in the distance the lights of the village far away.

He thought of the forty years he had spent here on the homestead--the
rude, pioneer days--the house he had built for himself, with its
plain furniture, the old-fashioned spinning-wheel on which Anna had
spun his trousers, the wooden telephone and the rude skidway on which
he ate his meals.

He looked out over the swamp and sighed.

Down in the swamp, two miles away, could he have but seen it, there
moved a sleigh, and in it a man dressed in a sealskin coat and silk
hat, whose face beamed in the moonlight as he turned to and fro and
stared at each object by the roadside as at an old familiar scene.
Round his waist was a belt containing a million dollars in gold coin,
and as he halted his horse in an opening of the road he unstrapped
the belt and counted the coins.

Beside him there crouched in the bushes at the dark edge of the swamp
road, with eyes that watched every glitter of the coins, and a hand
that grasped a heavy cudgel of blackthorn, a man whose close-cropped
hair and hard lined face belonged nowhere but within the walls of
Sing Sing.

When the sleigh started again the man in the bushes followed doggedly
in its track.

Meanwhile John Enderby had made the rounds of his outbuildings. He
bedded the fat cattle that blinked in the flashing light of the
lantern. He stood a moment among his hogs, and, farmer as he was,