"You chaps have done me a big favor to-night," said Locke, a little later, when he and his companions were safely out of the Austrian Village, "and I won't forget it, either. Now let's finish the evening the way we began it." Anderson, Rankin, and Burroughs, to conceal their nervousness, pleaded bodily fatigue, while Anthony also declared that he had enjoyed himself sufficiently for one night and intended to go home and to bed. "That episode rather got on my nerves," he acknowledged. "Mine, too," assented Locke. "That's why you mustn't leave me. I just won't let you. Remember, you agreed to see me off." "'S'right, fellows," Higgins joined in. "We agreed to put him aboard and we must do it. Don't break up the party, Kirk." "I don't want to go home," Ringold muttered. "It's a breach of hospitality to go home," Higgins insisted. "Besides, after my bloody 'ncounter with that limb of the law I need a stimulant. You must look after me." "I shall tuck you in your little bed," Kirk told him. But Higgins would hear to nothing of the sort, protesting that he was in honor bound to conduct his old friend Locke to the steamer, and Anthony feared that without his protection some harm might befall his irresponsible and impulsive companion. Candor requires it to be said that he did hesitate, arguing long with the limp-legged Higgins; but Locke was insistent, the others grew impatient of the delay, and in the end he allowed himself to be persuaded. It is often through just such sudden, inconsequent decisions, influenced perhaps by the merest trifles, that a man's life is made great or small; just such narrow forkings of the trail may divert him into strange adventurings, or into worlds undreamed of. Kirk Anthony, twenty-six years old, with a heritage at hand, and with an average capacity for good or evil, chose the turning that led him swiftly from the world he knew into an alien land. Numbed as they were by the excesses of the evening, it did not take the young men long to lose all clear and vivid remembrance of this recent experience; for the time had come when Nature was offering her last resistance, and their brains were badly awhirl. Of all the four, Jefferson Locke was the only one who retained his wits to the fullest--a circumstance that would have proved him the owner of a remarkably steady head had it not been for the fact that he had cunningly substituted water for gin each time it came his turn to drink. It was a commentary upon the state of his companions that they did not notice the limpid clearness of his beverage.