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ENCOUNTER BY THE RIVER
39

my thought, "We're back of Linthrop's old warehouse, Steve."

Then I knew that the building above us was empty; and I knew, as I gazed at Jerry, that he'd chosen this place to stop me because of his uncertainty of me.

And here I stood before Jerry shaking with my uncertainty of him! He saw it. An impulse swept over me to seize him and drag him through that door to an arrest; for the instant, I stood before Jerry, not as his brother who believed in him—I who had given my word to believe in him—but as a representative of society which hunted him for his treacherous, savage attack upon Dorothy Crewe. For the instant, I saw him as others thought,—my brother with a beast inside him which had struck, through him, at Dorothy Crewe.

Then the sight of his face heaped upon me too many other memories of Jerry and me through twenty-eight years. He was not quite as he had been; how could he be? He was hunted for crime; for nine days he had known that all his world—all the world which we had made his—believed he had committed that attack on Dorothy Crewe. And she had believed!

So it showed in his eyes; it lined his lip stiffer