is appearance, or uneasiness over "Kate's"
opinion of him. He was hungry. And since it is next to impossible to
whip up the conscience of a man whose thoughts are concentrated upon his
physical needs, Mason was wise enough to wait, though the one point
which he considered of vital importance to them both--the question of
Ford's acceptance or refusal of the foremanship of the Double Cross--had
not yet been touched upon.

While Ford ate with a controlled voraciousness which spoke eloquently of
his twenty-four hours of fasting and exposure, Mason gossiped
inattentively and studied the man.

Eight years leave their impress of mental growth or deterioration upon a
man. Outwardly Ford was not much changed since Mason had come with him
out of Alaska and lost sight of him afterwards. There was the maturity
which the man of thirty possessed and which the virile young fellow of
twenty-one had lacked. There was the same straight glance, the same
atmosphere of squareness and mental poise. Those were qualities which
Mason set down as valuable factors in his estimate of the man. Besides,
there were other signs which did not make so pleasant a reading.

Eight years--and a few of them, at least, had been spent wastefully in
tearing down what the other years had built; Mason had heard that Ford
was "going to the dogs," and that by the short trail men blazed for
themselves centuries ago and which those who came after have made a
highway--the whisky trail. Mason had heard, now and then, of ten
thousand dollars coming to Ford upon the death of his father and going
almost as suddenly as it had come. That, at least, had been the rumor.
Also he had heard, just lately, that Ford had taken to gambling as a
profession and to terrorizing Sunset periodically as a pastime. And
Mason remembered the Ford Campbell who had carried him on his back out
of a wild place in Alaska, and had nearly starved himself that the sick
man's strength might not fail him utterly. He had remembered--had Ches
Mason; and, being one of those tenacious souls who cling to friendship
and to a resilient faith in the good that is in the worst of us, he had
thrown out a tentative life-line, as it were, and hoped that Ford might
clutch it before he became quite submerged in the sodden morass of
inebriety.

Ford may or may not have grasped eagerly at the line. At any rate he was
there in the mess-house of the Double Cross, and he was not quite so
sodden as Mason had feared to