silently and waited.

"He was already in love . . . with his wife. Also, he had three
children, and he loved them. They are in Honolulu now. The boy is
going to college."

"Some rash act?" I questioned, after a time, impatiently.

He shook his head. "Neither guilty of anything criminal, nor
charged with anything criminal. He was the Sheriff of Kona."

"You choose to be paradoxical," I said.

"I suppose it does sound that way," he admitted, "and that is the
perfect hell of it."

He looked at me searchingly for a moment, and then abruptly took up
the tale.

"He was a leper. No, he was not born with it--no one is born with
it; it came upon him. This man--what does it matter? Lyte Gregory
was his name. Every kamaina knows the story. He was straight
American stock, but he was built like the chieftains of old Hawaii.
He stood six feet three. His stripped weight was two hundred and
twenty pounds, not an ounce of which was not clean muscle or bone.
He was the strongest man I have ever seen. He was an athlete and a
giant. He was a god. He was my friend. And his heart and his soul
were as big and as fine as his body.

"I wonder what you would do if you saw your friend, your brother, on