Gordon sat down at his desk to read it, and again the roving eyes of the bookkeeper swept the interior of the larger room for the means to an end; sought and found not.

The eye-search was not fully concluded when Gordon pressed the electric button which summoned the young man who kept the local books of the Chiawassee plant across the way.  While he waited he saw the conclusion of the eye-search and smiled rather grimly.

“You’ll not find it, Dyckman,” he said, divining the desperate purpose of the other; adding, as an afterthought:  “and if you should, you wouldn’t have the courage to use it.  That is the fatal lack in your makeup.  It is what kept you from taking the train last night with the money belt which you emptied this morning.  You’ll never make a successful criminal; it takes a good deal more nerve than it does to be an honest man.”

The bookkeeper was sliding lower in his chair.

“I—­I believe you are the devil in human shape,” he muttered; and then he made an addendum which was an unconscious slipping of the under-thought into words:  “It’s no crime to kill a devil.”

Gordon smiled again.  “None in the least,—­only you want to make sure you have a silver bullet in the gun when you try it.”

Hereupon the young man from the office across the pike came in, and Gordon handed a pen to Dyckman.

“I want you to witness Mr. Dyckman’s signature to this paper, Dillard,” he said, folding the confession so that it could not be read by the witness; and when the thing was done, the young man appended his notarial attestation and went back to his duties.

“Well?” said Dyckman, when they were once more alone together.

“That’s all,” said Gordon curtly.  “As long as you are discreet, you needn’t lose any sleep over this.  If you don’t mind hurrying a little, you can make the ten-forty back to town.”

Dyckman restrapped his books and made a show of hastening.  But before he closed the office door behind him he had seen Gordon place the type-written sheet, neatly folded, on top of the thick packet, snapping an elastic band over the whole and returning it to its pigeonhole in the small safe.

Later in the day, Tom crossed the pike to the oak-shingled office of the Chiawassee Consolidated.  His father was deep in the new wage scale submitted by the miners’ union, but he sat up and pushed the papers away when his son entered.

“Have you seen this morning’s Tribune?” asked Tom, taking the paper from his pocket.

“No; I don’t make out to find much time for it before I get home o’ nights,” said Caleb.  “Anything doin’?”

“Yes; they are having a hot time in Chicago and Pullman.  The strike is spreading all over the country on sympathy lines.”

“Reckon it’ll get down to us in any way?” queried the iron-master.

“You can’t tell.  I’d be a little easy with Ludlow and his outfit on that wage scale, if I were you.”