When Brainard awoke the next morning the train was moving through the Mojave desert. He lay for some time in his berth trying to collect himself and realize all that had brought him thither. It was intensely hot in the narrow compartment that he had taken, and when he raised the window curtains the sunlight reflected from the desert was blinding. As he drew down the curtain, his eyes fell upon the large bag beside him, and with a start the adventure of the previous day came over him. He laughed aloud as he recalled the different scenes in Krutzmacht’s office,—the stenographer’s suspicious reception, the endless bumping down the circular iron stairs with the bag and the valise, old Peters’s horrified face when he learned that the woman had been shut in the safe. Indeed, the entire week since he ran across the dying stranger at the door of his lodging seemed like a dream, peopled with faces and scenes that were extraordinarily vivid and of a kind he had never known in his narrow, sordid life. With a luxurious sense of new possession he went over all the little details of his journey across the continent. The week, he recognized, had been a liberal education to his mentally starved self. But what was he going to do now? Hitherto he had been carried along easily on a wave of events that demanded instant action, and he had not worried about the future. Even when the reporter had given him the news of Krutzmacht’s death in the hospital he was already too deep in the affair to stop, although he realized that the crude power of attorney, which had been his sole legal protection in looting the safe, had lost all its force the instant its maker ceased to breathe. After that, he was, as the stenographer had said,—merely a burglar. Yet he had not hesitated to obey the dead man’s will rather than the law. But now? Thus far he had been executing Krutzmacht’s direct orders, with an unconscious sense of a living personality guiding him, taking the real responsibility for his deeds. The stranger who had been stricken near his door had seized upon him as the nearest available tool, had imposed on him his will, and had sent him hurrying across the continent on an errand the full nature of which was even yet a mystery to Brainard. And he had obeyed the dying stranger with a curious faith in his reasonableness,—had responded to him pliantly as to the command of a natural master. But now that this master was dead, the situation was altogether different. Should he still attempt to execute his scarcely intelligible wishes?