“Ellis, how are you?  Good-evening, Dr. Elliot.  Ah!  Pistols?”

“Yes.  Have one?” invited Ellis smoothly.

“I brought one with me.”  He tugged at his pocket, whence emerged a cheap and shiny weapon.  Hal shuddered, recognizing it.  It was the revolver which Milly Neal had carried.

“So you’ve heard?” asked Ellis.

“Ten minutes ago.  I haven’t any idea it will amount to much, but I thought I ought to be here in case of danger.”

Dr. Elliot grunted.  Ellis, suggesting that they take a look at the other defense, tactfully led him away, leaving father and son together.  They had not seen each other since the Emergency Health Committee meeting.  Something of the quack’s glossy jauntiness faded out of his bearing as he turned to Hal.

“Boy-ee,” he began diffidently, “there’s been a pretty bad mistake.”

“There’s been worse than that,” said Hal sadly.

“About Milly Neal.  I thought—­I thought it was you that got her into trouble.”

“Why?  For God’s sake, why?”

“Don’t be too hard on me,” pleaded the other.  “I’d heard about the road-house.  And then, what she said to you.  It all fitted in.  Hale put me right.  Boy-ee, I can sleep again, now that I know it wasn’t you.”

The implication caught at Hal’s throat.

“Why, Dad,” he said lamely, “if you’d only come to me and asked—­”

“Somehow I couldn’t.  I was waiting for you to tell me.”  He slid his big hand over Hal’s shoulder, and clutched him in a sudden, jerky squeeze, his face averted.

“Now, that’s off our minds,” he said, in a loud and hearty voice.  “We can—­”

“Wait a minute.  Father, you saw the story in the ’Clarion,’—­the story of Milly’s death?”

“Yes, I saw that.”

“Well?”

“I suppose you did what you thought was right, Boy-ee.”

“I did what I had to do.  I hated it.”

“I’m glad to know that much, anyway.”

“But I’d do it again, exactly the same.”

The Doctor turned troubled eyes on his son.  “Hasn’t there been enough judging of each other between you and me, Boy-ee?” he asked sorrowfully.

In wretched uncertainty how to meet this appeal, Hal hesitated.  He was saved from decision by the return of McGuire Ellis.

“No movement yet from the enemy’s camp,” he reported.  “I just had a telephone from Hale’s club.”

“Perhaps they won’t come, after all,” surmised Hal.

“There’s pretty hot talk going.  Somebody’s been helping along by serving free drinks.”

“Now who could that be, I wonder?”

“Maybe some of our tenement-owning politician friends who aren’t keen about having to-morrow’s ‘Clarion’ appear.”

“We ought to have a reporter down there, Mac.”