“No; I didn’t mean that. I mean the fact that not all of your money could help me to prove what isn’t so. I took the money from the bank; stole it, you’ll say, though I chose to call it squaring accounts with Hiram Witherspoon, who had kept me on starvation wages for years. I took it and got away with it.” Once again Philip’s heart skipped a beat and stopped, and for a moment the room whirled in dizzying circles for him. “You--you stole it?” he faltered, in a voice that he scarcely recognized as his own. Then, helplessly: “I--I don’t understand.” “You wouldn’t,” was the curt reply, “you are too much of a Sanborn. They never kick over the traces.” A pause, and then: “You’d never understand in a month of Sundays, Phil. Your grandfather was a hard man and a hypocrite. He never took his hand off my collar until after I was a man grown--bull-necked me into everything I ever did, even to my marriage with your mother, forgetting that I had the same blood in me that he had in him. He lived a double life until he died, and thought nobody knew; but I knew, and I did the same until the time came when I could help myself and bolt--with the other woman.” “Oh, my God!” Philip groaned, and covered his face with his hands to shut out the sight of the man who sat opposite, calmly indifferent, as it seemed, to the havoc he had wrought. When Philip looked up it was to say harshly: “Where is the other woman now?” “She is here--in Denver. She does a turn now and then at the Corinthian when the cards run queer for me.” Philip staggered to his feet in a desolate rage. “Then I’m the son of a thief, a gambler and the paramour of a kept woman!” he blazed out madly. “That’s the name I bear, is it?--the reward I get for believing in you, like the damned fool that I was, when everybody else was against you?” He shook his fist in his father’s face. “Do you know what you’ve done to me? You’ve killed my soul--that’s what you’ve done!--blasted my faith in all humankind! Let me get out of here, before I--Oh, God!...” He choked and clapped his hands to his face, stumbling toward the door. As he fumbled for the knob and twisted it, the chill voice behind him said: “You had no call to chase me, and you needn’t worry about the name. I haven’t called myself John Trask since I left New Hampshire. And one thing more: I’ve put a bullet through a man before this for saying less than you said a minute ago. That’s all, I guess.” Philip groped his way through the upper passage and down the two flights of stairs to the sidewalk. The reaction from the fit of mad rage set in as he stepped into the open air and he went suddenly weak and nauseated. The Tabor Building was just opposite, and in the alley beside it he saw the light of the saloon at the back. Two minutes later he had staggered across the street, up the alley and into the lighted bar-room, which proved to be momentarily empty of other patrons. “Whiskey!” he gasped, leaning against the bar. “I’m sick!”