He had learned enough about Krutzmacht these last few days to understand that the old man had been engaged in a life-and-death struggle for the control of large properties,—one of those peculiarly modern duels fought with bankers’ credits and court decrees. Apparently his enemies, more powerful than he—at least with larger resources at their command—had been closing in on him for the final grapple, which threatened utterly to ruin him. He had gone to New York to raise the funds with which to evade impending bankruptcy and loss of control of the properties which he had created. Brainard now fully believed that Krutzmacht had succeeded in this, and that he had been stricken at last by the hand of a hired thug and thrown on the street to die. But even in the torture of his final convulsions the old man had exerted his powerful will to defeat these cowardly foes, and had lingered on in life just long enough to enable his agent to snatch the prey from their jaws. What now was he to do with this bag of documents and securities that lay there, its fat sides bulging in proof of his deed? The obvious thing would be to seek the nearest federal authority, deposit his plunder, and allow an impartial court to settle the dispute between the dead man and his enemies. A week before, such a timid and safe course of conduct would have seemed to Brainard the only possible action to take. Now he found it not in the least to his taste, and dismissed it without further consideration. He had become an altogether different person, even in this week, from that beaten man who had stumbled homeward from a petty defeat through the New York streets in the gloom of an April day. For this one brief week in all the years he could remember he had been alive—fully alive—and with his hand now in the thick of this vital web he was not willing to withdraw. The one who had used him as a tool was dead, but his strong will lived on in him, not yet fulfilled, and to that strong will whose only hope of fulfillment lay in him—the chance stranger—a new sense of loyalty responded. He would not desert the old man in the present crisis, no matter what the merely legal aspects of his situation were. Already the stranger’s will like fertile seed was germinating within this fresh soil. “Take everything,” Krutzmacht said. “Take it all to Berlin.” That he would do if he could. But then what? There was a strange name—Mell or Melody—that the dying man had been at such pains to enunciate. What had Melody to do with the matter? Was it the name of a person? Or an institution? He exercised all his ingenuity in trying to invent a reasonable explanation of this one word. Possibly Krutzmacht had tried to pronounce Mendel or Mendelssohn. Brainard thought there was a firm of German bankers with some such name. Light on the puzzle might be found in the contents of his bag, but at present he did not like to open it. At any rate Berlin must be his next destination.