of the afternoon. He had
when he left the Somasco mill headed in the direction of the Tyee mine,
and passed the night in the woods; but with the morning reflection
came, and he had doubled on his trail and was then making for the
railroad, stiff with fatigue. Each time he stumbled into a rut and the
jolt shook him he remembered his last grievance against Alton, who had
sent him on foot, and his frame of mind was not an enviable one when he
limped into sight of the settlement as dusk was closing down.

He had made a long journey that day, and a good deal depended on the
fact that he was weary and his boots galled him, because it had been
his intention to push on to a ranch beyond the settlement before he
slept, and hire a horse there. Damer was not especially sensitive, but
he felt no great desire to encounter the badinage of the men generally
to be found about the store, who, he surmised, would have heard by this
time what had happened at the Somasco mill. Still, he was hungry and
weary, and stopped a moment when he caught a blink of light between the
trees. The bush behind him was very black and still, the dampness of
the dew was on his dusty garments, and he shivered a little in the
faint cold breeze that came down from the snow. Then more lights
twinkled into brightness, a cheerful murmur of voices and a burst of
laughter came out of the shadows, and the glow that broke out from the
windows of Horton's store seemed curiously inviting. Damer, however,
dallied still, and fumbled for his tobacco. He would sit down where he
was and smoke, he said, and then attempt that last toilsome league.

As it happened, he could not find the tobacco, and having a hazy
recollection of laying it on the ground the last time he filled his
pipe, he shook his aching shoulders and trudged on. The loss of the
tobacco decided him, and with a malediction on Alton he made for
Horton's. It was also a fateful decision with far-reaching results he
made just then. Supper had long been cleared away when he entered the
general room of the hotel, and then stopped a moment with his hand on
the door, for the one man who sat under the big lamp was the last
person he desired to meet. He had, however, some papers spread out in
front of him, and Damer decided to slip away quietly, but as he moved
the blankets on his shoulders struck the door, which rattled, and the
man looked up sharply. He had a fleshy face, and black beady eyes,
which he fi