She entered the hotel and found she still had no appetite for supper. She asked what time she could catch a train back to the Junction. “Find yer man?” demanded Pat Whitney. “Oh, yes,” Madelaine answered cheerily enough. “The person I hoped to find isn’t here any longer.” VI Twenty-four hours later she stood in her apartment and took down the copper frame from the wall. “Married!—A wife and little girl!—_In jail!_ And all the time I might have asked Bernice! Oh, well!” She laughed and called herself a silly fool. She ripped off the backboard of the copper frame and extracted the poem. She found a photograph of her mother and cut it to fit. The frame restored, she picked up the mapping with the slip of news-print pasted thereon. She started to tear it. She did tear it once across. She had started another tear when she stopped. She smoothed the torn pieces out. She found an envelope that would hold them and tucked it away in a bottom drawer. “Oh, why did I go?” she cried, as she turned once again to her work. “I shot my Bird of Paradise!” She fell to thinking,—dry-throated, hard-eyed. So Gordon Ruggles wanted to marry her, did he? The rotter! Romance! What was Romance? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER II GROPING TERRIBLY I Into the town lock-up came Caleb Gridley. And Caleb Gridley was one mad man. It was four-thirty of a gray afternoon in March. The local police force tilted back in its chair with its feet on its desk and perused the day’s issue of the _Telegraph_ with the official corncob of the department exquisitely odoriferous and the atmosphere of headquarters suggesting gas masks, cheese knives and quickly lowered windows. “So this is how you earn taxpayers’ money!” snarled the tanner. “Where’s young Forge?” The police force lowered its paper and blinked at old Caleb in stupefaction. The last known address of the tanner had been Los Angeles. “Where’d you come from now?” it demanded weakly. “None o’ your damn business where I come from now. What’s the idea o’ jailin’ an innocent youngster like Natie Forge for his old man’s cussedness? That’s what I wanner know and I’m gonna find out. Somebody’s goin’ to answer for this—and they’re goin’ to answer to me!” The police force gradually recovered from this astonishing levitation of the Gridley corpus across three thousand continental miles. It became human and a servant of the public, meaning Caleb. “You needn’t blame me. I ain’t got nothin’ against him. All I do is carry out the law.” “Well, carry it out now and never bring it back. Where’s the boy? Got him here?” “Sure I got him here. Wanner see him?” “What the devil do you think I’m here for—to gaze at your homely mug, maybe?”