"In the prison," said the old physician, "I heard the end of a story that began many years ago and it has given me, somehow, a curious little certainty that none of us are accidents. Also, my son, it made me very humbly proud that such a manifest and certain proof should come to me that--secret-service operatives have guarded my steps."

The young man frowned with perplexity. "I don't understand-" he began.

"I do not understand, myself," said the old doctor. "But-I will tell you, if you like."

The young man nodded swiftly. "Please," he said; and the physician knocked the dottel from his pipe into the grate, filled and lighted the pipe, and smoked thoughtfully for a time, as though marshaling his recollections.

At length he began:

IT

T was a good many years ago, said the old doctor, that I had among my patients an elderly woman of some wealth, who lived on a lonely road, perhaps half a mile from any other house, and five or six miles from here.

She was, as I have said, wealthy. Her husband had been dead for some years, and she lived alone with an occasional visit from her nephew, a son of her husband's brother, whose parents were dead.

This woman-it is not necessary that I reveal her name distrusted the young man, perhaps rightfully; and as she grew older she decided that her original intention to bequeath her property to him was a mistake. He was dissolute, she believed; and she was a devout woman, and was not willing that she should furnish him the means of his own ruin.

About five years before her death, she made a will leaving to the young man only a few dollars. The remainder of her considerable estate was to go to a certain worthy charity. The will was drawn by her attorney, in my presence, and I was one of the two witnesses. The other witness, an old woman who had been housekeeper for my patient for many years, died a year after the will was drawn. The attorney, who drew the document, was killed in an accident two years later. At the time of which I speak, therefore, I was the only other person, besides herself, who knew of the existence of the will. She kept it at her home, and by her request, the attorney had retained no copy of the document.

This explanation may be tedious; but it is a necessary groundwork for what followed.

One night, in March, I was summoned by telephone to come to the woman's home. It was a bitter, rainy night, and the long drive did not attract me; furthermore, I knew the woman was not at the time seriously ill. Nevertheless, the

summons was insistent, and I obeyed it. In those days, automobiles had not come to help us on such occasions; but my horse was a stout animal. and I fastened the curtains about my buggy and drew the waterproof robe up to my chin and set

out.

However, even thus protected. I suffered severely. It was as dark as nothingness. My horse was a bay; and even his rump was invisible to me as I sat in the seat of the buggy. The rain was like a cloud-burst; and, to make matters worse, the wind was almost directly in my face. Thus the rain and the flying drift were blown in over the robe, and, even through my heavy coat, I was drenched and cold. The journey was not a pleasant one. I passed gradually outside the town, left the last houses behind me, and struck the mud of the country roads. The wheels of the buggy lurched into puddles and slid in the thick mud, and stuck and pulled loose with little sounds like those made by the removal of a cork from a bottle. I could hear the feet of my horse plunging through the mud, but I could not see his efforts. It was folly to attempt to guide him; and so I let the beast pick his own way through the night.

In the end, he brought me safely to my destination, and I saw a lantern in the carriage shed to guide me. I drove in and blanketed the horse and made him fast. He was of an independent turn of mind, and had, now and then, left me at the home of some patient and trotted off to his home stable. I had no wish to be left afoot on such a night, and I was careful to fasten him securely.

Then, taking the lantern, I made my way to the house. Even in that brief passage, the dreadful thrust and buffeting of the wind and rain seemed to sap my strength. I found a side door. It opened under my hand and I entered.

The woman who had sent for me was alone in a room on the lower floor. I knew she had no servant, and so did not knock or summon her to the door. When she saw me in the doorway, from the room where she was sitting, she rose hurriedly and came toward me, and I saw distress and terror in her eyes.

Now, there was little for her to fear in all the world. Though she was wealthy, it was well known that the furnishings of this house were meager, and that she never kept valuables here. It was her custom to leave all her doors and windows unfastened; for, as she often told me:

"If anybody thinks they'll find anything here, I want them to feel free to try it."

She could not be in fear of thieves; she was a woman of sense and courage; and so, I was at a loss to account for the manifest anxiety which distressed her. She did not leave me long in

doubt, however. I laid my wet coat over a chair before her open fire, sat down beside her, and she said abruptly:

"Doctor Price, James is here."

James was the young man, the son of her husband's brother, the dissolute and reckless creature she had determined to disinherit.

"Has he distressed you?" I asked.

"He has frightened me," she said frankly. "He is intoxicated."

"He is in the house?"

"In his room upstairs," she assented. "We dined together. He had been drinking before that. I reproached him for it."

I nodded, listening in spite of myself for any sound from the young man in the upper room. But the wind was so blustery, and the rain's tattoo on the windows was so constant, that if he made any noise it was instantly smothered in the tumult of the night.

"He jeered at me when I begged him not to drink any more to-night," said the woman, my patient. "He angered me; and I told him-perhaps it was unwise to do so-of the will which you witnessed, Doctor Price, in which he receives only a few dollars."

"That was not wise," I agreed.

"He was furious," she assented. "He cursed me, and he swore he would even the score with me."

Now, while this woman was not ill, her heart was in a serious condition. She had worked very hard in her youth, and the physical effort had weakened her. She was in no immediate danger of death; yet, at the same time, shock or fright might lead to a seizure of the gravest nature. I determined to speak to the young man before leaving the house, and warn him of this danger. The woman seemed to guess what I was thinking.

"He frightened me, and I felt a little sick, Doctor Price," she said. "I told him you had advised me to avoid shock or fright. He laughed outright at that, and said: 'Sooner you go, the better I'm pleased.'"

For a moment, there was no other sound except the trumpeting and thumping of the wind and rain. Then I heard a step on the upper floor and rose quickly. "I'll speak to him,” I said.

But she detained me. "Wait, please," she whispered. "There is something else."

I turned back and stood beside her; and she drew from the bosom of her dress a folded paper. I guessed what it was, recognized it as the will she had drawn years before. She handed it to me. I took it, stupidly, and held it in my hands.

"Take it back with you," she whispered. "He knows it is in the house. I told him. He will try to get it."

I thrust the document into my pocket. "I will see that he does not get it,” I said. "But I shall stay here with you to-night."

She rose alertly, all the anxiety gone now, proud and erect; and she smiled at me. "Nonsense, Doctor Price," she said. "Take it with you and go. Once it is gone, I have nothing to fear. I am not afraid of a drunken puppy-not for myself. But I do not wish him to destroy that paper."

She was a strong, fine woman; and I saw that it was true. She was no longer afraid. She was more than a match for the young man in everything save physical strength; and she did not fear his strength. There was a compulsion in her eyes and in her voice as she told me to take the will and go, which I could not resist.

"Deliver that, in the morning, to the trustees of the hospital," she said, naming the institution which was to receive the bulk of her estate. "Warn them to preserve it carefully till my death."

"But I will speak to the young man before I go," I protested.

S

HE shook her head. "There is no need," she said. “Once that document is gone, he can do no harm here."

There was nothing for me to do but obey her. She guided me to the door, and I took the lantern which I had brought in with me and bade her good-night. We heard no further sound from the upper floor. I opened the door quickly and slipped out and closed it before the rain could beat in; but she opened it and stood there, silhouetted in the lighted doorway, and watched me find my buggy and start my return journey. As I drove away, she was the last thing I saw; and I never saw her again alive. She died, quite peacefully, in her bed a few weeks later. An old woman who came to the house every morning with eggs, discovered her body.

As I started home that night, it seemed to me the fury of the rain had increased. A winter rain is so much more chill and drenching than a summer tempest. There had been snow on the ground when this downpour began, two days before. But now the snow was gone and the rain still continued.

The wind was blowing colder, however, so that I said to myself as the horse turned into the homeward road, "This is turning to snow to a blizzard."

The wind had shifted somewhat, during the evening. It had been in my face as I drove to the house. Now, instead of being at my back, it blew straight across the road. The curtains of the buggy sheltered me from its direct as

saults; but it made little eddies and whirls inside the curtains and brought flying drops that halfblinded me. The force of the wind was so great that, at times, it made the buggy sway dangerously; and I was prepared, more than once, to jump free if the vehicle should overturn.

Our homeward progress was slower than our coming had been; for the horse was weary, and, perhaps, the thick mud was stiffening a little as the wind grew colder. Once or twice something lashed me in the face and tingled there, and I guessed there were a few flying flakes of snow on the wind. The night had become somewhat brighter, either by a dispersing or a lightening of the clouds; and the struggling form of the horse was perceptible, while the fences and the trees along the road could be vaguely discerned.

About a quarter of a mile from the home of my patient, and more than half a mile from any other house, the road dipped into a little hollow at the bottom of which a brook tinkled audibly. This little hollow was wooded; and, as my horse began the descent, leaning back heavily to hold the carriage in the slippery mud, the shadows of the trees closed over us, so that the horse was lost in the darkness, and only the dim ribbon of sky between the foliage overhead was visible. The brook, at the bottom of the hollow, was swollen by the long rains; but as it was normally merely a thin trickle, its rise had done no harm. Most of the surplus ran safely under the little bridge. The remainder followed a backwater around a boulder beside the road, and flowed across the road a dozen feet from the bridge itself, where the road was lower than the bridge. The feet of my horse splashed into this swift, though shallow, current, and then reached the solid road again; and it was in the comparative lull after the noise of his hoofs in the water that I heard a faint shout from the wooded hollow below the road.

The horse must have heard it as well as I; for he stopped without a command from me, and even though I could not see him, I could almost feel the intensity of his posture as he stood with head turned and ears forward to listen.

FO

OR myself, though that faint cry had chilled me with an indefinable alarm, I leaned forward to listen for its repetition.

It came again, after a moment. It was curiously muffled, and was almost more a groan than a cry. I could not be sure the word, "Help!" was articulated by the person who cried out; but, certainly, it was an appeal for aid.

For an instant, I did not think of the will in my pocket though I had promised to protect it. Instinctively I threw back the heavy, waterproof

robe, and jumped over the wheel into the mud of the road. I hitched the horse to the bridge railing and halted to listen again; and after a few seconds I heard the cry repeated, more plainly now.

The road on which I stood was not a main thoroughfare. Beyond the home of my patient, it led only to a small village whose inhabitants were unlikely to be abroad on such a night as this. Even if they were on the road, it was difficult to imagine what could have taken any man or woman down the wooded hollow on such a night. These considerations returned to me as I hitched the horse; and, at the same time, I remembered the will in my pocket.

The cry was repeated. I reassured myself. No one had an interest in destroying this will save James Norman, the young man I had left in the house back along the road. No robber would be abroad on such a night as this; or, if he was, he would scarcely choose such an unfrequented road; nor would a robber lurk in the woods and groan when he might as easily halt a passenger in the road itself.

I laughed grimly at my own uneasiness, and when the low cry came again-it seemed, perhaps, fifty yards away, down wind-I turned back to the buggy and took one of the side lamps and lighted it in the shelter of my coat. The lamps had refused to burn, so fierce was the wind, while in their brackets beside the carriage, and I had let them go, trusting to the isolation of the road on which I traveled to preserve me from accident. Now, by sheltering this lamp. with my coat, I was able to throw a faint gleam a few feet ahead of me. I crossed the bridge to a little path which led down through the wooded hollow, and started forward, listening, now and then, for the cry which had attracted my attention.

It came as I left the road; and I heard it again, not twenty yards in front of me, a moment later. I pushed on and came into a little open space among the trees and looked about, casting the faint light of my lamp this way and that.

There was no one in sight-and I waited for that cry. It did not come. By and by, I called

out:

"Halloo! Who is it? Where are you?" Then I listened acutely, concentrating every faculty in my ears. There was no reply.

Suddenly and inexplicably, the faint tremors I had experienced left me. I was as bold as a lion. I stood in the middle of the little, open glade, looked about me and cast the light this way and that. There was no one there. I started out and circled through the woods for fifty yards in each direction. There was no one, (Continued on page 130)

T

HE cash drawer of the United States! It is in that tiny peninsula pocket of the Island of Manhattan known as Lower Broadway, New York City.

"Lower Broadway" means from Maiden Lane down to the Battery. It isn't wider than a good-sized farm, nor longer than a fair-sized village. But it holds daily, from ten until four o'clock, a hundred thousand of the biggest, busiest brains in the world.

The financial district, Wall Street, the banking section, the stock exchange, the clearing house, the moneyed center,-call it what you will, everybody in New York has the greatest respect for it, and everybody from everywhere else has the greatest curiosity to see it and go through it.

It is a wondrous place, this little bit of a strip of land with its narrow streets, crooked alleys, sky-scrapers, ponderous structures, hurrying motor-cars, clanging cars, scurrying men, running boys; with the sacred precincts of Trinity Church to hallow it in the memories and traditions of bygone times, when Lower Broadway was the vital entirety of New York; when what is now the City Hall Plaza was well up in the city; when Canal Street was away up town, and when Fourteenth Street was out in the country.

Still, it isn't the place that is so wonderful. It is the people, the occupants, the denizens. This is the countingroom of "the partner of the world" in everything financial, commercial, maritime, mercantile, speculative, progressive. This is the

cash drawer of the country, the Mecca of the continent, the throne of dictation of the making and unmaking of fortunes.

Throughout the world, the American represents the magnitude of money. Be he a tourist,

he is looked upon as a walking exchequer; be he a purchaser of goods, he is considered equal to dealings of any magnitude; be he a diplomatist, he is acknowledged to have material resources behind him which admit of no contempt, or

frivolous disregard. To come from America is to hail from the greatest money supply on earth. To go to America is to enter the precincts which forbid no man, whatever his nationality, to jump into the exciting competition which converts the bread winner of to-day into the opulent capitalist of to-morrow.

Nor is there anything inflated, or unreal, or romantic, appertaining to this gigantic proposition of untold wealth. Nor is there, in the very marrow of fact, anything but what is substantial, solid, permanent, dependable, associated with the stupendous moneyed interests of the American people. Money is the commodity with which and by which the wheels of the world's industries are lubricated.

Photograph by Brown Bros.

This little bit of land is worth more to the world than any other acre anywhere else.