The president of the White River National Bank, perched on a pile of lumber on a wet January evening with a girl he knew only as his accomplice in an escapade that it would be very difficult to explain to a cynical world, reflected that at about this hour his wife, hardly a mile distant, in one of the handsomest houses in town, was dressing for dinner to be ready to greet a guest, who was the most valiant member of the sedate House of Bishops. And Webster G. Burgess assured himself that he was not a bit frightened; he had been pursued by detectives and police and shot at--and yet he was less annoyed than when the White River National lost an account, or an ignorant new member preempted his favorite seat in the University Club dining room. He had lost both the sense of fear and the sense of shame; and he marveled at his transformation and delighted in it. “How long will it be before that begins to bore them, Nellie?” he remarked casually, as though he were speaking to a girl he had known always, in a cozy corner at a tea. The answer was unexpected and it did not come from Nellie. He heard the scraping of feet, and immediately a man loomed against the sky not thirty feet away and began sweeping the neighboring stacks with an electric lamp; its rays struck Burgess smartly across the face. He hung and jumped; and as he let go the light flashed again and an automatic barked. “Lord! It’s Hill!” he gasped. As he struck the ground he experienced a curious tingle on the left side of his head above the ear--it was as though a hot needle had been drawn across it. The detective yelled and fired another shot to attract the attention of the other pursuers. Nellie was already down and ready for flight. She grasped Burgess’s arm and hurried him over and between unseen obstacles. There seemed to be no method of locomotion to which he was not urged--climbing, crawling, running, edging in between seeming Gibraltars of lumber. From a low pile she leaped to a higher, and on up until they were thirty feet above the ground; then it seemed to amuse her to jump from pile to pile until they reached earth again. Running over uneven lumber piles in the dark, handicapped by an absurd ulster, does not make for ease, grace or security--and wet lumber has a disagreeable habit of being slippery. They trotted across an open space and crept under a shingle shed. “Good place to rest,” panted Nellie--and he dropped down beside her on a bundle of shingles. The rain fell monotonously upon the low roof of their shelter. “That’s a pretty picture,” said the girl dreamily. Burgess, breathing like a husky bellows, marveled at her. What had interested her was the flashing of electric lamps from the tops of the lumber piles, where the pursuers had formed a semicircle and were closing in on the spot where the quarry had disappeared. They were leaping from stack to stack, shooting their lamps ahead.