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184 druggist promised that a physician would be there within a quarter of an hour. Alan went back to Luke, who was silent now except for the gasp of his breath; he did not answer when Alan spoke to him, except to ask for whiskey. Alan, gazing down at him, felt that the man was dying; liquor and his fever had sustained him only to bring him to the door; now the collapse had come; the doctor, even if he arrived very soon, could do no more than perhaps delay the end. Alan went up-stairs and brought down blankets and put them over Luke; he cut the knotted laces of the soaked shoes and pulled them off; he also took off the mackinaw and the undercoat. The fellow, appreciating that care was being given him, relaxed; he slept deeply for short periods, stirred and started up, then slept again. Alan stood watching, a strange, sinking tremor shaking him. This man had come there to make a claim—a claim which many times before, apparently, Benjamin Corvet had admitted. Luke came to Ben Corvet for money which he always got—all he wanted—the alternative to giving which was that Luke would "talk." Blackmail, that meant, of course; blackmail which not only Luke had told of, but which Wassaquam too had admitted, as Alan now realized. Money for blackmail—that was the reason for that thousand dollars in cash which Benjamin Corvet always kept at the house.

Alan turned, with a sudden shiver of revulsion, toward his father's chair in place before the hearth; there for hours each day his father had sat with a book or staring into the fire, always with what this man knew hanging over him, always arming against it with the thousand dollars ready for this man, whenever he