elf an amply prosperous man on the remaining three-tenths.

Where did it all come from? How did it come about? He expressed no
wonder to anybody. He gave no outward sign of his astonishment. There
was a secret. There must be a secret. But the books yielded up no
secret. Only the broad increasing tide of a trade which coincided with
the results. But he felt for all their simple, indisputable figures,
they concealed in their pages a cleverly hidden secret, a profound
secret, which must alone have been shared by the partners, and possibly
Ailsa Mowbray. Allan Mowbray's fortune, apart from the business,
closely approximated half a million dollars. It was incredible. It
was so stupendous as to leave the simple little priest quite
overwhelmed.

However, with due regard for his friendship, he spared himself nothing.
Nothing was neglected. Nothing was left undone in his stewardship.
And so, within seven months of Allan's disastrous end, he found himself
once more free to turn to the simple cares of the living in his
administration of the Mission on Snake River, which was the sum total
of his life's ambition and work.

His duty to the dead was done. And it seemed to his plain thinking
mind that the episode should have been closed forever. But it was not.
Moreover, he knew it was not. How he knew was by no means clear.
Somehow he felt that the end was far off, somewhere in the dim future.
Somehow he felt that he was only at the beginning of things. A secret
lay concealed under his friend's great wealth, and the thought of it
haunted him. It warned him, too, and left him pondering deeply.
However, he did not talk, not even to his friend's widow.

The round form of Murray McTavish filled the office chair to
overflowing. For a man of his energy and capacity, for a man so
perfectly equipped, mentally, and in spirit, for the fierce battle of
the northern latitudes, it was a grotesque freak of Nature that his
form, so literally corpulent, should be so inadequate. However, there
it was. And Nature, seeming to realize the anachronism, had done her
best to repair her blunder. If he were laboring under a superfluity of
adipose, she had equipped him with muscles of steel and lungs of
tremendous expansion, a fierce courage, and nerves of a tempering such
as she rarely bestowed.

He was smoking a strong cigar and reading a letter in a decided
handwriting. It was a man's letter, and it was of a business nature.
Ye