"I don't want to go home," Ringold muttered.

"It's a breach of hospitality to go home," Higgins insisted.
"Besides, after my bloody 'ncounter with that limb of the law I
need a stimulant. You must look after me."

"I shall tuck you in your little bed," Kirk told him. But Higgins
would hear to nothing of the sort, protesting that he was in honor
bound to conduct his old friend Locke to the steamer, and Anthony
feared that without his protection some harm might befall his
irresponsible and impulsive companion. Candor requires it to be
said that he did hesitate, arguing long with the limp-legged
Higgins; but Locke was insistent, the others grew impatient of the
delay, and in the end he allowed himself to be persuaded.

It is often through just such sudden, inconsequent decisions,
influenced perhaps by the merest trifles, that a man's life is
made great or small; just such narrow forkings of the trail may
divert him into strange adventurings, or into worlds undreamed of.
Kirk Anthony, twenty-six years old, with a heritage at hand, and
with an average capacity for good or evil, chose the turning that
led him swiftly from the world he knew into an alien land.

Numbed as they were by the excesses of the evening, it did not
take the young men long to lose all clear and vivid remembrance of
this recent experience; for the time had come when Nature was
offering her last resistance, and their brains were badly awhirl.
Of all the four, Jefferson Locke was the only one who retained his
wits to the fullest--a circumstance that would have proved him the
owner of a remarkably steady head had it not been for the fact