Purdick never knew afterward how he managed to keep on talking to the girl after this horrible revelation had battered its way into his brain. The thing he remembered most clearly was the tremendous feeling of relief he had when Ollie came up with half a dozen of the fellows from his fraternity house, and he――Purdick――was able to slip aside and, as you might say, efface himself. One thing, and only one, was clear in his mind; he must never spend another penny of the money, and what he had already spent must be paid back. From the way he looked at it, it was blood-money――nothing more or less. Fifteen minutes later Larry found his room-mate at the stairhead, quietly making his escape. “Making a sneak, are you?” said Larry, clapping him on the shoulder. “Well, so am I, if anybody should ask you. Got to go home and pack in a hurry. It’s ‘Westward Ho!’ for us on the early morning train.” “You and Dick, you mean?” “M-m, yes; for Dick and me.” “I’ll help you pack,” Purdick offered, and not another word was said until Larry was turning on the lights in the room they had been sharing for something like half a year. Then it was that Purdick, dropping wearily into a chair, said his say. “I’m not blaming you any, Larry; I guess you’ve been doing only what you had to do. But if you had told me at first that it was Ollie McKnight who was putting up the money for me, I’d have died before I would have taken it.” “Why, Purdy!” exclaimed Larry. And then: “Did Ruth McKnight tell you?” Purdick nodded. “She didn’t know that I didn’t know. Neither did she know that my father was killed in the Steelville Furnace at the time when her father and Ollie’s was the general manager.” “Well?” said Larry, failing to see the connection. “Don’t you see?” said Purdick harshly. “Wasn’t he my father’s murderer? Wasn’t that loose plank and broken railing reported time and again, and nothing was done about them?” Now there had been a time, and not so many months back, at that, when Larry Donovan, taking a leaf out of the book of his experience as an apprentice and helper in the railroad shop at home where he had heard some of the men constantly talking about the greed of the capitalists and their disregard for the comfort and safety of their workmen, would have given at least a qualified assent to little Purdick’s bitter charge. But he was no longer the one-sided fellow he had been when his college mates had called him “The Offish Worm.” “Let’s see a minute,” he temporized. “Was it positively known that Mr. McKnight had been told about the loose board?” “Put yourself in his place,” was Purdick’s retort. “If you were in charge of a mill or a furnace where men’s lives were at stake, wouldn’t you consider it a part of your job to see such reports and act upon them?”