in a grand way about “the office force.” They even had vague notions of starting a daily and many a night Jared and Amos pored over the type samples in the advertising in Rounds Printer’s Cabinet, picked out the type they would need and the other equipment necessary for the new venture. But it was only a dream. For gradually Jared found Lizzie’s eyes and he found more to interest him there than in the type-book, and so the dream faded and was gone.

Also as Lizzie’s eyes began to glow in his sky, Jared let his interest lag in the talk at Casper Herdicker’s shoe shop, though it was tall talk, and Jared sitting on a keg in a corner with little Tom Williams, the stone mason, beside him on a box, and Denny Hogan near him on a vacant work bench and Ira Dooley on the window ledge would wrangle until bed time many a night as Dick Bowman, wagging a warlike head, and Casper pegging away at his shoes, tore society into shreds, smashed idols and overturned civilization. Up to this point there was complete agreement between the iconoclasts. They went so far together that they had no quarrel about the route of the mob down Fifth Avenue in New York–which Dick knew only as a legend but which Casper had seen; and they were one in the belief that Dan Sands’s bank and Wright & Perry’s store should fall early in the sack of Market Street. But when it came to reconstructing society there was a clash that mounted to a cataclysm. For Dick, shaking his head violently, demanded a government that should regulate everything and Casper waving a vicious, flat-nosed hammer, battered down all government 17and stood for the untrammeled and unhampered liberty of the individual. Night after night they looted civilization and stained the sky with their fires and the ground with the oppressor’s blood, only to sink their claws and tusks into each other’s vitals in mortal combat over the spoil.

About the time that Jared Thurston found the new stars that had ranged across his ken, Tom Van Dorn, the handsome, cheerful, exquisite Tom Van Dorn began to find the debates between Casper and Dick Bowman diverting. So many a night when the society of the softer sex was either cloying or inconvenient, the dapper young fellow would come dragging Henry Fenn with him, to sit on a rickety chair and observe the progress of the revolution and to enjoy the carnage that always followed the downfall of the established order. He used to sit beside Jared Thurston who, being a printer, was supposed to belong to the more intellectual of the crafts and hence more appreciative than Williams or Dooley or Hogan, of his young lordship’s point of view; and as the debate waxed warm, Tom was wont to pinch the lean leg of Mr. Thurston in lieu of the winks Tom dared not venture. But a time came when Jared Thurston sat apart from Van Dorn and stared coldly at him. And as Tom and Henry Fenn walked out of the human slaughter house that Dick and Casper had made after a particularly bloody revolt against the capitalistic system, Henry Fenn walked for a time beside his friend looking silently at the earth while Van Dorn mooned and star-gazed with wordy delight. Henry lifted his face, looked at Tom with great, bright, sympathetic eyes and cut in:

“Tom–why are you playing with Lizzie Coulter? She is not in your class or of your kind. What’s your idea in cutting in between Jared and her; you’ll only make trouble.”

A smile, a gay, happy, and withal a seductive smile lit up the handsome, oval face of young Mr. Van Dorn. The smile became a laugh, a quiet, insinuating, good-natured, light-hearted laugh. As he laughed he replied:

“Lizzie’s all right, Henry–don’t worry about Lizzie.” Again he laughed a gentle, deep-voiced chuckle, and held 18up his hand in the moonlight. A brown scab was lined across the back of the hand and as Henry saw it Van Dorn spoke: “Present from Lizzie–little pussy.” Again he chuckled and added, “Nearly made the horse run away, too. Anyway,” he laughed pleasantly, “when I left her she promised to go again.”

But Henry Fenn returned to his point: “Tom,” he cried, “don’t play with Lizzie–she’s not your kind, and it’s breaking Jared’s heart. Can’t you see what you’re doing? You’ll go down there a dozen times, make love to her, hold her hand and kiss her and go away and pick up another girl. But she’s the whole world and Heaven to boot for Jared. She’s his one little ewe lamb, Tom. And she’d be happy with Jared if–”

“If she wants Jared she can have him. I’m not holding her,” interrupted the youth. “And anyway,” he exclaimed, “what do I owe to Jared and what do I owe to her or to any one but myself!”

Fenn did not answer at once. At length he broke the silence. “Well, you heard what I said and I didn’t smile when I said it.”

But Tom Van Dorn did smile as he answered, a smile of such sweetness, and of such winning grace that it sugar-coated his words.

“Henry,” he cried in his gay, deep voice with the exuberance of youth ringing in it, “the world is mine. You know what I think about this whole business. If Lizzie doesn’t want me to bother her she mustn’t have such eyes and such hair and such lips. In this life I shall take what I find that I can get. I’m not going to be meek nor humble nor patient, nor forgiving and forbearing and I’m not going to refrain from a mutton roast because some one has a ewe lamb.”

He put a warm, kind, brotherly hand on the shoulder beside him. “Shocked, aren’t you, Henry?” he asked, laughing.

Henry Fenn looked up with a gentle, glowing smile on his rather dull face and returned, “No, Tom. Maybe you can make it go, but I couldn’t.”

“Well, I can. Watch me,” he cried arrogantly. “Henry, I want the advantage of my strength in this world and I’m 19not going to go puling around, golden-ruling and bending my back to give the weak and worthless a ride. Let ’em walk. Let ’em fall. Let ’em rot for all I care. I’m not afraid of their God. There is no God. There is nature. Up to the place where man puts on trousers it’s a battle of thews and teeth. And nature never intended pants to mark the line where she changes the order of things. And the servile, weakling, groveling, charitable, cowardly philosophy of Christ–it doesn’t fool me, Henry. I’m a pagan and I want the advantage of all the force, all the power, that nature gave me, to live life as a dangerous, exhilarating experience. I shall live life to the full–live it hard–live it beautifully, but live it! live it! Henry, live it like a gentleman and not like an understrapper and bootlicker! I intend to command, not obey! Rule, not serve! I shall take and not give–not give save as it pleases me to have my hand licked now and then! As for Lizzie and Jared,” young Mr. Van Dorn waved a gay hand, “let them look out for themselves. They’re not my worries!”

“But, Tom,” remonstrated Henry as he looked at the ground, “it’s nothing to me of course, but Lizzie–”

“Ah, Henry,” Van Dorn laughed gayly, “I’m not going to hurt Lizzie. She’s good fun: that’s all. And now look here, Mr. Preacher–you come moralizing around me about what I’m doing to some one else, which after all is not my business but hers; and I’m right here to tell you, what you’re doing to yourself, and that’s your business and no one’s else. You’re drinking too much. People are talking about it. Quit it! Whisky never won a jury. In the Morse case you loaded up for your speech and I beat you because in all your agonizing about the wrong to old man Müller and his ‘pretty brown-eyed daughter’ as you called her, you forgot slick and clean the flaw in Morse’s deed.”

“I suppose you’re right, Tom. But I was feeling kind of off that day, mother’d been sick the night before and–”

“And