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