The young man sat silent, frowning into space; then: 

“I tell you plainly enough that I have come here to argue with two men at the end of a pistol; and—­you tell me I’m in love.  By what logic—­”

“It is written in your face, Mr. Burke—­in your eyes, in every feature, every muscle’s contraction, every modulation of your voice.  My tables, containing six hundred classified superficial phenomena peculiar to all human emotions, have been compiled and scientifically arranged according to Bertillon’s system.  It is an absolutely accurate key to every phase of human emotion, from hate, through all its amazingly paradoxical phenomena, to love, with all its genera under the suborder—­all its species, subspecies, and varieties.”

He leaned back, surveying the young man with kindly amusement.

“You talk of pistol range, but you are thinking of something more fatal than bullets, Mr. Burke.  You are thinking of love—­of the first, great, absorbing, unreasoning passion that has ever shaken you, blinded you, seized you and dragged you out of the ordered path of life, to push you violently into the strange and unexplored!  That is what stares out on the world through those haunted eyes of yours, when the smile dies out and you are off your guard; that is what is hardening those flat, clean bands of muscle in jaw and cheek; that is what those hints of shadow mean beneath the eye, that new and delicate pinch to the nostril, that refining, almost to sharpness, of the nose, that sensitive edging to the lips, and the lean delicacy of the chin.”

He bent slightly forward in his chair.

“There is all that there, Mr. Burke, and something else—­the glimmering dawn of desperation.”

“Yes,” said the other, “that is there.  I am desperate.”

“Exactly.  Also you wear two revolvers in a light, leather harness strapped up under your armpits,” said the Tracer, laughing.  “Take them off, Mr. Burke.  There is nothing to be gained in shooting up Mr. Smiles or converting Mr. Gandon into nitrates.”

“If it is a matter where one man can help another,” the Tracer added simply, “it would give me pleasure to place my resources at your command—­without recompense—­”

“Mr. Keen!” said Burke, astonished.

“Yes?”

“You are very amiable; I had not wished—­had not expected anything except professional interest from you.”

“Why not?  I like you, Mr. Burke.”

The utter disarming candor of this quiet, elderly gentleman silenced the younger man with a suddenness born of emotions long crushed, long relentlessly mastered, and which now, in revolt, shook him fiercely in every fiber.  All at once he felt very young, very helpless in the world—­that same world through which, until within a few weeks, he had roved so confidently, so arrogantly, challenging man and the gods themselves in the pride of his strength and youth.

But now, halting, bewildered, lost amid the strange maze of byways whither impulse had lured and abandoned him, he looked out into a world of wilderness and unfamiliar stars and shadow shapes undreamed of, and he knew not which way to turn—­not even how to return along the ways his impetuous feet had trodden in this strange and hopeless quest of his.