substituted. "I don't know why, unless he's crazy. And now he's left me. Put me in my camp and look for him."

"You should not have brought him; I said not." And an uncalled-for comprehension in the answer put me in a rage. "My camp is near; we will go to it. Perhaps he may come there."

"If I wait here till the last day I will wait here!" I did not care if the man were angry or not. "Louis would not go near your camp; he said you were a liar, and your name was not Martin at all. He was afraid of this country, and it is because of me that he strayed into it. He says it is haunted.”

"Haunted?"

"Reserved, was what he said.”

"I live here," commented the cold voice; in the silence I knew its owner was laughing. And over the laugh, quite close to me, some one screamed. The cry was baffled in the gully, beaten to and fro against the sides of it; but it was Louis's cry. I thought it would never stop. The ungovernable terror of a soul unbridled, it stiffened the hair on my head. I began to run, and knew I should be too long on the road.

"Go, man; for God's sake!" I ordered. I felt for my knife and could not find it. "You know this place, and I'm blind. Go!"

"Why? He is a man of low character, and cunning; he is not afraid."

I had to hear Louis call for the help that was not coming, but there was no reason I should listen to mockery. I sprang at the man, and him I did not touch; my hand closed by a miracle on the knife he carried. As he clutched the air for me I was on all fours with it in my hand, crawling to that sound. There was more than a scream now, and it guided me; if it were a death struggle it guided me. I touched suddenly what I knew was Louis, and he lay still; touched, too, something else - and God knows I cut at it, and I cut well; but I was late. The tall man's knife went to the hilt in loose gravel, and something no bigger than a marten scuttered up the falling shale of the gully side. There was, literally and absolutely, nothing else. I said to myself that it was my blindness, and Louis's madness, and the Indian devil in the gully laughing at both of them, that made me afraid; but I knew it was the foolish inadequacy of the marten coming on top of that cry.

"Dead men's voices," said I, “and a marten," and knew I was clutching at my sanity. I meant to swear at Louis, and instead felt furiously for the life in him; the sweat of panic was on my hands when I heard the quick feet of the tall man beside me. I listened - for reasons of my own till he stopped to make sure that Louis was dead; but instead he touched me on the shoulder. It was as if virtue came out of him; I can find no other phrase. I know that I dropped his knife.

"So the smoked pipe goes for nothing, with you!" he said softly. The changed voice sucked the murder out of me till I was slack as Louis, who would have been alive if I had not wanted my miserable eyesight. It was some satisfaction to me to stammer out what he had been to me, even if I had to do it in jerks as I tried to rouse him. But the tall man put me suddenly aside.

"You have, several times, given me

back my servants I can perhaps do as much for you," he said unexpectedly. His laugh was different, just as I knew his eyes were if I could have seen them, and then there dawned on me what I had been a fool not to know from the first. This man was a chief; able to keep up his state in this outlying country; with perhaps twenty captains under him. I did not remember any of his men, I had no hope he would put his hand to squaw's work for Louis, but I moved aside.

What he did I do not know: I might not even if I had had my sight. But I felt Louis move; I suppose that he opened his eyes; and I know that the strange chief spoke to him in words that I could not understand. All I gathered was that his name was not Martin, who was a small man and a servant, and perhaps known to Louis. But Louis turned on his face and groveled; I could hear his hands claw and scratch on the stones of that place as he answered:

66

Aooledalume, 'Nsakumam!" He might have been praying, but I knew better, though it was "Lord have mercy on me" that he said.

It was plain that the two knew each other, with bad blood between them; but all I cared for was that the strange chief had chosen to wipe it away. It was none of my business what his real name was; many Indians have several; besides, I was in the darkness of the blind, and I was sick with weariness. It was by no choice of mine that the tall man took my hand and led me all the next day, while Louis, stone silent, walked behind; but I was, quite suddenly, very happy with him. I say he led me; and we talked as friends talk it was that which made me ask his name.

"It is one I keep silence on," he answered quietly; and once more I was conscious of that aloofness, that domination that had repelled me. "And so will you, O white man I have met in peace!"

I do not know why I could not answer him as he said good-by with that word that lacked the name of God in it. I held

out his knife, but he would not take it. He was gone so abruptly that I staggered for want of his hand.

It was when I could see again, and was still thanking the good God for it, that I found Father Moore looking at the tall man's knife. He was holding it over an old sack of painted leather and Louis was glowering at him when I came in on the pair of them.

"Where did you dig up this knife?" cried the priest eagerly. very old very good!"

-

stone

"It's

I nodded. I had got over my amazement at the stone blade.

"I did n't find it; a man gave my glance rested on the painted sack in joyful astonishment. On it were picture after picture of the tall man; his outlandish clothing; his splendid bearing; the unforgotten, once-seen outline of his face. "Why, that's the man—”I began, and the priest cut me off dryly.

"Those are pictures, three hundred years old, of the Indians' demi-god and hero, their Glooscap, who left them because the whites came, and is still alive

or they dare to believe so! They say he will return when his hour comes, but

till then he keeps silence and will have no man pry after him, or kill on his land. It is rank heresy, but I cannot cure them of it, and almost I-" he checked himself hastily, and tapped the picture-writing. "That pipe and knife," he said irritably, "don't you see what a treasure they are? That they are here?"

"Glooscap!" I stood in a whirl of tardy memories of the tall man's eyes, of Glooscap whose brother was King of the Wolves, whose servant was the Marten - and my mouth opened foolishly. "It could n't have been!" I babbled. "The knife belonged to a man who guided me here. He was a tall man, a —a chief —”

Louis interrupted me smoothly, if I had not seen his face before he smiled at the priest.

"The master has had those things for a long time, ever since I knew him. He was very sick and blind coming here, and talked much to himself. There never was any tall man!"

I looked at the things lying on the table, from the priest to the Indian; and I remembered that word concerning silence. Then:

"I suppose there never was," said I.

THE Edda has it that during Thor's visit to the giants he is challenged to lift a certain gray cat. "Our young men think it nothing but play." Thor puts forth his whole strength, but can at most bend the creature's back and lift one foot. On leaving, however, the mortified hero is told the secret of his failure. "The cat — ah! we were terror-stricken when we saw one paw off the floor; for that is the Midgard serpent which, tail in mouth, girds and keeps up the created world."

How often to-day the prosecutor who

tries to lay by the heels some notorious public enemy is baffled by a mysterious resistance! The thews of Justice become as water; her sword turns to lath. Though the machinery of the law is strained askew, the evildoer remains erect, smiling, unscathed. At the end, the mortified champion of the law may be given to understand that like Thor he was contending with the established order; that he had unwittingly laid hold on a pillar of society, and was therefore pitting himself against the reigning or

ganization in local finance and politics. The real weakness in the moral position of Americans is not their attitude toward the plain criminal, but their attitude toward the quasi-criminal. The shocking leniency of the public in judging conspicuous persons who have thriven by anti-social practices is not due, as many imagine, to sycophancy. Let a prominent man commit some offense in bad odor and the multitude flings its stones with a right goodwill. The social lynching of the self-made magnate who put away his faded, toil-worn wife for the sake of a soubrette, proves that the props of the old morality have not rotted through. Sex righteousness continues to be thus stiffly upheld simply because man has not been inventing new ways of wronging woman. So long ago were sex sins recognized and branded that the public, feeling sure of itself, lays on with promptness and emphasis. The slowness of this same public in lashing other kinds of transgression betrays, not sycophancy, or unthinking admiration of success, but perplexity. The prosperous evildoers that bask undisturbed in popular favor have been careful to shun - or seem to shun—the familiar types of wickedness. Overlooked in Bible and Prayer-book, their obliquities lack the brimstone smell. Surpass as their misdeeds may in meanness and cruelty, there has not yet been time enough to store up strong emotion about them; and so the sight of them does not let loose the flood of wrath and abhorrence that rushes down upon the long-attainted sins.

The immunity enjoyed by the perpetrator of new sins has brought into being a class for which we may coin the term criminaloid. By this we designate such as prosper by flagitious practices which have not yet come under the effective ban of public opinion. Often, indeed, they are guilty in the eyes of the law; but since they are not culpable in the

1 Like asteroid, crystalloid, anthropoid, etc. "Criminaloid" is Latin-Greek, to be sure, but so is "sociology."

eyes of the public and in their own eyes, their spiritual attitude is not that of the criminal. The law-maker may make their misdeeds crimes, but, so long as morality stands stock-still in the old tracks, they escape both punishment and ignominy. Unlike their low-browed cousins, they occupy the cabin rather than the steerage of society. Relentless pursuit hems in the criminals, narrows their range of success, denies them influence. The criminaloids, on the other hand, encounter but feeble opposition, and, since their practices are often more lucrative than the authentic crimes, they distance their more scrupulous rivals in business and politics and reap an worldly prosperity.

uncommon

Of greater moment is the fact that the criminaloids lower the tone of the community. The criminal slinks in the shadow, menacing our purses but not our ideals; the criminaloid, however, does not belong to the half-world. Fortified by his connections with "legitimate business," "the regular party organization," perhaps with orthodoxy and the bon ton, he may even bestride his community like a Colossus. In his sight and in their own sight the old-style, squaredealing sort are as grasshoppers. Do we not hail him as "a man who does things," make him director of our banks and railroads, trustee of our hospitals and libraries? When Prince Henry visits us, do we not put him on the reception committee? He has far more initial weight in the community than has the arraigning clergyman, editor, or prosecutor. From his example and his excuses spreads a noxious influence that tarnishes the ideals of ingenuous youth on the threshold of active life. To put the soul of this pagan through a Bertillon system and set forth its marks of easy identification is, therefore, a sanitary measure demanded in the interest of public health.

The key to the criminaloid is not evil impulse but moral insensibility.

The director who speculates in the