"Oh, bag your head, John; I'm going home. When you can talk some sense, let me know." And Bemis left Barclay standing in the garden looking at the sunrise across the mill-pond. Presently the carrier boy with a morning paper came around, and in it Barclay read the account of Hendricks' reported suicide, corroborated by his antemortem statement, written and delivered to Jacob Dolan an hour before he died. "When I took charge of the Exchange National Bank," it read, "I found that my father owed Garrison County nine thousand dollars for another man's taxes, which he, my father, had agreed to pay, but had no money to do so. The other man insisted on my father forging a note to straighten matters up. It seemed at that time that the bank would close and the whole county would be ruined if my father had not committed that deed. I could not put the money back into the treasury without revealing my father's crime, so I let the matter run for a few years, renewing the forged note, and then, as it seemed an interminable job of forgery, I forged the balance on the county books, one afternoon between administrations in 1879. Mr. E. W. Bemis, who is trying to force polluted water on Sycamore Ridge, has discovered this forgery and has threatened to expose me in that and perhaps other matters. So I feel that my usefulness in the fight for pure water in the town is ended. I leave funds to fight the matter in the courts, and I feel sure that we will win." Barclay sat in the warm morning sun, reading and re-reading the statement. Finally Jane Barclay, thin, broken and faded, on whom the wrath of the people was falling with crushing weight, came into the veranda, and put her hands on her husband's shoulders. "Come in, John, breakfast is ready." The woman whom the leprosy of dishonest wealth was whitening, walked dumbly into the great house, and ate in silence. "I am going to Molly," she said simply, as the two rose from their meal. "I think she needs me, dear; won't you come, too?" she asked. "I can't, Jane--I can't," cried Barclay. And when his wife had pressed him, he broke forth: "Because Lige Bemis made Adrian kill Bob and I helped--" he groaned, and sank into his chair, "and I helped." When Neal Ward came to the office the next morning, he found Dolan waiting for him. Ward opened the envelope that Dolan gave him, and found in it the mortgage Hendricks had owned on the _Banner_ office, assigned to Ward, and around the mortgage was a paper band on which was written: "God bless you, my boy--keep up the fight; never say die." Then Ward read Adrian Brownwell's valedictory that was hanging on a copy spike before him. It was the heart-broken sob of an old man who had run away from failure and sorrow, and it need not be printed here.