After eating his supper, Lon, sullen and moody, looked out upon the lake, reviewing in his mind the terrible revenge he was soon to complete.  He took his pipe slowly from his pocket and filled it with coarse tobacco.  Soon gray rings lifted themselves to the ceiling and faded into the rafters.  As the smoke curled upward, his mind became busy with the past, and so vivid was his imagination that outlined in the smoke rings that floated about him was a girlish face—­a face pale and wan, but a loving, sweet one to him.  He could see the fair curls which clung close to the head; the eyes, serious but kind, seemed to strike his memory in unforgotten glances.  To another than himself the smoke-formed face would have been plain, perhaps ugly, the weakness of her race showing in every feature; but not to him.  So intent was he with these thoughts that the present dissolved completely into the past, and beside him stood a small, fond woman.  In his imagination she had risen from that grave which he had never been able to find in the Potter’s Field.  The personality of his dead wife called upon his senses and made itself as necessary to him then as in the moment of his first rapture when she had placed her womanly might upon his soul.

His revenge upon Floyd Vandecar would be finished when the gray-eyed Flea, so like her own father, went away with the one-armed man, to eke out her destiny amid the squalor of the thief’s home.

For months he had been enthralled with the satisfaction of the last act in the one terrible drama of his life; for it had played with his rude fancy as a tigress does with her prey, inflaming his hatred and keeping alive his desire for retaliation.  Flukey was a good thief, although obeying him at the end of the lash, and Flea would receive her portion of hate’s penalty on her fifteenth birthday.

Cronk did not heed the pitter-patter of his mother’s feet as she cleared the table, nor did he hear the droning of the twin’s voices in the loft above.  He was thinking of how the dead woman with her child—­his child, the one small atom he would have loved better than himself—­would be well avenged when Flea went away with Lem.

Lon had kept track of the doings of the young district attorney.  He knew that he had gone to the gubernatorial chair but the year before.  The squatter smiled gloomily as he remembered the words of a newspaper friendly to Vandecar, in which he had read that Syracuse was full of painful memories for the new governor, and that Floyd Vandecar had taken his family down the Hudson, to make another home at Tarrytown, where Harold Brimbecomb, a youthful friend, resided.  Another expression of dark gratification flitted over Lon’s heavy features as he reviewed again the purport of the article.  It had plainly said that in the new home there would be fewer visions of a lost boy and girl to haunt the afflicted parents.  Lon realized in his savage heart that the change of scene would not lessen the grief of the stricken family.