en floor at
the edge of the buffalo-skin. "To tell the truth, I'll be glad to go,
not only because of--" He hitched his shoulders towards the corner
whence came the hoarse and muffled breathing of the Denver clerk. "I'll
be glad to have something to tire me out, so I'll sleep--sleep too
sound to dream. That's what I came for, not to sit idle in a God-damn
cabin and think--think--" He got up suddenly and strode the tiny space
from fire to door, a man transformed, with hands clenching and dark
face almost evil. "They say the men who winter up here either take to
drink or go mad. I begin to see it is so. It's no place to do any
forgetting in." He stopped suddenly before the Boy with glittering
eyes. "It's the country where your conscience finds you out."

"That religion of yours is makin' you morbid, Colonel." The Boy spoke
with the detached and soothing air of a sage.

"You don't know what you're talking about." He turned sharply away. The
Boy relapsed into silence. The Colonel in his renewed prowling brought
up against the wooden crane. He stood looking down into the fire. Loud
and regular sounded the sleeping man's breathing in the quiet little
room.

"I did a wrong once to a woman--ten years ago," said the Colonel,
speaking to the back-log--"although I loved her." He raised a hand to
his eyes with a queer choking sound. "I loved her," he repeated, still
with his back to the Boy. "By-and-by I could have righted it, but
she--she wasn't the kind to hang about and wait on a man's better
nature when once he'd shown himself a coward. She skipped the country."
He leaned his head against the end of the shelf over the fire, and said
no more.

"Go back in the spring, find out where she is, and--"

"I've spent every spring and every summer, every fall and every winter
till this one, trying to do just that thing."

"You can't find her?"

"Nobody can find her."

"She's dead--"

"She's _not_ dead!"

The Boy involuntarily shrank back; the Colonel looked ready to smash
him. The action recalled the older man to himself.

"I feel sure she isn't dead," he said more quietly, but still
trembling. "No, no; she isn't dead. She had some money of her own, and
she went abroad. I followed her. I heard of her in Paris, in Rome. I
saw her once in a droschky in Vienna; there I lost the trail. Her
people said she'd gone to Japan. _I_ went to Japan. I'm sure she wasn't
in the islands. I've spent my life since trying to find her--writin