Isaac looked down upon the man, whom he could have crushed with one swoop of his hands. The consternation of his first broken ideal possessed his heart. With a deadly pallor upon his face, he hurried up the clanging street, and the coarse laughter of brutes tingled in his ears. He swallowed this rough inhospitality, which is the hemlock that poisons country faith. Take from the pavement enough dust to cover the point of a penknife, and insert it in the arm of a child, and in a week it will be dead with tetanus. After this first encounter with the protectors of the people, Isaac felt as if his soul had been bedaubed with mud. He experienced a contracting tetanus of the heart. Had he not planned all the lonesome day to cast himself upon the kindness of the first policeman whom he saw? What other guide or protector was there left for him in the strange city? The rebuff which he had received half annihilated his intelligence. [Illustration: "AM--I--IMPRISONED BECAUSE I AM FRIENDLESS AND POOR? IS THIS YOUR LAW?"] Isaac could no more put up at the great hotel he saw on his right than the majority of us can take a trip to Japan. Isaac hurried on. Why did he leave home? The fear of a great city is more teasing than the terror of a wilderness or of a desert. There the trees or the rocks or the sand befriends you. But in the city the penniless stranger has no part in people or home or doorsteps. Every one's heart is against him. It is the anguish of hunger amid plenty, the rattling of thirst amid rivers of wine, the serration of loneliness amid humanity thicker than barnacles upon a wharf pile. Such a terror--not of cowardice, but of friendlessness--seized Isaac Masters, and a foreboding that he might possibly fail after all made his spine tingle. Still he drove on. He had passed through the main street--or across it--he did not know--until the electric lights cast dim shadows, until stately banks had given way to unkempt brick fronts, until the glittering bar-rooms had been exchanged for vulgar saloons--until-- Masters came to a sudden halt, and dropping his bag, uttered a loud cry. The curtained door of a grog-shop opened upon him. A hatless man dashed out, swearing horribly, and all but fell into Isaac's arms. With a cry of terror the runner dodged the pedestrian, and bolted down the street. Not twenty feet behind him bounded his pursuer. By this time the country boy had slipped into the shadow of the building, where he could see without being seen. In that moment Isaac caught sight of a dazed group of men within, and the profile of the pursuer against the hot light of the saloon. He saw a brute holding a pistol in his out-stretched hand. Before Isaac understood the situation, the weapon shot out two flames and two staccato reports. These were followed by the intense silence which is like the darkness upon the heels of lightning.