With the New Year had descended upon John Flint an obsessing and tormenting spirit which made him by fits and starts moody, depressed, nervous, restless, or wholly silent and abstracted.  I have known him to come in just before dawn, snatch a few hours’ sleep, and be off again before day had well set in, though he must already have been far afield, for Kerry heeled him with lagging legs and hanging head.  Or he would shut himself up, and refusing himself to all callers, fall into a cold fury of concentrated effort, sitting at his table hour after hour, tireless, absorbed, accomplishing a week’s overdue work in a day and a night.  Often his light burned all night through.  Some of the most notable papers bearing his name, and research work of far-reaching significance, came from that workroom then—­as if lumps of ambergris had been tossed out of a whirlpool.

All this time, too, he was working in conjunction with the Washington Bureau, experimenting with remedies for the boll-weevil, and fighting the plague of the cattle-tick.  This, and the other outside work in which he was so immensely interested, could not be allowed to hang fire.  Like many another, he found himself for his salvation caught in the great human net he himself had helped to spin.  It was not only the country people who held him.  Gradually, as he passed to and from on his way among them, and became acquainted with their children, there had sprung up a most curious sort of understanding between the Butterfly Man on the one side, and the half-articulate foreigners in the factory and the sly secretive mill-workers on the other.

People I had never been able to get at humanly, people who resisted even Madame, not only chose to open their doors but their mouths, to Meester Fleent.  Uncouth fumbling men, slip-shod women, dirty-faced children, were never dumb and suspicious or wholly untruthful and evasive, where the Butterfly Man was concerned.  He was one to whom might be told, without shame, fear, or compunction, the plain, blunt, terrible truth. He understood.

“I wish you’d look up Petronovich’s boy, father,” he might tell me, or, “Madame, have a woman-talk with Lovena Smith’s girl at the mills, will you?  Lovena’s a fool, and that girl’s up against things.”  And we went, and wondered, afterwards, what particularly tender guardian angels kept close company with our Butterfly Man.

Then occurred the great event which put Meester Fleent in a place apart in the estimation of all Appleboro, forever settled his status among the mill-hands and the “hickeys,” and incidentally settled a tormenting doubt of himself in his own mind.  I mean the settling of the score against Big Jan.