The Key to Yesterday

when an early teamster, passing along the turnpike, saw two men garbed in what he would have called "full-dress suits," still sitting over their cigars on the verandah of the hill shack. A los

but there had been no surprise. He had known alre

orward and leaving the past behind. If you do the first, whether or not you are the man they want, the circumstantial case is strong. You know too little of your p

e," demurred Saxon

o me that with her in your life you would be safe against for

n with so many plausible, masculine arguments that he waited. He was packing and preparing the pictures that were to be shipped to New York. Some of them would be exhibited and sold there. Others, to be selected by his Eastern agent, would go on to the Paris m

tigation, and argued it with all the forcefulness h

a hill lane between pines and cedars. The girl's eyes were drinking in the color and abundant beauty, and the man rode silent at

r certainty? The very disproving of this suspicion would le

ould have exhausted the possibilities, and I could then with a clear conscience leave the rest to destiny.

as re

in letting you share the danger

lmost scornfully, and

d no hearts in our eyes, who live and marry and die, and never have a hint of loving as the gods love? I w

time more than half in favor of it, and spoke as though she might after all reconsider her refusal to be her aunt's traveling compan

re, but I guess I'm safe in Puerto Frio, and I might settle your doubts myself. You see," she added judicially, "I'

her wishes, but, if the thing were to be recognized as deserving investigation at all, he must do it himself. He could not protect himself behind he

at, though she would not admit it, at heart she realized the necessity of a solution. The hanging of his canvases for exhibition afforded an excuse for going to New York. On his ar

the conspiracy. When Saxon stood, a few days later, on the step of an inbound train, the girl stood waving her sunbonnet, slenderly outlined against the

grow wistful as the las

owly: "this new girl who has taken the place of th

"than anybody else that ever lived.

rite. He had to explain, and explain convincingly, that he was disobeying her expressed command only because his love was not the sort that could lull itsel

t, at Washington, he learned that Ribero had been recalled by government. Then, hurrying through his business in

open it, but, slipping it, dispatch-like, into her belt, she called the terrier, and together they went into the woods. Here

then, she said to the terrier in a voice as

et-" she tossed her head upward-"yet, I guess I shouldn'

ent, for he cocked his head gravely to th

of rapid thinking as she sat, her fingers clasped about her updrawn knees, then she rose and hurried to Horton Hou

y off. Mrs. Horton had known for weeks that something more was transpiring than showed on the surface. She had even inferred that there was "an understanding" between her niece and the painter, and this inference she had not found displeasing. The story that Duska told

s acquiring vast information as to schedules and connections. He learned that they could catch an outgoing steamer from New Orleans, which would probably put them at thei

the slight alleviation of an uncrowded ship. Those few travelers whose misfortunes doomed them to such a cruise at such a time, lay listlessly under the awnings, and watched the face

s born without benefit of twilight, watching the disk of the sun plunge into the sea like a diver. It seemed that Nature herself was here sudden and passionate in matters of life and death. He saw the stars come out, lo

ms. At last, at a town no more or less appealing than the others, just as the ear-splitting whistle screeched its last warning of departure, a belated passen

g perspiration, his none-too-fresh gray flannels splashed with salt water. At the t

h a large handkerchief, and began fanning himself with a stained

, with a quick, cauti

towed away in the h

safeguarded. It is required in the development of a country that ne

tness was suggestive of the fox or the weasel-furtive rather than intelligent. The eyes were quick-seeing and roving; the nose, aquiline; the lips, thi

m the hatch, caught only a vanishing glimpse of a tall, flannel-clad figure disappearing into the

tes before the call of the dinner-bugle, the thi

teful coolness that was creeping into the ai

and stepped modestly back into the protecting angle where he could himself be sheltered from view by the bulk of a tarpau

American was never far away, though he kept always in the blackest shadow thrown by boats or superstructure on the moonlit deck. If Saxon turned suddenly, the

recently come aboard was one Howard Stanley Rodman. It is highly improbable, however, that he would have discovered the additional fact that the "stuff" Rodman had asked after as he came abo

im, Saxon was of course equally unconscious of having as shipmate a man as

ean flag station was up to his neck in a revolutionary plot which was soon to burst; that the steamship line, because of interests of its own which a change of government would advance, had agreed to regard the rifles in the hold as agricultural implements, and that Mr. Rodman was among the most expert of traveling salesmen for revolutions and

Rodman had not been equally delinquent. The name R