from one
to another. His face was drawn and haggard and lined. Extreme exhaustion
showed in every movement. He babbled incoherently.

"Seven--eighteen--ninety-nine. 'Atta-boy," he said thickly.

"Don't you see he's starving and out of his head?" snapped Holt
brusquely. "Get him grub, _pronto_."

The old man rose and moved toward the suffering man. "Come, pard. Tha'
's all right. Sit down right here and go to it, as the old sayin' is."
He led the man to a place beside Big Bill and made him sit down. "Better
light a fire, boys, and get some coffee on. Don't give him too much
solid grub at first."

The famished man ate what was given him and clamored for more.

"Coming up soon, pardner," Holt told him soothingly. "Now tell us
howcome you to get lost."

The man nodded gravely. "Hit that line low, Gord. Hit 'er low. Only
three yards to gain."

"Plumb bughouse," commented Dud, chewing tobacco stolidly.

"Out of his head--that's all. He'll be right enough after he's fed up
and had a good sleep. But right now he's sure some Exhibit A. Look at
the bones sticking through his cheeks," Big Bill commented.

"Come, Old-Timer. Get down in your collar to it. Once more now. Don't
lie down on the job. All together now." The stranger clucked to an
imaginary horse and made a motion of lifting with his hands.

"Looks like his hawss bogged down in Fifty-Mile Swamp," suggested Holt.

"Looks like," agreed Dud.

The old miner said no more. But his eyes narrowed to shining slits. If
this man had come through Fifty-Mile Swamp he must have started from the
river. That probably meant that he had come from Kusiak. He was a young
man, talking the jargon of a college football player. Without doubt he
was, in the old phrasing of the North, a chechako. His clothing, though
much soiled and torn, had been good. His voice held the inflections of
the cultured world.

Gideon Holt's sly brain moved keenly to the possibility that he could
put a name to this human derelict they had picked up. He began to see
it as more than a possibility, as even a probability, at least as a
fifty-fifty chance. A sardonic grin hovered about the corners of his
grim mouth. It would be a strange freak of irony if Wally Selfridge,
to prevent a meeting between him and the Government land agent, had
sent him a hundred miles into the wilderness to save the life of Gordon
Elliot and so had brought about the meeting that otherwise would never
have taken place.