Solution Manual for Physics for Scientists and

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Edition Katz 1133939147 9781133939146
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5
Newton's Laws of Motion
1. It is easier to lift the beach ball because it is lighter than a small lead ball. Other
properties, such as its size and shape, are less important. The object with the greater mass
will be the most difficult to lift.

2. The soccer ball is easier to stop because it has less mass and less inertia. It is less likely
to break your toe.

3. The light block has less mass and thus is easier to accelerate than the heavy block. The
same amount of push will make the light block go faster, and it will travel farther as
friction, which is larger for the heavier block, eventually stops each object.

4. The egg’s inertia keeps it moving in its initial direction until it hits a sidewall of the
pan (Newton’s first law). When she pushes or pulls the pan in the opposite direction of
the egg’s motion, the egg hits the side of the pan and is pushed back in the other
direction. According to Newton’s second law, this changes the motion of the egg by
accelerating it.

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5. The answer is (b), about the same speed at which he left the other ship. While he is
floating through space, there are no forces acting on the astronaut, so his velocity remains
constant.

6. This would be possible if the car began the 90 minute time span with some initial
velocity and maintained that constant velocity throughout the 90 minutes. While many
forces may be acting on the car during this time, if the net force on the car is zero, the car
may maintain a constant velocity (both speed and direction) throughout the journey.

7. (a) No force is needed. (b) A force is required to explain the deceleration. (c) A force
is required to explain the particle’s change in direction of motion.

8. It is a field force. The magnet does not need to touch the keys to exert a force on the
keys. You may watch the keys move toward the magnet before they eventually come into
contact.

5-1

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Chapter 5 – Newton's Laws of Motion 5-2

9. The net force can be found by determining the vector sum of the two forces.

F→tot = F1 + F2ˆ ˆ ˆ ˆ
( ) (
F→tot = 7.263i +ˆ 8.889 j N+
ˆ −13.452i + 7.991 j N )
Ftot = (−6.189i + 16.880 j )N

We can then find the magnitude from the components of the net force.

Ftot =
Ftot = 17.98 N

10. If the force is either parallel or antiparallel to any initial velocity the object might
have (or if the object starts from rest), then the object will continue to travel along that
same line. If the force is directed perpendicular to some initial velocity of the object, the
object will move in a circular motion. If the force is directed in any other way, the motion
of the object will be along a curved path that is not circular.

11. The third vector can be found by recognizing that the vector sum must equal 0.

F1 + F2 + F3 = 0
→
(6.03iˆ − 10.64 ˆj )N+(−3.71iˆ − 12.93 ˆj )N + F = 0 3

We can now rearrange the equation to solve for the unknown force.
→
ˆ ˆ ˆ ˆ
( ) (
F3 = − 6.03i − 10.64 j N − −3.71i − 12.93 j N
→ ˆ
)
 ˆ 
F3 = (−6.03 + 3.71)i + (10.64 + 12.93) j N
→
F3 =

12. It is a contact force. You exert a contact force on the air when you are blowing, and
the air exerts a contact force on the paper.

13. The fish exerts a contact force. It pushes on the water, and the water pushes back. The
fish would also exert a gravitational force on the surrounding water, but the magnitude
would be much less than the contact force.

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Chapter 5 – Newton's Laws of Motion 5-3

14. The major issues in this conversation stem from misconceptions concerning mass and
weight. One problem with the conversation is that Dallas answers the question about the
weight of the turkey by stating a mass in kg. Also, while it is true that the mass of the
turkey is the same on the Moon as it is on Earth, the weight would not be the same.

15. The inertia of an object only depends on its mass, not its motion. Thus, both the
rolling and stationary bowling ball would have the same inertia.

16. The inertia of an object only depends on its mass, not its motion. Thus, your inertia is
the same whether you are sitting or running.

17. The heavy man will have a greater mass than the child, and therefore, his inertia will
be greater.

18. The cart is a non-inertial reference frame because it is accelerating to the right in the
picture. There is no force responsible for the deflection of the ball. The deflection can be
explained using Newton’s first law – the ball will not move until subject to a net external
force. As the motion of the cart changes, the ball’s motion will not change until the string
pulls the ball in the direction the cart is moving. The angle of deflection of the ball could
be used to measure the acceleration of the cart because if the acceleration is greater, the
deflection angle of the ball will be greater.

19. The wind must be causing the deflection of the ball. If the cart moves with a constant
velocity, then it is an inertial reference frame.

20. The only event that might lead to the cup of tea being in your lap is (c). If the bus
speeds up rapidly so that your seat and the tray have forward accelerations and the
maximum friction force between the cup and the tray is not enough to accelerate the cup
at the same rate, then the cup would roughly stay in place as the tray slides out from
under it and eventually end up on your lap. Scenario (d) might make the cup move, but it
would move toward the seat in front of you, and thus should not spill in your lap, but spill
forward.

21. This problem requires us to use Newton’s second law to find the mass. This can be
done using either the x or y components of the acceleration and force.
F = F x tot x
= max
Ftot x 10.8 kg m/s2
m= =
ax 3.45 m/s2
m = 3.13 kg

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Chapter 5 – Newton's Laws of Motion 5-4

22. (a) The net force on the particle can be found using Newton’s second law.
→ → →  ˆ ˆ 2

F = F tot
= ma = (3.50 kg) −3.00i + 2.00 j ( ) m/s  =
(b) We can then use the answer from part (a) to find the magnitude of the net force.

Fnet = = 12.6 N

23. To find the force, we differentiate the functions for the x and y positions of the
particle to obtain functions for the components of the particle’s acceleration, noting that
they will have units of m/s2 when the time is in seconds.

v =
x
dx
=
d
(t 4
)
− 6t = 4t3 − 6
dt dt
a =
x
dvx
=
d
(4t − 6) = 12t
3 2

dt dt

and

v =
y
dy
=
d
(4t + 1) = 8t
2

dt dt
dvy
a = =
d
(8t ) = 8 m s2
y
dt dt

Given the mass and that the time must be in s for the force to be in N, the components of
the force on the particle can now be written.

( )
Fx = (4.00 kg) 12.0t2 = 48.0t2 N

F = (4.00 kg)(8 m/s ) = 32.0 N

y
2

Then, the magnitude of the force can be found, when t = 4.00 s.

Fnet =  48.0 4.00  + 32.0 = 769 N

 

24. Since the graph of the arrow's position vs. time is a parabola, the position can be
→
written as r (t) = (ct 2 + dt + e) ĵ where c, d, and e are all constants, and c is not zero. The

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Another document from Scribd.com that is
random and unrelated content:
In All the World There Was No Man Quite Like This
One

The Man the Law Forgot

By WALTER NOBLE BURNS

The jail was silent. Boisterous incoherencies that in the day made the
vast gloomy pile of stone and iron a bedlam—talk, curses, laughter—
were stilled.
The prisoners were asleep in their cells. Dusty electric bulbs at sparse
intervals made a dusky twilight in the long, hushed corridors. Moonlight,
shimmering through the tall, narrow windows, laid barred, luminous
lozenges on the stone floors.
From the death cell in “Murderers’ Row,” the voice of Guisseppi rose
in the still night watches in the Miserere. Its first mellow notes broke the
slumberous silence with dulcet crashes like the breaking of ice crystals
beneath a silver hammer. Vibrating through the cavernous spaces of the
sleeping prison, the clear boyish voice lifting the burden of the solemn
hymn was by turns a tender caress, a flight of white wings up into sunny
skies, a silver whisper stealing through the glimmering aisles, a swift
stream of plashing melody, a flaming rush of music.
“A broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.” The
prayer in its draperies of melody filled the cells like a shining presence
and laid its blessing of hope upon hopeless hearts. From the shadow of
the gallows, Guisseppi poured forth his soul in music that was
benediction and farewell.
Bitter memories, like sneering ghosts that elbow one another, crowd
the road to Gallows Hill. In swift retrospect, Guisseppi reviewed his
life’s last tragic phase. Young, with healthy blood dancing gay dances
through his veins, sunny-spirited, spilling over with the happiness and
hopefulness of irresponsibility, he had not despaired when the death
sentence was pronounced.
The court’s denial of his lawyer’s motion for a new trial left him with
undiminished optimism. Yet a while longer hope sustained him when his
old father and mother kissed him good-by through the bars and set off
for the state capital to intercede with the governor.
Bowed with years and broken with sorrow, they had pleaded in tears
and on their knees. The venerable father, lost for words, helplessly
inarticulate, the mother with her black shawl over her head, white-faced,
hysterical, both praying for the life of their only son, were a picture to
melt a heart of stone.
The pathos of it stirred the governor to the depths, but could not make
him forget that for the moment he stood as the incarnation of the law and
the inexorable justice that is the theory of the law. With heavy heart and
misty eyes, he turned away.
So hope at last had died. And between the death of hope and the death
that awaited him, Guisseppi brooded in the death-cell, bitterly counting
his numbered days as they slipped one by one into the past, each day
bringing him that much nearer to certain annihilation. Round and round
the dial, the hands of the clock on the prison wall went in a never-ending
funeral march; the tick-tock, tick-tock of the pendulum, measuring off the
fateful seconds, echoed in his heart like a death knell.
Times without number he repeated to himself that he was not afraid to
die. Nevertheless the inevitability of death tortured him. At times, in
sheer terror, he seized the rigid bars of his cell, pounded his fists against
the iron walls, till the blood spurted from his knuckles. He was like a
sparrow charmed by a serpent, fluttering vainly to escape, but drawing
ever nearer to certain death. Black walls of death kept closing in upon
him inexorably, like a mediaeval torture chamber.
Some men, the experts say, are born criminals; other are made
criminals by some fortuity or crisis of circumstances. Guisseppi had been
a happy, healthy, careless boy. His father was a small shopkeeper of the
Italian quarter who had achieved a certain prosperity. His mother was a
typical Italian mother, meek, long-suffering, tender, her whole life
wrapped up in her boy, her husband and her home.
Guisseppi had received a good common school education. He had
been a choir boy in Santa Michaela Church, and the range and beauty of
his voice had won him fame even beyond the borders of the colony;
musicians for whom he had sung had grown enthusiastic over his
promise and had encouraged him to study for the operatic stage.
 The exuberance of youth, and love of gayety and adventure, had been
responsible for his first misstep. His companions of the streets had
enticed him into Cardello’s pool room. Cardello, known to the police as
“The Devil,” had noted with a crafty eye the lively youth’s possibilities
as a useful member of his gang. His approaches were subtle—genial
patronage, the pretense of goodfellowship, an intimate glass across a
table. The descent to Avernus was facile.
Almost before he knew it, Guisseppi was a sworn member of
Cardello’s gang of reckless young daredevils and a participant in their
thrilling nightly adventures. Home lessons were forgotten. His mother
lost her influence over the boy. Even Rosina Stefano, the little beauty of
the quarter, who had claimed all his boyish devotion since school days,
had no power to turn him from his downward course.
He had been taken by the police after a robbery in which a citizen had
been killed. He was condemned to death.
“I forgive everybody,” Guisseppi told his death-watch. “Everybody
but ‘Devil’ Cardello. If it had not been for him, I would be free and
happy today. He made me a thief. That is his business—teaching young
fools to rob for him. He did the planning; we did the jobs. We took the
chances, he took the money. I was in the hold-up when the gang
committed murder, but I myself killed no man.
“And now the gallows is waiting for me, while Cardello sits in his
pool room, immune, prosperous, still planning crimes for other young
fools. If I could sink my fingers in his throat and choke his life out, I
could die happy. One thing I promise him—if my ghost can come back, I
will haunt him to his dying day.”
Morning dawned. Father and mother arrived for a final embrace.
Rosina gave him a last kiss. A priest administered consolation. The
sheriff came and read the death warrant.
Light, flooding through the barred windows from the newly-risen sun,
filled the jail with golden radiance as, through the iron corridors, feet
shuffling drearily, the death march moved in solemn silence toward the
gallows....
 Doctors with stethoscopes watched the final pulsations of ebbing life.
They pronounced him dead.
The body was wheeled off on a tumbril into the jail morgue and turned
over to assistants of an undertaker employed by the family. Placing it on
a stretcher and covering it with a mantle, these hurried it to a motor
ambulance waiting in the alley. They slid the stretcher into the vehicle
and slammed the doors. The machine got quickly under way, gathered
speed, began to fly through the streets.
No sooner had the doors of the ambulance slammed shut than strange
things began to happen inside. A physician and a nurse who had been
secreted in the car, fell upon the body with feverish haste, stripped it of
clothing, dashed alcohol over it from head to foot, began to massage the
still warm flesh, chafing the wrists, slapping limbs and torso with smart,
stinging thumps.
Then, to conserve what little heat remained, they bundled the body in
heavy blankets kept warm in a fireless contrivance. And all the while the
ambulance, its gong clanging madly, was plunging at wild speed across
the city, swaying from side to side, turning corners on two wheels.
It drew up at last in front of a small undertaking shop on a back street,
and the body was hurried inside. Laid upon a table, it looked as if carved
from ivory. The coal-black hair curled about the white brow in glossy
abandon. The long black lashes of the nearly-shut eyes left deep shadows
on the cold pallor of the cheeks. No tint of blood, no sign of life
appeared.
Quickly a pulmotor was applied. Oxygen was pumped into the lungs
while the body was again vigorously rubbed with alcohol. Guisseppi’s
father and mother and close relatives stood about in an excited group,
eyes wide with feverish interest, their hearts in their mouths. Doctors and
nurses worked with dynamic energy.
No sign of rekindled life rewarded them. Their drastic efforts seemed
lost labor. The boy’s soul, apparently, had journeyed far into the dark
places beyond life’s pale and was not to be lured back to its fleshly
habitation.
Still they persisted, hoping against hope.
“Per dio!” suddenly exclaimed a physician. “Do you see that?”
A faint flush appeared in Guisseppi’s cheek.
 “He lives again!” burst in a tense whisper from the bloodless lips of
the father.
The tiny stain spread, tinging the marble flesh.
“My boy, my darling boy!” cried the mother, wringing her hands in
delirious joy.
Guisseppi’s chest began to rise and fall slowly, with an almost
imperceptible movement of respiration. The suspicion of a smile hovered
for a moment at the corners of his mouth.
He opened his eyes. He lived!

II.

“Devil” Cardello sat at his desk in a corner of his pool room. The
morning was young; no customers had yet arrived to play pool or
billiards. Basco, the porter, pail and mop in hand, stood for a moment
gossiping.
“They say he died game,” remarked Basco.
“They all do,” sneered Cardello.
“And kept his mouth shut.”
“No; he spilled everything. But the police didn’t believe him. That’s
all that saved me.”
“I heard he said his ghost would come back to haunt you.”
“Ho! That’s a good one,” laughed Cardello. “The devil has got him on
a spit over the fire and will keep him turning. I should worry about the
little fool’s ghost!”
A whisper of sound from the direction of the billiard tables caused
both men to glance up.
There stood Guisseppi a few paces away, surveying them in silence, a
blue-steel revolver in his hand!
“Mother of God!” screamed Basco, dropping his pail and mop, and
dashing into the street.
Cardello’s eyes bulged from their sockets. His face went as white as
paper. Panic, terror, pulled his lips back in a ghastly grin from his
chattering teeth. He rose heavily to his feet and stood swaying.
 “Guisseppi!” he breathed scarcely above a whisper. “Guisseppi!”
Guisseppi’s lips curled.
“Yes,” he replied. “The boy you ruined, betrayed, sent to death on the
gallows.”
“No, no, Guisseppi. The police got you. I was your friend.”
“Liar! But for you, I would be happy; my father and mother would not
bear the black disgrace of a son hanged on the gallows.”
“Why have you come back from the dead, Guisseppi? Why should
you haunt your old pal?”
“I have a score to settle with you.”
“In the name of God the Father, go back to the grave! Leave me in
peace.”
Guisseppi raised his weapon.
“I have come to kill you,” he said.
Cardello fell upon his knees.
“Spare me, Guisseppi!” he screamed, stretching out imploring arms.
“Mercy, Guisseppi, mercy! Don’t—”
There was a crash—a leap of fire.
A wisp of blue smoke drifted above a billiard table.

III.

The police dragnet for the slayer of Cardello was far flung, and zest
was added to the man hunt by the offer of $1,000 reward. Throughout
the Italian quarter, Basco spread the story of Guisseppi’s recrudescence
and his ghostly revenge.
The superstitious residents accepted the weird tale with simple faith.
Fear of the phantom became rife. Children remained indoors after dark.
Pedestrians quickened their pace when passing lonely spots at night.
Turning a corner suddenly, they half-expected to come face to face with
Guisseppi’s ghost, wry-necked from the hangman’s noose.
Policeman Rafferty, traveling beat in the neighborhood of Death
Corners, was told time and again that Guisseppi’s ghost had murdered
Cardello. Yes, it was true. Basco had seen the phantom. Others in the
colony had seen it slipping like a shadow through some deserted street at
night. There was no doubt that Guisseppi had come back from the dead.
Policeman Rafferty laughed. When had ghosts started in bumping off
live folks? That was what he would like to know. How could the poor
simpletons believe such stuff? Funny lot of jobbies, these dagoes!
But when Policeman Rafferty had heard the story of Guisseppi’s ghost
for the thousandth time, he scratched his head and did a little thinking,
not forgetting the $1,000 reward. Guisseppi was dead. Of course. He had
been hanged, and the newspapers had been full of the stories of his
execution. So Guisseppi couldn’t have killed Cardello. That was out of
the question. But could it be possible that dead Guisseppi had a living
double? Hah!
Policeman Rafferty got in touch with his favorite stool-pigeon without
delay. Shortly thereafter, that worthy laid before him a piece of
information which Policeman Rafferty was welcome to for just what it
was worth and no more. Guisseppi’s ghost had been seen oftenest in the
immediate neighborhood of Guisseppi’s father’s residence. If the fool
copper thought he could put a pinch over on a ghost, he might do well to
search Guisseppi’s old home.
So Policeman Rafferty eased himself one day through a narrow
passageway, burst in suddenly at the kitchen door and started to search
the premises.
He found Guisseppi whiffing a cigaret in a front room.

“Yes, I killed Cardello,” said Guisseppi quietly. “I’ll go with you.”

“But who are you?” asked the policeman. “You can’t be Guisseppi.
They topped that boy on the gallows.”
“I’m Guisseppi, all right. They brought me back to life with a
pulmotor.”
Policeman Rafferty’s jaw dropped.
“Back to life?”
“Yes. I was as dead as stone. I was gone absolutely for an hour.”
 “Gone? Gone where?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere. I remember standing on the trap. Then it
seemed I was falling for a long time, falling—from a star—or a high
mountain top—through miles of emptiness into midnight blackness.
There wasn’t any pain. I seemed to land on a deep soft cushion of
feathers. I could feel the darkness. It seemed to whirl and billow round
me. I couldn’t see myself—or feel myself. But I knew, somehow, I was
there in the heart of the darkness. I suddenly found myself on a broad
road stretching away into night.”
“Must ha’ been the road to hell,” remarked Policeman Rafferty.
“Maybe so. Along this road, I glided with the swiftness of a bird on
the wing. I didn’t know where I was going—”
“You were bound for hell,” said Rafferty.
“I heard music away off in the dark; wonderful orchestra music,
violins, ’cellos, wind pipes. It grew louder. I never heard such beautiful
music. Through the solid blackness ahead, I saw a great mountain peak
standing up, red and shining, against the sky.
“Around me came a glare of bright lights. I was blinded by streaks and
splashes of color, darting, rolling, weaving into each other, changing all
the time. Reds, purples, greens, blues, rolled over me in great, flashing
waves. Flaring colors swirled around me in blazing whirlwinds. I was
drowned in gorgeousness. It was as if a cyclone had wrecked a thousand
rainbows and buried me beneath their ruins.”
“What were these lights?”
“Search me. I don’t know. I heard a loud, clear call out of the distance.
I pushed through the storm of colors. Across a dark plain, I reached the
shining, red mountain. I climbed up until I stood on the peak. I felt fine.
Something struck me as a joke. I began laughing. Then, bending close
above me, I saw the faces of my mother and father and the doctors.”
“Well, Guisseppi,” said Policeman Rafferty, “gettin’ hung once would
ha’ been an elegant sufficiency for most men. They’d be leery about
takin’ a second chance. You must be stuck on dropping through a trap—
eh?”
“Yes, they’ll hang me again, all right. That’s a cinch. You might think
me a fool for walking with my eyes open right into this second scrape—”
 “A hog,” corrected Rafferty.
“I don’t know. I came back from the dead to kill Cardello. And I killed
him. I hated that fellow. I’d like to have tortured the life out of him,
killed him by inches. His cries of agony would have been wine to me.
It’s hell to be hanged. I ought to know. But I can go back to the gallows
now with a light heart. I got Cardello, and I’m ready to take my
medicine.”
Policeman Rafferty bit a generous chew from his plug of tobacco.
“You Eye-talians,” he remarked reflectively, “are a nutty bunch.”

IV.

The court room was crowded. Guisseppi’s strange story had been
spread to the four winds by the newspapers, and everybody was eager to
see this man who had passed through the mystic portals of death.
“My client will plead guilty to the Cardello murder,” said Guisseppi’s
lawyer. “I take it your honor will agree with me that having paid the
penalty of the law for his former crime, he can not again be hanged for
that old offense.”
“I do agree with you,” replied the judge. “The sentence was that on a
certain day at a certain hour, he be hanged by the neck until dead. This
sentence was carried out. He was hanged. He was officially pronounced
dead. It is not for me to say whether death was absolute. Perhaps a spark
of life remained which was fanned back to full flame. Possibly his soul
actually left the body and was recalled by some cryptic means we do not
fully understand.
“But, whatever the truth, his return to life creates a unique situation. I
know of no precedent of which the law ever has taken cognizance. So far
as I know, this case is the first of its kind in history. Since the sentence
pronounced upon this man has been carried out legally in every detail, it
is my decision that he can not again be hanged for the crime for which he
already has paid the penalty.”
“There is one other point which your honor failed to consider,” said
Guisseppi’s lawyer. “It is an axiom of law that a man can not, for the
same crime, be placed in jeopardy twice. A man can be placed in no
greater jeopardy than when, with a hangman’s noose around his neck, he
is dropped through the trap-door of a gallows. So, whether Guisseppi
was actually dead or whether a faint flicker of life remained, he is
forever immune from further punishment for the crime for which he was
placed in this great jeopardy.”
“Your point may be well taken,” replied the judge.
“Now, your honor, we come to the Cardello murder charge. It is at the
prisoner’s own desire and against my better judgment that I enter a plea
of guilty and throw him upon the mercy of the court. There are perhaps
some extenuating circumstances. But he is willing to take whatever
punishment the court may see fit to inflict. In view of all the
circumstances of this extraordinary case, I make a special plea for
mercy.”
“I will answer your plea,” returned the judge, “by ordering the case
stricken from the docket and the prisoner discharged from custody.”
A murmur of amazement broke the tense hush of the crowded
chamber. Guisseppi’s lawyer gasped.
“Am I to understand, your honor—”
“This is not mercy but law,” the judge continued. “This man is legally
dead. He is without the pale of all law. A dead man can commit no crime.
No provision in the whole range of jurisprudence recognizes the
possibility of a dead man’s committing a crime. No man, in the purview
of the law, can return from the dead. If we assume that this man was
dead, he will remain dead forever in the eyes of the law. If by a miracle
he has returned to life and committed murder, there is no punishment
within the scope of the statutes that can be decreed against him.
“He is the super-outlaw of all history. Forever beyond the reach of
law, the statutes are powerless to deal with him or punish him in any
way. If he should shoot down every member of the jury that convicted
him, if he should walk into court and kill the judge before whom his case
was tried, the law could do nothing to him. He could spend his days as a
bandit, robbing, plundering, murdering, and the law could not touch him.
Legally he is a ghost, a shadow, an apparition, with no more reality than
the beings in a dream. So far as the law is concerned, he does not exist.
He can no more be imprisoned, hanged, punished or restricted in his
actions than a phantom that exists only in the imagination.”
“A most wonderful construction of the law,” declared Guisseppi’s
attorney in happy bewilderment at the turn of events.
 “It is less a construction of law as it exists than an admission there is
no law applicable to a man legally dead yet actually alive, a man who
under the law does not exist. This boy, physically alive but legally dead,
has murdered a man with deliberate purpose and malice aforethought.
There is no doubt about that. If the law recognized his existence, he
should be hanged. Justice demands that he be executed. But he is in
some fourth-dimensional legal state beyond the reach of justice. The law
is powerless to deal with him. As the administrator of the law, my hands
are tied. There is nothing left for me but to set him at liberty.”
Despite the decision of the court that under the law he had no
existence, Guisseppi left the chamber smiling and happy, acutely
conscious of joyous life in every fibre of his being.

Policeman Rafferty was filled with righteous anger when he learned

that he could not collect the $1,000 reward. In answer to his indignant
questions, he was told the reward was offered for the arrest of “the
person or persons guilty of the murder of Cardello,” and since Guisseppi
was neither a person or anything else that the law recognized as existing,
he was not guilty of the crime.
Moreover, it was hinted to him that in capturing Guisseppi, he had
arrested nobody. In the end, Policeman Rafferty had to laugh in spite of
himself.
“The money’s mine, all right,” he said philosophically. “Only I don’t
get it.”

V.

Rosina Stefano sat alone in the little parlor of her home in one of the
quaint side-streets of the Italian quarters, picturesque with its jumble of
weather-stained frame dwellings and exotic little shops.
It was a chill, dreary night outside. A piping wind made fantastic
noises about eaves and gables, and shook the windows as with ghostly
hands. A lamp, burning under a blue shade, filled the chamber with eerie
shadows. A coal fire was dying to embers in the open grate. There was a
knock at the door.
 “Entre!”
Guisseppi threw open the door and stood upon the threshold smiling.
“Rosina!”
The girl rose from her chair and stared fixedly at him out of frightened
eyes. With a quick gesture, as if for protection against some supernatural
menace, she made the sign of the cross.
“I have come back to you, Rosina.” Guisseppi took a step toward her
and threw open his arms.
Rosina shrank back.
“Do you not still love me?”
Her lips framed a “No” for answer in a terror-stricken whisper.
“Come, my little sweetheart, embrace me.”
“No, no, Guisseppi!” Her voice was a tremulous cry. “You are dead!”
“Dead? Certainly I am not dead. I am alive and well, and I love you
just as I always loved you.”
“You are only a ghost.”
“Don’t be foolish, little one. Do I look like a ghost? Me? Come into
my arms and see how strong they are. Lay your head on my breast and
feel the beating of my heart. And every beat of my heart is for you.”
Rosina stood motionless. There flashed through her mind old
grewsome stories of vampires that lured their victims into their power
with love traps and sucked their blood. Momentary horror froze her
blood.
“O Guisseppi,” she exclaimed, “why have you risen from the dead?
Why do you come back to haunt me?”
“Poor girl, do not talk like that. I tell you I am alive—tingling to my
finger tips with life and love for you. If I were dead, I should still love
you. Death could not kill my love for you. Have you forgotten
everything? I thought you loved me. You have often told me so. I
believed you would always love me, be true to me forever. Now I find
you changed and cold.”
“I did love you, Guisseppi. To the depths of my being I loved you.”
Her words came in a passionate torrent in her liquid native tongue. “You
were my earth and heaven, my life, my soul’s salvation. All day my
thoughts were of you. I dreamed of you at night. There was nothing I
would not have done for you. There was nothing I would not have given
you. I could have lived for you always. I could have died for you. Did I
not come to see you every day in jail? Did I not bring you constantly
dishes I had cooked myself with utmost care? Was not I close beside you
in the court room every day of the long trial?
“I did everything to soothe and comfort you through all those terrible
days. Was it nothing that I remained constant when you were locked in a
cell condemned to death? I was true to the very trap-door of the
hangman. What greater proof could a woman give of her love than to
remain true to a man sentenced as a felon to the eternal disgrace of the
gallows?”
She paused for a moment, erect, motionless, her face aflame,
seemingly transfigured like the wonder woman of a vision.
“Ah, yes,” she went on; “then there was no one like my Guisseppi; no
eyes so bright, no lips so tender, no face so dear. You were my god. Can I
ever forget the songs you used to sing to me in the happy days before
‘Devil’ Cardello crossed your life. Your voice was divine. Every note
thrilled me. I loved it. To me it was the music of the stars. Nothing in all
the world was so beautiful as your voice. But now your voice has
changed. There is no longer any music in it. As you speak to me, it
seems a voice from the sepulchre.”
Guisseppi raised an arresting hand. He threw back his head. He smiled
again.
“My voice has changed? Listen, cara mia.”
Slowly he began to sing an old Italian serenade. The ballad told of a
knight of old who had bade a lily-white maid farewell and gone off to the
wars and who, wounded and left for dead on the battlefield, was nursed
back to life and returned to find his lady unchanged in her devotion
against rivals and temptations.
Soft in the opening cadences, Guisseppi’s voice grew in volume and
power. It brought out in shades and nuances of wonderful beauty all the
charm and romance of the ancient tale—the sadness of farewell, the
clash of battle, the wounded soldier’s dreams of his sweetheart as life
seemed ebbing, the gladness of his homecoming, his happiness in
reunited love.
 Into the music, Guisseppi threw all the ardor and passion of his own
love. There were notes like tears in his voice when, in minor strain, he
sang the sorrows and dreams of the soldier; and the final crescendo
passage, vivid with renewed love, was a burst of joyous melody straight
from his heart.
“And you loved me still the same!” The words rose like incense from
an altar. They fluttered about Rosina’s ears like a shower of rose leaves.
The girl listened, spellbound. Never in happier days had she heard
Guisseppi sing with such compelling sweetness. There seemed a new
and wonderful quality in his voice. With his magical music, he was like a
conjurer bending her spirit to his subtle enchantments.
On a golden cloud, she was transported to the sunny shores of Italy. A
cavalier sang the serenade in the moonlight to his mandolin and, leaning
from her latticed balcony, she dropped a rose to him. The bay of Naples
spread its crinkled azure before her. Against the dark, star-spangled
crystal of the night, sculptured Vesuvius upheld its canopy of smoke.
As the music steeped her senses, she fancied she could feel its golden
filaments being drawn about her, binding her more and more closely in a
fairy chain. As if under the charm of melodious hypnotism, her old love
returned. All the tenderness and passion of her heart went out again to
Guisseppi. The siren influence of his voice was transforming her. Her
strength of will was crumbling. She stood swaying, helpless, her eyes
glowing with rekindled love.
Suddenly the song ended. The spell was broken. Rosina passed a
languid hand over her eyes as if to brush away a film of sleep. She
seemed to wake from a trance. Guisseppi stood before her radiant,
smiling.
“Now will you believe I am alive? Could a dead man sing like that?”
A look of awe overspread Rosina’s face.
“You never sang like that before.”
“This is the first time my life and happiness were ever at stake on a
song.”
“The Guisseppi I used to know could not sing like that. You are not
Guisseppi. You are a spirit. Some demon has taught you how to sing so
beautifully. You have come back with this new devil’s voice of yours to
lure my soul to hell.”
 “Ah, Rosina, how can you delude yourself with such foolish fancies.
Do you not see me here solid in flesh and blood?”
“I see you, but I know you are only a shadow from the grave.”
“If your eyes deceive you, your ears can not. You have heard me
sing.”
“That was some devil’s necromancy.”
Guisseppi fell on his knees before her and stretched out his arms in
supplication.
“I love you, Rosina. That is all I can say. The hangman’s noose was
not able to strangle my love for you. Your love is more to me now than it
ever was before. The world has turned cold to me. You are my only
hope, my refuge. I need you. I want you with all my soul.”
The girl shook her head sorrowfully. Her eyes rested upon him with
sadness that was touched with renunciation.
“It can never be,” she said firmly. “How you are here, I do not know.
You are dead; of that I am sure. My love for you was buried in the grave
that was dug for you. You are not the boy I once loved. You are
something strange and different. I am afraid of you. It is only with horror
that I could fancy the kisses of a dead man on my lips. The thought of a
ghost’s endearments fills me with loathing. Go back to the dead. I can
love and reverence those who are gone, but there is no love anywhere in
all the world for the dead returned from the grave.”
She turned away and stood with her head bowed in her hands.
Slowly Guisseppi struggled to his feet. He staggered weakly against
the wall and buried his face in his arms.
“And you, Rosina!” he sobbed.
This was the final, crushing blow. He felt now that he was indeed dead
—dead at the grave of his lost love.

VI.

A taxicab stood in the narrow street near Rosina’s home, its driver
ready at the wheel, its engine purring. Behind the drawn blinds, sat
Guisseppi, aflame with excitement, peering eagerly through the curtains
from time to time.
 Guisseppi was desperate. There was no place for the dead among the
living. He had learned that clearly. As a “living dead man,” all his
experiences had been tragic. He regretted his resuscitation. He longed for
the peace of the grave.
His old friends had fallen away from him. Many believed him a spirit
damned, who, by some strange dispensation, was spared to life for yet a
little while to make more exquisite the final agony reserved for him.
Others were intelligent enough to know the truth, but even these were
repelled by a certain unwholesomeness, a savor of the sepulchre, that
seemed to cling about him.
The girls he had known in his old, gay days would have nothing to do
with him. As handsome as ever, as romantic, with a voice as musical and
appealing, he was in their imagination enveloped in an atmosphere of the
charnel-house, and the curse of hell was branded on his brow.
His relatives held aloof. Between him and even his mother and father
he was conscious that a thin shadow had gradually crept, and the
tenderness of their love had been cooled by a ghostly fear of this eerie
son who had been down among the dead and read with dead eyes the
mysteries beyond the tomb.
He had been unable to find employment. It was as if every business
house had up a sign, “No dead men need apply.”
In despair and desperation, he fell into his old ways of banditry. He
soon had placed to his record a long series of bold robberies. For several
of his first lawless exploits, the police arrested him. But invariably the
judges before whom he was arraigned set him at liberty.
So after a while the police refused to arrest him. What was the use?
This ghost-man would only be set free again.
... While Guisseppi sat hidden from view behind the curtains of his
taxicab, ruminating upon the bitterness of his fate, Rosina emerged from
her home. Trim and dainty with pink cheeks and sparkling eyes, the
young beauty was subtly suggestive of flowers and fragrance as she
tripped along the street in the warm sunshine.
As she came abreast of the taxicab, Guisseppi stepped out, caught her
in his arms, and swung her into the car. The girl’s wild screams shrilled
through the slumberous stillness of the quarter and filled the streets with
excited throngs as the cab plunged madly forward, dashed around a
corner and was soon lost to sight. In a distant part of the city, the car
halted before a weather-stained building. Within the dingy doorway
Guisseppi disappeared, bearing the kidnapped maiden in his arms.
A little later, Guisseppi appeared before the marriage license clerk in
the city hall.
“I’m sorry,” said the clerk, “but I can not give you a marriage license.”
“Why not?”
“You are dead. You can not marry.”
“But I’m going to marry!” shouted Guisseppi defiantly.
“Impossible. If I went through the formality of filling out a license for
you, no minister or priest would perform the wedding service. The
marriage altar, orange blossoms, the happiness of domestic love are not
for the dead.”
“But I’m alive! I am only legally dead.”
The clerk smiled tolerantly. With a pencil he drew a circle on a sheet
of paper.
“Here,” said he, “is a cipher. It is the symbol of nothing, but, as a
circular pencil mark, it is still something.”
He erased every trace of the pencil and exhibited the blank piece of
paper.
“This,” he explained, “illustrates your status. In human affairs, you are
a cipher with the rim rubbed out. A man legally dead is less than
nothing.”

VII.

Luigi Romano, who had succeeded Guisseppi in Rosina’s affections,

was among the first to hear of the abduction.
Blazing with passion, he laid his plans with quick decision and took
the trail. Without great difficulty, he traced the route of the taxicab, block
by block, to its destination.
Depressed by his fruitless mission in search of a marriage license,
Guisseppi was hurrying toward the building in which Rosina was
imprisoned. His eyes were bent upon the ground in deep thought. His
face was white and drawn.
Luigi stepped from the shelter of a doorway with a sawed-off shotgun
in his hands....

When the police arrived, a little crowd of Italians had gathered.

They shrugged their shoulders and spread their palms. Nobody had
seen anything; nobody had heard anything; nobody knew anything. But
one thing was plain—the dead man, sprawled on the sidewalk, was dead
this time to stay dead.
“O yes,” said Attorney Malato, who had looked after Luigi’s case,
“they arrested Luigi all right. But they turned him loose. Why not? This
boy Guisseppi could not be punished by the law, but neither could he
claim in the slightest degree the protection of the law. Since he had no
legal life, it was no crime to kill him. He was a legal problem, and Luigi
solved it in about the only way it could be solved—with a sawed-off
shotgun.”’

It is often wondered why the earth is round instead of being some

other shape. This is because of the attraction of gravity, which tends to
pull everything toward the center of the world. It can be seen that even if
the earth was originally some other shape, in the course of a few years
this influence would have pulled it into its present shape.
A Gripping, Powerful Story by a Man Who Always
Tells a Good Tale

The Blade of Vengeance

By George Warburton Lewis

The outcome was all the more regrettable because Henry Fayne had
staked so much on the success of his great venture. He had renounced
innumerable bachelor friendships for Leanor, only to discover within a
year of the celebrated social event, which had been their wedding, that he
was linked for life to a captivating adventuress.
It was a hard blow. Only by desperate efforts, long sustained, had he
been able to take himself in hand and force out of his thoughts the ugly
images that obsessed him.
 Leanor’s perfidy was a thing of which even his best friends never
could have convinced him; yet now he knew it to be true—aye, knew it
because she herself had boasted of it!
Fayne had striven hard to shut so hideous a specter out of his vision,
partly because of a haunting fear that the thing which the discovery had
set throbbing in his brain would get the better of him, that he would hurt
somebody, or himself.
He had been an unusually well-balanced man, but it was only after
many a stern struggle with the pulsating thing that hammered in his head
that he surrendered the corpse of his outraged love to the divorce court
and the gossip-mongers, and went sadly back to his bachelor haunts in
the hope of forgetting. But he was appalled to find that he no longer
fitted in.
The friends of the free and easy days of his celibacy were sincere
enough in their pity for him, though in no way disposed to put
themselves out seeking reclamation. In short, they might as well have
said in chorus:
“You couldn’t have expected us to forewarn you; you’d have quit us
cold. You had to discover it for yourself, and the operation of finding out
has simply rendered you impossible as one of the old crowd. Sorry, old
man, but, after all, it’s better that you should know.”
So Henry Fayne brooded, lost his nerve, and then, all of a sudden—
disappeared.
The old circle knew his set and cynical face no more. There were
rumors of mental breakdown and suicide, and there was one report (little
credited, however) that the unfortunate fellow had drifted down into the
wilds of South America and become an eccentric and a recluse.
Leanor tired, in time, of the murderous velocity of her social chariot,
dumped the winged vehicle on the trash-heap and went abroad,
accompanied by a less rich and more ambitious retinue of high livers.
Like vari-colored butterflies, five years winged overhead, years by no
means lacking in color and variety for Leanor. Exacting as were her
tastes, she could scarcely have desired a more changeful, a more
exquisitely exhilarating life.
Only once in a blue moon did she think of Henry. Thoughts of him,
like all other memories of her meteoric past, had been crowded into
oblivion by the inrush of the more intimate and actual.
Henry had been very good to her, she had to admit, but he had been
none the less impossible. The outcome had been inevitable from the
beginning. He was fifteen years her senior. She knew that she could
never have held her volatile self down to a life of self-sacrifice and
suffering with Henry. The idea was no less absurd than the mating of an
esthetic humming-bird with some sedate old owl.
When she consented to marry Henry she had entertained no such
preposterous thought as exacting of him a compliance with the
ridiculously restricted code of ethics he subsequently set for her. Indeed,
she would have grown old and ugly with nothing accomplished,
unseeking and unsought. Too, there would have been lamentably fewer
notches on her ivory fan than the half-decade last past had yielded.
As the wretched venture had turned out, however, she was still under
thirty and was, to employ the homely simile of her latest masculine
objective, “as pretty as a peach.”

At the Pacific entrance of the Grand Canal, where the town of

Bandora drowses like a sprawling lizard on the sun-baked clay, word
went round that the millionaire adventuress was yachting down the west
coast, homeward bound.
Everybody who read the public prints knew about Leanor, so at least
one element at Bandora awaited her arrival with curious interest. And the
curious were to be gratified, for since pretty Leanor habitually did the
unexpected, she only proved her consistency when, upon her arrival, she
capriciously decided to tarry a fortnight, with the two-fold object of
having a look at the great waterway and exploring historic Batoga Island,
only a couple of hours distant.
Should the mighty monument to engineering skill prove uninteresting,
there remained the secret caves of Batoga, among them La Guaca de San
Pedro, by allegation the identical haunted, bat-inhabited cavern in which
buccaneering old Henry Morgan had once stored all of his ill-gotten
gains and maybe imprisoned the unfortunate nuns captured at Porto
Bello! And then, too, there was the celebrated Devil’s Channel, which,
according to widely circulated and much-believed stories, sucked small
craft down into its omnivorous maw like some insatiable demon lying in
wait.
Leanor devoted but little time to the prodigious engineering feat. After
all, it was man-made, and what was man if not a purveyor to feminine
caprices? Mere men were cheap. The adventuress knew, because she had
bought and sold many of them. She had bartered the very souls of some.
She had bought them all with make-believe affection and disposed of
them at a hundred per cent discount. She treated them much as one treats
cast-off garments, experiencing only minor difficulties in disengaging
herself from some of the more persistent.
A genuine Sybarite, Leanor’s appetite for entities masculine had at last
cloyed, and she now turned impatiently to inscrutable old Nature to make
up the deficiency.
She went to Batoga, a verdant, mighty mountain, greenly shaggy, as
yet unshorn by advancing civilization. It might have been a little separate
world, set down by nature in a sleeping sea of sapphire. Here, indeed,
was something different.
She was wild with delight as soon as her dainty feet touched the shell-
paved beach. Really, this wonderland was too splendidly perfect to share
with her unpoetic company of paid buffoons! She sent the whole lot of
them bagging back to Bandora, decided to employ a guide, a boatman, or
a native maid, contingent upon her special needs, right on the ground.
It was due to this whim of Leanor’s that I myself wandered into the
cast, came to know Leanor and likewise the story I am telling you here. I
had just come through a notably obstinate case of dengue in the
sanitarium. My thin knees, in fact, were still somewhat wobbly, and I
was urging them back to normal by means of a leisurely stroll across the
rolling pasture-land. On a grassy, wind-swept hillside I came all
unexpectedly upon Leanor.
Evidently she had thought to refresh her jaded wits by a revel in wild
flowers. She was seated on a shelf of rock that rimmed the hill-crown,
culling unworthy floral specimens. A single upward glance, and then her
eyes dropped back to her flowers in a world-bored manner which I
somehow felt a quick impulse to resent. At least I could annoy her. That
was any fool’s privilege.
“Gathering flowers?” I interrogated, just as though that fact were not
as obvious as the blue sky itself.
For answer, my front-line fortifications were instantly swept by an
ocular onslaught well calculated to obliterate. I smiled back engagingly
at the source of the tempest.
“Some hill, this,” I suggested, emitting a windy sigh after the exertion
of its ascent.
And then I saw that my second drive had broken through her first-line
trench on a front of about a quarter of an inch. Disdain died slowly out of
her face—a face still unaccountably fresh and girlish—and something
like pity at my apparent lack of sophistication took its place.
“You really think it a high hill?” she asked, faintly smiling and gazing
at me steadily as though she doubted my sanity.
I noted that her hazel eyes seemed to swim in seas of a wonderfully
sparkling liquid.
“Well,” I qualified, affecting funereal gravity, “it’s higher than some
hills.”
Her amused smile expanded perceptibly.
“Really, now, have you ever seen very many hills?”
“N-no,” I reluctantly confessed, “not so very many.”
“What induced you to measure this one?”
“Well, I was shadowing somebody,” I said quietly. At last she had
given me an opening.
“Whom, pray?” she demanded, her smile brightening expectantly.
“You—if you don’t mind,” I announced.
“Me!” She laughed deliriously for a moment.
“It’s hardly a laughing matter,” I said, with forced seriousness when
she was still. “I’ve been working on this case for years.”
She sobered with a suddenness that suggested ugly thoughts,
perchance remembering something of her kaleidoscopic past. The hazel
eyes saddened a little. It was evident that she was rummaging among
happenings which it gave her small pleasure to review. I waited. Maybe I
was not quite the yokel she had thought me.
“Do you mean you’re a detective?” she presently asked.
“I mean just that, madam,” I said evenly.
“By whom are you employed?” she questioned tentatively.
“By Henry Fayne,” I casually replied.
“That is the lie of an impostor,” quickly asserted the woman; “Henry
Fayne is dead.”
She rose from the stone shelf and prepared to desert me. Anyhow, I
had won my point. I had succeeded in annoying her.
 But I concluded I could hardly let the matter so end, even as affecting
a woman like Leanor. Nobody can afford to be openly rude.
“Wait,” I said; “let’s be good sportsmen. You tilted at me and I
retaliated. Honors are even. Why not forget it?”
She was greatly relieved; and besides, forgetfulness, of all things, was
what she sought. After a moment, deep wells of laughter again glistened
in her splendid eyes. These and the smiling young mouth somehow
seemed to give the lie to the fiasco she had made of life. What a pity, I
thought, that she had chosen to fritter away her life in this fatuous, futile
fashion.
I had thought that I should feel only contempt for such a woman as
Leanor, but as we walked down the hill she told me something that
penetrated a hitherto unknown weak spot in my armor. So I all but pitied
the woman I had prepared to despise.
As if to take strength from them, she kept her eyes on the wild flowers
she had gathered, as she pronounced the well-nigh unbelievable words I
now set down.
The craze for the blinding white lights, and the delusion of equally
white wines, were surfeited. The gilt and tinsel of the truly tawdry had
palled. The mask of allurement had fallen from the forbidding face of the
artificial and empty. Life itself had become for Leanor a vacant and
meaningless thing. She had seen too much of it in too brief a space.
She concluded with a seeming contradiction, a veiled regret that her
frenzied explorations had exhausted all too soon the world’s meager
store of things worth while, and there was a bitterness in her voice which
contrasted unpleasantly with her youth and beauty as she said plainly,
though with little visible emotion, that she had reached a point where life
itself often repelled and nauseated her.
We had reached the sanitarium by this time, an interruption not
unwelcome in the circumstances, and I left the strange woman alone with
her tardy regrets and sought my own quarters, sympathetic and
depressed, yet thanking my lucky stars for the happy dispensation that
had made me an adventurer instead of an “adventuress.”
That evening, Leanor and I planned a trip to Devil’s Channel, and I
strolled down to the beach in search of such a shallow-draught cayuco as
could maneuver its way over the reefs that barred larger craft. Boteros of
divers nationalities abounded, and among the many my questioning gaze
finally met that of a vagabondish-looking fellow countryman in a frayed
sailor garb. In odd contrast to his raiment, and swinging from his belt in
a sheath which his short coat for an instant did not quite conceal, I
caught a single glimpse of a heavy hunting knife with an ornamented
stag-horn handle.
His name was Sisson, he told me, but he spoke Spanish like a native.
His uncarded beard was a thing long forgotten of razors. He was
unmistakably another of those easily identified tramps of the tropics
who, in an unguarded moment, unaccountably lose their grip on
themselves and thenceforward go sliding unresistingly down to a not
unwelcome oblivion.
Sisson did not importune me, as did all the other boatmen; he did not
even offer me his services; and it was because of this evidence of some
lingering vestige of pride, coupled with the fact that he had an eminently
suitable cayuco, that I decided to employ him.

At the narrow gateway of Devil’s Channel the water is so shallow, and

there so frequently occur tiny submerged sand-bars, that only the
minutest of sea craft can skim over the gleaming rifts and gain entrance.
This was confirmed for the nth time when I felt the specially made keel
of our tiny cayuco scrape the shiny sand in warning that we were at last
entering the canyon-like waterway.
Leanor and I were both playing our splendid oarsman with well-nigh
every imaginable question about the gloomy, spooky-looking channel
before us.
“Aren’t we nearing the place yet?” Leanor presently asked.
“Farther in,” drawled Sisson, the bearded giant of a boatman, glancing
carelessly at the ascending cliffs on either side.
Twisting my body round in the wee native cayuco, I noted that the
perpendicular walls of the shadowy strait that lay before us seemed
drawing together with every pull of Sisson’s great arms. Leanor’s pretty
face was radiant with expectation. Though bored of the world, there was
at least one more thrill for her ahead.
 Five minutes slipped by. Sisson rowed on steadily.
“There she is!” the boatman said suddenly, for the first time evincing
something like a normal human interest in life. One of his huge, hairy
hands was indicating an alkali spot on the face of the right-hand wall a
stone’s throw ahead. “Just opposite that white spot is where it always
happens.”
He released his oars and let them trail in the still water. It looked
peculiarly lifeless. Our small shell gradually slowed.
“Seems to be all smooth sailing here today, though,” I ventured.
“Overrated, for the benefit of tourists,” opined Sisson. “The water’s
eaten out a little tunnel under the west wall, but there’s no real danger if
you know the chart.”
“How many did you say were drowned when that launch went down?”
again asked Leanor. Her great dark eyes were sparkling again now with a
keen new interest in life—or was it the nearness to potential death?
“Eleven,” drawled Sisson. “The engineer jumped for it and made a
landing on that bench of slate over there, and right there”—he smiled
reminiscently—“he sat for seventy-two hours, with ‘water, water
everywhere, nor any drop’—”
“And is it true that none of the life-preservers they were putting on
when the launch sank was ever found?” Leanor also wanted to know.
“True enough,” said Sisson, “but that’s not unnatural. Drowning men
lay hold of whatever they can and never, never turn loose. Why, I’ve
seen the clawlike fingers of skeletons locked around sticks that wouldn’t
bear up a cockroach!”
“Did you say it was a relatively calm day?” I questioned the boatman
idly.
“Sure. Calm as it is right now,” he answered.
I observed casually that the oarsman was gazing fixedly at Leanor.
Even on him, perhaps, beauty was not entirely lost. Doubtless, too, he
had heard the gossip her arrival had set going along the wharves at
Batoga. Meanwhile Leanor had made a discovery.
“Why, we’re still making headway!” she broke out suddenly. “I—I
thought we had stopped.”
 Sisson glanced down at the water, and his tanned brow broke up in
vertical wrinkles of consternation. The look in his deepset eyes, though,
did not, oddly enough, seem to match the perplexity written on his
corrugated brow.
Our craft was sliding rapidly forward as though propelled by the oars.
The phenomenon was due to a current; that much was certain, for we
were moving with a flotsam of dead leaves and seaweed.
Again I screwed my body half round in the cramped bow and shot a
glance ahead. God! we were shooting toward the dread spot on the alkali
cliff as though drawn to it by an unseen magnet. I could see, too, that our
speed was rapidly increasing.
Sisson snatched up the trailing oars and put his giant’s strength against
the invisible something that seemed dragging us by the keel, but all he
did was to plough two futile furrows in the strange whirlpool. Our
cayuco glided on.
The blasé adventuress was never more beautiful. For the time, at least,
life, warm and pulsating, had come back and clasped her in a joyous
embrace. Her lips were parted in a smile of seemingly inexpressible
delight. There was not the remotest suggestion of surprise or fear in her
girlish face.
She put her helm over only when I shouted to her in wide-eyed alarm,
but the keen, finlike keel of our specially built cayuco obviously did not
respond. Oblique in the channel, we slithered over, ever nearer to the
west wall, the unseen agent of destruction towing us with awful certainty
toward the vortex. Still the surface of the water, moving with us, looked
as motionless as a mill-pond! It was uncanny, nothing less.
I peered into the bluishly transparent depths, fascinated with wonder,
and then, of a sudden, I saw that which alone might prove our salvation.
Apparently we were in a writhing, powerful current, racing atop the
seemingly placid undersea or sub-surface waters of the channel. I could
make out many small objects spinning merrily about as they flew,
submerging, toward the whirlpool.
We carried six life-belts. Two of these I snatched from their fastenings,
slipped one about Leanor, and with the other but partly adjusted—for
there remained no time—myself plunged out of our—as it were—
bewitched craft in the direction of the west wall.
 To my surprise I swam easily. When I made a deep stroke, however, I
could feel strange suctorial forces tugging at my finger-tips. But for the
moment I was safe.
I glanced about to see if Leanor had followed my lead. She was not in
the water. I turned on my back and saw, to my utter amazement, that
neither she nor Sisson had left the cayuco.
This was unaccountable indeed. And it was now clear that it was too
late for them to jump, for the light boat had already begun to spin round
in a circle at a point exactly opposite the alkali spot! Faster and faster it
flew, the diameter of the ring in which it raced swiftly narrowing.
As I swam, my shoulder collided with some obstruction. It was the
west wall. I clambered up a couple of feet and sat dripping on a slime-
covered shelf of slate, the identical slab on which the engineer of the
sunken launch had thirsted.
I was powerless to help my companions. I could only sit and stare in
near unbelief. Why—Why had they not abandoned the tiny craft with
me? I saw now that neither had even so much as got hold of a life-belt.
Why—?
My God! What was this I beheld? Sisson had advanced to the stern of
the flying cockleshell where Leanor still sat motionless, unexcited,
smiling. The charmed look of expectancy was still in her perfect face.
Sisson’s voice, suddenly risen high, chilled me to the marrow. It might
have been the voice of some martyr on the scaffold. He did not reveal his
identity to Leanor. It was not necessary. Something—I dare not say what
—enabled her in that awful moment of tragedy to know her divorced
husband.

The exquisite torture of recollection had shriveled Henry Fayne’s

mentality and left him a semi-maniac, yet here, after all the cynical,
embittering years was the physical, the carnate Henry Fayne, the long-
discarded plaything of feminine caprice. His suffering was fearfully
recorded in the seamed and bearded mask of his altered features.
The smile did not leave Leanor’s face. The madman’s voice rose in a
shrill, terrible cry. He babbled and sputtered in consuming rage, but I
caught the current of his wild harangue. He had waited all the years for
this opportunity; he had followed her from Bandora, had laid all his
plans with infinite nicety to avenge the wreck which Leanor had made of
his life.
But the woman laughed defiantly, tensely; laughed derisively, full in
the bearded face.
“You have waited too long, Henry,” she said, evenly yet with a note of
triumph in her tone; “I’ve worn threadbare every allurement of life.
Today I came here seeking my last adventure—a sensation at once new
and ultimate—death!”
It was here that the miracle supervened.
Chagrin, fierce and awful, distorted the hairy vagabond’s face, and,
balancing himself precariously in the crazily whirling dugout, he raised a
great clenched fist. I once had seen a laughing man struck by lightning.
As the rending voltage shot through him the muscles of his face had
relaxed slowly, queerly, as if from incredulity, just as the furious, drawn
face of Henry Fayne relaxed now. The menacing fist unclinched and fell
limply at his side.
Of all the examples of thwarted vengeance I had ever seen on the
stage, or off, this episode from real life was the most dramatic.
The boat had circled swiftly in to the center of the vortex and now
spun crazily for a moment as though on a fixed pivot, like a weather-
vane. Then it capriciously resumed its first tactics, only it now raced
inversely in a rapidly widening circle, running well down in the water, as
though from some powerful submarine attraction.
That the spurious boatman was a victim of some hopeless form of
insanity I was certain when I saw him drop to his knees and extend both
his great hands in evident entreaty to the woman who had stripped him
of his honor and, driven him, a driveling idio-maniac, into exile. Leanor
sat impassive, but the madman continued to supplicate.
Never did my credulity undergo so mighty a strain as when, after a
moment, the woman reached out and locked her slim hands in his. It was
a strange picture, believe me! From my uncertain perch on the slimy
ledge of slate, I stared, thrilling deep in my being at this futile truce on
the brink of eternity.