t these
men, and why you have continued the acquaintance."

"Molly," he said, obeying her, "you are a terrible inquisitor, and the
privacy of one's chamber were the kinder place to call one to account.
But I bend to your implacability.... Mr. Vandewaters, like myself, has
a taste for roving, though our aims are not identical. He has a
fine faculty for uniting business and pleasure. He is not a thorough
sportsman--there is always a certain amount of enthusiasm, even in the
unrewarded patience of the true hunter; but he sufficeth. Well, Mr.
Vandewaters had been hunting in the far north, and looking after a
promising mine at the same time. He was on his way south at one angle,
I at another angle, bound for the same point. Shon McGann was with me;
Pierre with Vandewaters. McGann left me, at a certain point, to join his
wife at a Barracks of the Riders of the Plains. I had about a hundred
miles to travel alone. Well, I got along the first fifty all right.
Then came trouble. In a bad place of the hills I fell and broke an ankle
bone. I had an Eskimo dog of the right sort with me. I wrote a line on
a bit of birch bark, tied it round his neck, and started him away,
trusting my luck that he would pull up somewhere. He did. He ran into
Vandewaters's camp that evening. Vandewaters and Pierre started away at
once. They had dogs, and reached me soon.

"It was the first time I had seen Pierre for years. They fixed me up,
and we started south. And that's as it was in the beginning with Mr.
John Vandewaters and me."

Lady Lawless had been watching the two strangers during the talk, though
once or twice she turned and looked at her husband admiringly. When he
had finished she said: "That is very striking. What a pity it is that
men we want to like spoil all by their lack of form!"

"Don't be so sure about Vandewaters. Does he look flurried by these
surroundings?"

"No. He certainly has an air of contentment. It is, I suppose, the usual
air of self-made Americans."

"Go to London, E.C., and you will find the same, plus smugness. Now, Mr.
Vandewaters has real power--and taste too, as you will see. Would you
think Mr. Stephen Pride a self-made man?"

"I cannot think of any one else who would be proud of the patent. Please
to consider the seals about his waistcoat, and the lady-like droop of
his shoulders."

"Yet he is thought to be a young man of parts. He has money, made by
his ancestors; he has been round the world; he belongs