quilt. Gaston quietly felt her wrist, counting the pulse-beats; then
told Cawley to wet a cloth and hand it to him. He put it gently on the
woman's head. The eyes of the woman followed him anxiously. He sat
down again, and in response to her questioning gaze, began the story of
Jock's life as he knew it.

Cawley stood leaning on the foot-board; the woman's face was cowled
in the quilt with hungry eyes; and Gaston's voice went on in a low
monotone, to the ticking of the great clock in the next room. Gaston
watched her face, and there came to him like an inspiration little
things Jock did, which would mean more to his mother than large
adventures. Her lips moved now and again, even a smile flickered. At
last Gaston came to his father's own death and the years that followed;
then the events in Labrador.

He approached this with unusual delicacy: it needed bravery to look into
the mother's eyes, and tell the story. He did not know how dramatically
he told it--how he etched it without a waste word. When he came to that
scene in the Fort, the three men sitting, targets for his bullets,--he
softened the details greatly. He did not tell it as he told it at the
Court, but the simpler, sparser language made it tragically clear. There
was no sound from the bed, none from the foot-board, but he heard a door
open and shut without, and footsteps somewhere near.

How he put the body in the tree, and prayed over it and left it there,
was all told; and then he paused. He turned a little sick as he saw the
white face before him. She drew herself up, her fingers caught away
the night-dress at her throat; she stared hard at him for a moment, and
then, with a wild, moaning voice, cried out:

"You killed my boy! You killed my boy! You killed my boy!"

Gaston was about to take her hand, when he heard a shuffle and a rush
behind him. He rose, turned swiftly, saw a bottle swinging, threw up his
hand... and fell backwards against the bed.

The woman caught his bleeding head to her breast and hugged it.

"My Jock, my poor boy!" she cried in delirium now. Cawley had thrown his
arms about the struggling, drunken assailant--Jock's poaching friend.

The mother now called out to the pinioned man, as she had done to
Gaston:

"You have killed my boy!" She kissed Gaston's bloody face.

A messenger was soon on the way to Ridley Court, and in a little upper
room Jacques was caring for his master.

CHAPTER IX. HE FINDS NEW SPONSORS

Gast