I've run up accounts which I don't mean to settle. But you'll make me pay with usury, you old fox. I know you, Tempest."
"I hope so," said Tempest. Then his voice changed. "But I believe that you're a better man than you pretend to be," he said.
"It's not his beliefs which trouble a man," said Dick. "It is the making folk believe that he believes in his beliefs." He wheeled suddenly, and faced Tempest. "The clinkers that we rake out of the engine-fire can't burn again," he said. "I've wanted to be a clinker more times than once. On my soul, Tempest, I don't imagine a thing could ever get hold of you as it gets hold of me."
Tempest still stared at the blurr of window-pane through which Baxter had looked on his future.
"God knows I don't want to judge any man," he said. "But this would be a simpler world if each were responsible for himself only."
Dick whistled softly between shut teeth.
"According to the tenets of common-sense we are," he said. "But what a rotten thing is common-sense. A man doesn't rule himself by it half his days. And when he does he generally gets up to the neck. You leave me alone all you can, Tempest. A man can shoulder the rest of the world—but he can't shoulder his friend. His heart gets in the way there."
Tempest left the matter at that, and went over in the next afternoon to see Jennifer. He had developed a habit of going to see Jennifer when his work called him in that direction, and this day he found Slicker on the table in the little sitting-room eating the last half-dried saskatoons from the hill out of a shining tin pan. Jennifer was in the window-seat with that cheerful busyness of work about her which reminded Tempest of long ago home-days. The red of a late fall sunset was behind her, sharply distinct on lake and sky, on hills and marshy foreground; and the red of it was in the rough ends of her cloudy hair which glowed until they called a witticism from Slicker.
Jennifer was unabashed. She bit off an end of thead with her sharp little teeth.
"I suppose you can't help being clever any more than
