Some twenty years before, when I was a mere child (the story came to me later), a great quarrel had taken place between two citizens of the old burg. They were partners, before the dispute, in a flourishing business, and the one of them who was ultimately worsted in the argument had been the benefactor of the man that triumphed. The quarrel rose on some question as to the terms of their mutual agreement, the partner who had been taken into the firm out of kindness claiming the right to oust the other by a certain date. The technicalities of the matter were involved in a mass of obscurity, but anyhow they went to law about it and the beneficiary won the case. The other was forced to retire, to all intents and purposes a ruined man, but he bore with him a possession that no judge could deprive him of--a deep, deadly hatred against the reptile whose fortunes he had made and who had so poisonously bitten him in return. He was heard to declare that alive or dead he would have his enemy by the heel some day, and no one doubted but that he meant it. Some months later, as the successful partner was returning home from his office one winter night, a pistol shot cracked behind him and he was constrained to measure his portly figure in the slush of the street. There his late partner came and looked upon him and gave a weltering grunt, like a satisfied hog, and kicked the body and went his way. But his victim was scarcely finished with in the manner he fancied. The ball, glancing from a lamp-post, had smashed the bones of his right heel only, and he was merely feigning death. When his enemy was retired he crawled home on his hands and knees, leaving a sluggish trail of crimson behind him, and, once safe in the fortress of his household, sent for the doctor and an inspector of police. The would-be murderer was of course captured, tried and sentenced to a twenty-year term of penal servitude. He made no protest and took it all in the nature of things. But, before leaving the dock, he repeated--looking with a quiet smile on his becrutched and bandaged oppressor sitting pallidly in the court--his remarkable formula about “alive or dead” having him by the heel some day. Then he disappeared from Winton’s ken and for sixteen years the town knew him no more, and his victim prospered exceedingly and walked far into the regions of wealth and honor, for all a painful limp that seemed as if it should have impeded his advance.