SUSPICION Shipman, after the conclusion of the trial of Terry O'Brien, spent most of the time chopping wood. Trees that had been felled during the spring he sawed into lengths. Splitting and piling into neat kindling not only kept his muscles elastic, but somehow, as the wood piles mounted, gave him a primal sense of the old pioneers' fight against the cold and winter. That this wood found its way to the house of a needy widow with a little peaked boy about Pudge's age was one of Shipman's satisfactions. Long afterward, in the winter, the lawyer would wake of cold nights and think of the wind howling around the little valley house and of the center of heat that fed by his hands made it possible for two helpless people to escape that other awful Hand of Cold. To souls like Watts, intent upon some high conception of honor and goodness, bent upon making themselves into a fit home for the Spirit or some part of Spirit that possesses them, there come moments of awful despair and groping. The lawyer, sawing until his back burned with sore muscles, was knowing this despair to its utmost, for the golden currents, the flowered tides of the Hudson River summer had nearly swamped him. The last weeks on the mountain top had been as those of a starving man surrounded with fruits and delicious spicy drinks--the bleak sense of failure, of dusty loneliness, of hurrying years and barren paths--his dry desert had opened out before him! The man, with unutterable sense of hungry flesh and spirit, knew himself as one who inevitably had gotten into a barren trail. His inner eyes, panic stricken, got the strange vision of an ending--a going-out-of-the-world with no continuing strain of him left behind. No eyes that should be torched from his eyes; no lips that should turn his stuff of life into better words; no hand that like his should seek in darkness to find the keys to human breasts; no wife-comrade to speak comrade-words in the dark of loneliness and bafflement; no home that should make the abiding spot in a shifting world; no child; no race; no blood sent forward; no continuing city. Shipman, halting with the perspiration streaming down his bare back, drew on a sweater. "Dear old Bowwow"--the lawyer sat down on his usual log. He pulled the dog over to him. "Tuck, let me pour this last howl into your comfortable and safe ear, and then I'm done. I'm haunted, old chap, haunted with a horrible feeling of ending--and--and--I want to go on----