ipping at his heart. He tried to shake it off, but it
was like a sickness. To believe that she had been the wife of another man
or that she could ever belong to any other man than himself seemed like
shutting his eyes forever to the sun. And yet she had told him. She had
belonged to another man; she might belong to him even now. She had come to
find if he was alive--or dead.

And if alive? Aldous stopped again, and looked down into the dark pit
through which the river was rushing a hundred feet below him. It tore in
frothing maelstroms through a thousand rocks, filling the night with a low
thunder. To John Aldous the sound of it might have been a thousand miles
away. He did not hear. His eye saw nothing in the blackness. For a few
moments the question he had asked himself obliterated everything. If they
found Joanne's husband alive at Tete Jaune--what then? He turned back,
retracing his steps over the trail, a feeling of resentment--of hatred for
the man he had never seen--slowly taking the place of the oppressive thing
that had turned his heart sick within him. Then, in a flash, came the
memory of Joanne's words--words in which, white-faced and trembling, she
had confessed that her anxiety was not that she would find him dead, but
that _she would find him alive_. A joyous thrill shot through him as he
remembered that. Whoever this man was, whatever he might have been to her
once, or was to her now, Joanne did not want to find him alive! He laughed
softly to himself as he quickened his pace. The tense grip of his fingers
loosened. The grim, almost ghastly part of it did not occur to him--the
fact that deep in his soul he was wishing a man dead and in his grave.

He did not return at once to the scenes about Quade's place, but went to
the station, three quarters of a mile farther up the track. Here, in a
casual way, he learned from the little pink-faced Cockney Englishman who
watched the office at night that Stevens had been correct in his
information. Quade had gone to Tete Jaune. Although it was eleven o'clock,
Aldous proceeded in the direction of the engineers' camp, still another
quarter of a mile deeper in the bush. He was restless. He did not feel that
he could sleep that night. The engineers' camp he expected to find in
darkness, and he was surprised when he saw a light burning brightly in
Keller's cabin.

Keller was the assistant divisional engineer, and they had become good
friends. It was Keller who had set th