“As a man sows, Clark!” he said.  “You sowed hell for a number of people once.”

Bassett had to restrain an impulse to kick him out of the door.  When he had gone Bassett turned to Dick with assumed lightness.

“Well,” he said, “here we are, all dressed up and nowhere to go!”

He wandered around the room, restless and disappointed.  He knew, and Dick knew, that they had come to the end of the road, and that nothing lay beyond.  In his own unpleasant way Fred Gregory had made a case for his sister that tied their hands, and the crux of the matter had lain in his final gibe:  “As a man sows, Clark, so shall he reap.”  The moral issue was there.

“I suppose the Hines story goes by the board, eh?” he commented after a pause.

“Yes.  Except that I wish I’d known about him when I could have done something.  He’s my half-brother, any way you look at it, and he had a rotten deal.  Sometimes a man sows,” he added, with a wry smile, “and the other fellow reaps.”

Bassett went out after that, going to the office on the chance of a letter from Melis, but there was none.  When he came back he found Dick standing over a partially packed suitcase, and knew that they had come to the end of the road indeed.

“What’s the next step?” he asked bluntly.

“I’ll have to leave here.  It’s too expensive.”

“And after that, what?”

“I’ll get a job.  I suppose a man is as well hidden here as anywhere.  I can grow a beard-that’s the usual thing, isn’t it?”

Bassett made an impatient gesture, and fell to pacing the floor.  “It’s incredible,” he said.  “It’s monstrous.  It’s a joke.  Here you are, without a thing against you, and hung like Mahomet’s coffin between heaven and earth.  It makes me sick.”

He went home that night, leaving word to have any letters for L 22 forwarded, but without much hope.  His last clutch of Dick’s hand had a sort of desperate finality in it, and he carried with him most of the way home the tall, worn and rather shabby figure that saw him off with a smile.

By the next afternoon’s mail he received a note from New York, with a few words of comment penciled on it in Dick’s writing.  “This came this evening.  I sent back the money.  D.”  The note was from Gregory and had evidently enclosed a one-hundred dollar bill.  It began without superscription:  “Enclosed find a hundred dollars, as I imagine funds may be short.  If I were you I’d get out of here.  There has been considerable excitement, and you know too many people in this burg.”

Bassett sat back in his chair and studied the note.

“Now why the devil did he do that?” he reflected.  He sat for some time, thinking deeply, and he came to one important conclusion.  The story Gregory had told was the one which was absolutely calculated to shut off all further inquiry.  They had had ten years; ten years to plan, eliminate and construct; ten years to prepare their defense, in case Clark turned up.  Wasn’t that why Gregory had been so assured?  But he had not been content to let well enough alone; he had perhaps overreached himself.