CHAPTER II.
THE MAN IN THE DARK.
A man stood at a window, looking out into the night.

There was no light in the room.

The stars were hidden behind a thick curtain of sullen clouds.
The house was a wretchedly constructed, long-neglected building of a type common to those old river towns that in their many years of uselessness have lost all civic pride, and in their own resultant squalor and filth have buried their self-respect.

A dingy, scarcely legible sign over the treacherous board walk, in front, by the sickly light of a smoke-grimed kerosene lantern, announced that the place was a hotel.
Dark as it was, the man at the window could see the river.

The trees that lined the bank opposite the town were mere ghostly shadows against the gloomy masses of the low hills that rose from the water's edge, indistinct, mysterious, and unreal, into the threatening sky.