His mind was racing, racing. There were certain men he had always been seeing in the world. Usually they belonged to a class known as fellows with shaky reputations. What had happened to them? There were men who walked through life with a certain easy grace of manner. In some way they were beyond good and evil, stood outside the influences that made or unmade other men. John Webster had seen a few such men and had never been able to forget them. Now they passed, as in a procession, before his mind's eyes.

There was an old man with a white beard who carried a heavy walking stick and was followed by a dog. He had broad shoulders and walked with a certain stride. John Webster had encountered the man once, as he drove on a dusty country road. Who was the fellow? Where was he going? There was about him a certain air. "Go to the devil then," his manner seemed to say. "I'm a man walking here. Within me there is kingship. Go prattle of democracy and equality if you will, worry your silly heads about a life after death, make up little lies to cheer your way in the darkness, but get out of my way. I walk in the light."

It might be all just a silly notion, what John Webster was now thinking about an old man he had once met walking on a country road. It was certain he remembered the figure with extraordinary sharpness. He had stopped his horse to gaze after the old man, who had not even bothered to turn and look at him. Well the old man had walked with a kingly stride. Perhaps that was the reason he had attracted John Webster's attention.

Now he was thinking of him and a few other such men he had seen during his life. There was one, a sailor who had come down to a wharf in the city of Philadelphia. John Webster was in that city on business and having nothing to do one afternoon had gone down to where ships were loading and unloading. A sailing vessel, a brigantine, lay at the wharf, and the man he had seen came down to it. He had a bag over his shoulder, containing perhaps his sea clothes. He was no doubt a sailor, about to sail before the mast on the brigantine. What he did was simply to come to the vessel's side, throw his bag aboard, call to another man who put his head out at a cabin door, and turning walked away.

But who had taught him to walk like that? The old Harry! Most men and women too, crept through life like sneaks. What gave them the sense of being such underlings, such dogs? Were they constantly besmearing themselves with accusations of guilt and, if that was it, what made them do it?

The old man in the road, the sailor walking off along a street, a negro prize fighter he had once seen driving an automobile, a gambler at the horse races in a southern city, who walked wearing a loud checkered vest before a grandstand filled with people, a woman actress he had once seen coming out at the stage entrance of a theatre, reprobates all perhaps and all walking with the stride of kings.