"You are getting to be as bad as all the others," was the greeting he got from the high driving-seat. "You haven't been at Mereside for an age--only once since the night you took Mr. Griswold away from us. By the way, what has become of Mr. Griswold? He doesn't show himself in public much oftener than you do." "I think he has been getting to work on his writing," said Raymer, good-naturedly apologizing for his friend. "He'll come down out of the clouds after a little." And then, before he could stop it, out came the bit of unchartered information: "I understand he dines at Doctor Bertie's to-night." The young iron-founder was looking up into the eyes of beguiling when he said this, and, being a mere man, he wondered what made them flash and then grow suddenly fathomless and brooding. "When you see him, tell him that we are still on earth over at Mereside," said the magnate's daughter pertly; and a moment later Raymer was free to keep his appointment with Griswold. All in all, the little interruption had consumed no more than five minutes, but the time interval was sufficient to form another link in the chain of Wednesday incidents. For, as Raymer was turning out of Main Street into Shawnee, he narrowly missed running over a heavy-set man with a dark face and drooping mustaches; a pedestrian whose preoccupation seemed so great as to make him quite oblivious to street crossings and passing vehicles until Raymer pulled his horse back into the shafts and shouted. When the man looked up, Raymer recognized him as the stranger from the South who was stopping at the Winnebago House and who gave himself out as a Louisiana lumberman open to conviction on the subject of Minnesota pine lands as an investment. But he had no means of knowing that Broffin's momentary preoccupation was chargeable to a fruitless interview lately concluded; or that in driving away to the house three squares up the street he was bridging the narrow gap between a man-hunter and his quarry--a gap which had suddenly grown into a chasm for the man-hunter himself. One more small coincidence will serve to total the items on the Wednesday page. If Broffin had not stopped to look after the man who had so nearly run him down, he might not have been crossing Main Street in front of the Winnebago at the precise instant when Miss Grierson, with young Dahlgren in the second seat of the trap, came around the square and pulled up to let her horse drink at the public fountain. "Who is that Bitter-Creekish-looking man crossing over to the Winnebago House?" asked Miss Grierson of her seatmate, indicating Broffin with a wave of the whip, and skilfully making the query sound like the voicing of the idlest curiosity. "Fellow named Broffin, from Louisiana," said Dahlgren, who, as assistant editor of the _Daily Wahaskan_, knew everybody. "Says he's in the lumber business down there, but, 'I doubt it,' said the carpenter, and shed a bitter tear."