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tance John Webster got off the tracks. There was, at just that place, a high embankment beside the river along which he could walk. "I don't intend to come near being killed by a train as I was this morning when that young negro saved me," he thought. He looked away to the west and to the evening sun and then down at the bed of the stream. Now the river was low and only a narrow channel of water ran through wide banks of caked mud.

"I know what I am going to do," he told himself resolutely. Quickly a plan formed itself in his mind. He would go to his office and hurry through any letters that had come in. Then, without looking at Natalie Swartz, he would get up and go away. There was a train for Chicago at eight o'clock and he would tell his wife he had business in the city and would take the train. What a man had to do in life was to face facts and then act. He would go to Chicago and find himself a woman. When it came right down to the truth he would go on a regular bat. He would find himself a woman and he would get drunk and if he felt like doing it would stay drunk for several days.

There were times when 1t was perhaps necessary to be a downright rotter. He would do that too. While he was in Chicago and with the woman he had found he would write a letter to his bookkeeper at the factory and tell him to discharge Natalie Swartz. Then he would write Natalie a letter and send her a large check. He would send her six months' pay. The whole thing might cost him a pretty sum, but anything was better than this going on as he was, a regular crazy kind of man.

As for the woman in Chicago, he would find her all right. One got bold after a few drinks and when one had the money to spend women were always to be had. He felt very resolute and strong.

When he had opened the door that led into the little room where he had been sitting and working beside Natalie for three years, he quickly closed it behind him and stood with his back to the door and with his hand on the doorknob, as though for support. Natalie's desk was beside a window at a corner of the room and beyond his own desk and through the window one could see into an empty space beside the spur of tracks that belonged to the railroad company, but in which he had been given the privilege of piling a reserve supply of