layed it on
were around here now. It was a game we got off on one of the big strike
partners long before the strike. I'll tell YOU, dad, for you know
what happened afterwards, and you'll be glad. Well, that
partner--Demorest--was a kind of silly, you remember--a sort of Miss
Nancyish fellow--always gloomy and lovesick after his girl in the
States. Well, we'd written lots of letters to girls from their chaps
before, and got lots of fun out of it; but we had even a better show
for a game here, for it happened that Van Loo knew all about the
girl--things that even the man's own partners didn't, for Van Loo's
mother was a sort of a friend of the girl's family, and traveled about
with her, and knew that the girl was spoony over this Demorest, and that
they corresponded. So, knowing that Van Loo was employed at Heavy Tree,
she wrote to him to find out all about Demorest and how to stop their
foolish nonsense, for the girl's parents didn't want her to marry a
broken-down miner like him. So we thought we'd do it our own way, and
write a letter to her as if it was from him, don't you see? I wanted to
make him call her awful names, and say that he hated her, that he was a
murderer and a horse-thief, and that he had killed a policeman, and that
he was thinking of becoming a Digger Injin, and having a Digger squaw
for a wife, which he liked better than her. Lord! dad, you ought to have
seen what stuff I made up." The boy burst into a shrill, half-feminine
laugh, and Steptoe, catching the infection, laughed loudly in his own
coarse, brutal fashion.

For some moments they sat there looking in each other's faces, shaking
with sympathetic emotion, the father forgetting the purpose of his
coming there, his rage over Van Loo's visit, and even the rendezvous
to which his horse in the road below was waiting to bring him; the son
forgetting their retreat from Heavy Tree Hill and his shameful vagabond
wanderings with that father in the years that followed. The sinking sun
stared blankly in their faces; the protecting pines above them moved by
a stronger gust shook a few cones upon them; an enormous crow mockingly
repeated the father's coarse laugh, and a squirrel scampered away from
the strangely assorted pair as Steptoe, wiping his eyes and forehead
with his pocket-handkerchief, said:--

"And did you send it?"

"Oh! Van Loo thought it too strong. Said that those sort of love-sick
fools made more fuss over little things than they did over