Picture Play Magazine (Mar-Aug 1916)

The Destroyers 243 I found other threads that led straight to Lawler, and, instead of putting the evidence in the hands of the police, I took it upon myself to confront Lawler. I was determined that I would drag him to my wife and make him confess his villainy. I went to see him at his home. He was not there, but at his office, I was told. He had a suite of rooms in a downtown building. I went there and found him alone. Entering, I closed and locked the door and stood with my back against it. What I said to him I cannot recall. It was the kind of thing that blisters a man's tongue and incites to murder. Lawler was a coward, but my words bit into his heart. He yanked open the drawer of his desk and pulled out a pistol. I was on him before he could aim it. It was a death struggle we had, each of us fighting for his life. In the melee the pistol exploded and Lawler crumpled up. Did I shoot him? I don't know. Probably. If I did, he deserved his fate. The pistol lay on the floor beside the dead man. I staggered to my feet and stared at one hand that stuck up strangely — the hand of fate. I backed away from it, backed out the door and fled. In the eyes of the law I had become a murderer. How terrible was the gulf that now separated me from Josephine! Henceforth Roscoe Steele must be seen no more among his fellows. I went to Canada, drifted to Winnipeg, to Edmonton, to Athabasca Landing, to Fort MacMurray; traveled up through the Great Slave and the Great Bear country ; and finally began life anew at Fort McPherson, a hundred miles south of the Arctic coast, under the name of Peter God. I wrote to Josephine from there — sent her a map of the place. I had no reply. Years came and went — five of them. I gave little thought to their passing. I had lost all the joy of living. My face unshaven, my hair matted, uncut, the Peter God I had become differed horribly from the well-groomed Roscoe Steele of five years ago. I became a victim of that scourge of the wilderness — the smallpox. A red flag fluttered in front of my shack. Then came Phillip Curtis — the man who was to bring me back my belief in humanity. A fine, sturdy fellow of about my own age, and a physician of considerable repute. "Didn't they warn you not to come here — smallpox !" I shrieked at him. He waved me to silence. 'T'm a doctor," he said. Then suddenly: "Your name is Peter God?" I nodded. "Formerly known as Roscoe Steele," he went on, while I stared at him, wideeyed. "I have been commissioned to deliver a letter to you. It is from your wife Josephine." I sprang to him with a cry of joy, but he backed away. "First thing is to fix vou up, to make you well — then the letter." I was too weak to wrestle with him. "She sent you to me?" I asked him wonderingly. "Alan, man, do you know what you are saying? Do you know what it means to me ?" My heart was pounding painfully, my words came as a torrent. "She sent me," he answered stolidly, tonelessly. "And her message was that she has learned that you were the victim of plotters and that if you want her she will come to you." "If I want her !" I cried, in agony. "I have longed for her with a longing that tortures. In the solitudes, her face was ever before me. Waking and sleeping " I broke off and laughed hysterically. "Of course, you can't understand," I said. "On the contrary" — his voice was trembling — "I know how you feel — I have been in love with Josephine myself." I stepped close to him and looked into