hatred for the old code of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth
than in this hour when he saw up the valley a gray mist of smoke rising
over the roofs of his home town. He had never conceded within himself
that he was a criminal. He believed that in killing Kirkstone he had
killed a serpent who had deserved to die, and a hundred times he had
told himself that the job would have been much more satisfactory from
the view-point of human sanitation if he had sent the son in the
father's footsteps. He had rid the people of a man not fit to live--and
the people wanted to kill him for it. Therefore the men and women in
that town he had once loved, and still loved, were his enemies, and to
find friends among them again he was compelled to perpetrate a clever
fraud.

He remembered an unboarded path from this side of the town, which
entered an inconspicuous little street at the end of which was a barber
shop. It was the barber shop which he must reach first He was glad that
it was early in the day when he came to the street an hour later, for
he would meet few people. The street had changed considerably. Long,
open spaces had filled in with houses, and he wondered if the
anticipated boom of four years ago had come. He smiled grimly as the
humor of the situation struck him. His father and he had staked their
future in accumulating a lot of "outside" property. If the boom had
materialized, that property was "inside" now--and worth a great deal.
Before he reached the barber shop he realized that the dream of the
Prince Albertites had come true. Prosperity had advanced upon them in
mighty leaps. The population of the place had trebled. He was a rich
man! And also, it occurred to him, he was a dead one--or would be when
he reported officially to McDowell. What a merry scrap there would be
among the heirs of John Keith, deceased!