Two hours later, when he had got back to Hunston, after an interminable nightmare of running over rough ground with unaccustomed limbs, and stumbling heavily to earth, and rising up to struggle again, he had learned to what uses his enemies had put that absence. Smith had related the story in the fastness of his office, and in wholly different guise from that which it wore next morning in the columns of his newspaper. And Ryan, listening, had slowly calmed, calmed to the still fury of implacable hate. But he and Smith had quarreled violently. He was for publishing the story of his taking off in type as black as the dastardly act. Smith had a difficult time in holding him down, however much he pointed out that Ryan had no shadow of proof against his new adversary on the yacht, and that public sympathy in an affair of this sort was always with the successful. In the end Smith had carried his point, because he was, of those two men, both the more wise and the more resolute. But this morning they had conferred again and quarreled even more bitterly. Yet Ryan, plotting in the window of his splendid gin-palace, his eye always sweeping the evening street as though a-search, was not thinking of the young editor now. Two other policies for the days to come monopolized his attention. One of these was crushing victory at the polls. The other was revenge. Probably in thinking of these, he put them at the moment in reverse order. "Damn him!" he suddenly exploded: and it was not little Hare that he cursed. "Damn his soul!" In the next breath, the boss suddenly ducked, and disappeared from the half-curtained window altogether. A moment later, he appeared outside his swinging door, yawning and stretching himself, as one who, wearied with the tedium of life indoors, would see what beguilement might await him abroad. The boss looked first up the street and permitted his beady eye to range casually over the view. Then his gaze came slowly down and rested in time upon the person of James Hackley, now almost directly opposite. The boss's countenance lit up with a smile of pleased surprise. "Why, hello, Jim!" he called out. "Where you been hidin' yourself lately? Ain't seen you for a week o' Sundays. Come across and pass the time of day!" Mr. Hackley, who had been debating whether or not he should pause for inspiration at the Ottoman, and had just virtuously declared for the negative, shambled over. Ryan eyed him sympathetically. "You look kind o' played out, Jim. What you been doin' with yourself? Come in and take a drop of somethin' to hearten you up some. On the house." "Well," said Mr. Hackley, unable to resist the novel fascination of liquoring gratis, "just a weeny mite for to cut the dust out o' my windpipe."