“It’s the only way for me,” he decided, as he turned into the road leading toward Saint George and the Manhattan Ferry.  “Flint and Herzog will be sure to put Slade and the Cosmos people after me.  Blacklisting will be the least of what they’ll try to do.  They’ll use slugging tactics, sure, if they get a chance, or railroad me to some Pen or other, if possible.  My one best bet is to keep out of their way; and I figure I’m ten times safer on the open road, with a few dollars to stave off a vagrancy charge, and with two good fists and this stick to keep ’em at a distance, than I would be on the railroads or in cheap dumps along the way.

“The last place they’ll ever think of looking for me will be the big outdoors. Their idea of hunting for a workman is to dragnet the back rooms of saloons—­especially if they’re after a Socialist.  That’s the limit of their intelligence, to connect Socialism and beer.  I’ll beat ’em; I’ll hike—­and it’s a hundred to one I land in Niagara with more cash than when I started, with better health, more knowledge, and the freedom that, alone, can save the world now from the most damnable slavery that ever threatened its existence!”

Thus reasoning, with perfect clarity and a long-headedness that proved him a strategist at four-and-twenty, Gabriel Armstrong whistled a louder note as he tramped away to northward, away from the hateful presence of Herzog, away from the wage-slavery of the Oakwood Heights plant, away—­with that precious secret in his brain—­toward the far scene of destined warfare, where stranger things were to ensue than even he could possibly conceive.

Saturday morning found him, his visit with Underwood at an end, already twenty miles or more from the Bronx River, marching along through Haverstraw, up the magnificent road that fringes the Hudson—­now hidden from the mighty river behind a forest-screen, now curving on bold abutments right above the sun-kissed expanses of Haverstraw Bay, here more than two miles from wooded shore to shore.

At eleven, he halted at a farm house, some miles north of the town, got a job on the woodpile, and astonished the farmer by the amount of birch he could saw in an hour.  He took his pay in the shape of a bountiful dinner, and—­after half an hour’s smoke and talk with the farmer, to whom he gave a few pamphlets from the store in his knapsack—­said good-bye to all hands and once more set his face northward for the long hike through much wilder country, to West Point, where he hoped to pass the night.

Thus we must leave him, for a while.  For now the thread of our narration, like the silken cord in the Labyrinth of Crete, leads us back to the Country Club at Longmeadow, the scene, that very afternoon, of the sudden and violent rupture between the financier and Catherine Flint.