him before twenty-four
hours, and--"

"And Doctor Brydon is sick, and Doctor Hadley away at Winnipeg, and this
is two hundred miles from nowhere! It looks as if the police'll never get
him, eh?"

"You have not tell any one--never?"

Finden laughed. "Though I'm not a priest, I can lock myself up as tight as
anny. There's no tongue that's so tied, when tying's needed, as the one
that babbles most bewhiles. Babbling covers a lot of secrets."

"So you t'ink it better Meydon should die, as Hadley is away and Brydon is
sick--_hein_?"

"Oh, I think--"

Finden stopped short, for a horse's hoofs sounded on the turf beside the
house, and presently Varley, the great London surgeon, rounded the corner
and stopped his horse in front of the veranda.

He lifted his hat to the priest. "I hear there's a bad case at the
hospital," he said.

"It is ver' dangerous," answered Father Bourassa; "but, _voila_, come in!
There is something cool to drink. Ah, yes, he is ver' bad, that man from
the Great Slave Lake."

Inside the house, with the cooling drinks, Varley pressed his questions,
and presently, much interested, told at some length of singular cases
which had passed through his hands--one a man with his neck broken, who
had lived for six months afterward.

"Broken as a man's neck is broken by hanging--dislocation, really--the
disjointing of the _medulla oblongata_, if you don't mind technicalities,"
he said. "But I kept him living just the same. Time enough for him to
repent in and get ready to go. A most interesting case. He was a criminal,
too, and wanted to die; but you have to keep life going if you can, to the
last inch of resistance."

The priest looked thoughtfully out of the window; Finden's eyes were
screwed up in a questioning way, but neither made any response to Varley's
remarks. There was a long minute's silence. They were all three roused by
hearing a light footstep on the veranda.

Father Bourassa put down his glass and hastened into the hallway. Finden
caught a glimpse of a woman's figure, and, without a word, passed abruptly
from the dining-room, where they were, into the priest's study, leaving
Varley alone. Varley turned to look after him, stared, and shrugged his
shoulders.

"The manners of the West," he said, good-humoredly, and turned again to
the hallway, from whence came the sound of the priest's voice. Presently
there was another voice--a woman's. He flushed slightly and involuntarily
straighten