prove his capacity.
He'll be held by the tightest and strongest contract Charles Nisson can
draw up."

Bat spat out his chew. He replaced it with a pipe, and prepared to flake
off its filling from a plug of tobacco. Standing watched him with the
anxious eyes of a prisoner awaiting sentence. With the cutting of the
first flakes of tobacco, Bat looked up.

"And this little gal-child, with the same name as the mother who just
meant the whole of everything life could hand you? This kiddie with her
mother's blood running in innocent veins? She's your Nancy's daughter
and I guess your marriage made her yours."

"She's another man's child."

Standing's retort was instant. And the tone of it cut like a knife.

Bat regarded him keenly. His knife had ceased from its work on the plug.

"That's so," he said after a while. Then his gaze drifted in the
direction of the house across the water, and the expression in the grey
depths of his eyes became lost to the man who could not forget that the
remaining child of his wife was the offspring of another man. "It seems
queer," he went on reflectively. "That woman, your Nancy, was about the
best loved wife, a fellow could think of. She was all sorts of a woman
to you. Guess she was mostly the sun, moon, an' stars of your life. Yet
her kiddie, a pore, lonesome kiddie, was toted right off to school so
she couldn't butt in on you. You've never seen her, have you? And she
was blood of the woman that set you nigh crazy. Only her father was
another feller. No, Les." He shook his head, and went on filling his
pipe. "No, Les, this mill and all about it can go hang if that pore,
lone kiddie is wiped out of your reckoning. Maybe I'm queer about
things. Maybe I'm no account anyway when it comes to the things of life
mostly belonging to Sunday School. But I'd as lief go back to the woods
I came from, as handle a proposition for you that don't figger that
little gal in it. You best take that as all I've to say. There's a heap
more I could say. But it don't matter. You're feelin' bad. Things have
hit you bad. And you reckon they're going to hit you worse. Maybe you're
right. Maybe you're wrong. Anyway these things are for you, though I'd
be mighty thankful to help you. You want to go out of it all. You want
to follow up some queer notion you got. You reckon it's going to give
you peace. I hope so. I do sure. The thing you've said goes with me
without shouting one way or the other. It grieves me ba