Chapter 1
_ The morning was as dark and cold as city snow could make it--a dingy whirl at the window； a smoky gust through the fireplace； a shadow black as a bear‘s cave under the table. Nothing in all the cavernous room, loomed really warm or familiar except a glass of stale water, and a vapid, half-eaten grape-fruit.
Packed into his pudgy pillows like a fragile piece of china instead of a human being Carl Stanton lay and cursed the brutal Northern winter.
Between his sturdy, restive shoulders the rheumatism snarled and clawed like some utterly frenzied animal trying to gnaw-gnaw-gnaw its way out. Along the tortured hollow of his back a red-hot plaster fumed and mulled and sucked at the pain like a hideously poisoned fang trying to gnaw-gnaw-gnaw its way in. Worse than this； every four or five minutes an agony as miserably comic as a crashing blow on one‘s crazy bone went jarring and shuddering through his whole abnormally vibrant system.
In Stanton‘s swollen fingers Corneli

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