He turned from the other, ignoring the fumbling hand that would have taken his own in its grasp; and, resting his elbows on his desk, he put his face in his cupped palms and spoke from between his fingers: “I ask you again--please go away!” When Judge Priest had finished telling me the story, in form much as I have retold it here, he sat back, drawing hard on his pipe, which had gone out. Bewildered, I pondered the climax of the tale. “But if Mr. Felsburg really wanted to get even,” I said at length, “what made him give that man the money?” The Judge scratched a match on a linen-clad flank and applied the flame to the pipe-bowl; and then, between puffs, made answer slowly. “Son,” he said, “you jest think it over in your spare time. I reckin mebbe when you're a little older the answer'll come to you.” And sure enough, when I was a little older it did. CHAPTER IV. THE GARB OF MEN THEY used to say--and how long ago it seems since they used to say it!--that the world would never see another world war. They said that the planet, being more or less highly civilised with regard to its principal geographical divisions, and in the main peaceably inclined, would never again send forth armed millions to slit the throats of yet other armed millions. That was what they said back yonder in 1912 and 1913, and in the early part of 1914 even. But something happened--something unforeseen and unexpected and unplausible happened. And, at that, the structure of amity between the nations which so carefully had been built up on treaty and pledge, so shrewdly tongued-and-grooved by the promises of Christian statesmen, so beautifully puttied up by the prayers of Christian men, so excellently dovetailed and mortised and rabbeted together, all at once broke down, span by span; just as it is claimed that a fiddler who stations himself in the middle of a bridge and plays upon his fiddle a certain note may, if only he keeps up his playing long enough, play down that bridge, however strong and well-piered it is. We still regard the fiddle theory as a fable concocted upon a hypothesis of physics; but when that other thing happened--a thing utterly inconceivable--we so quickly adjusted ourselves to it that at once yesterday's impossibility became to-day's actuality and to-mor-row's certain prospect. This war having begun, they said it could not at the very most last more than a few months; that the countries immediately concerned could not, any of them, for very long withstand the drains upon them in men and money and munitions and misery; that the people at home would rise in revolt against the stupid malignity of it, if the men at the front did not.