licker.

The girl greeted him from the berth. "You look like a great bear,
Jeems." There was a glad, welcoming note in her voice.

He laughed, and drew the stool beside her, and managed to sit on it,
the roof compelling him to bend his head over a little. "I feel like an
elephant in a birdcage," he replied. "Are you comfortable, little Gray
Goose?"

"Yes. But you, Jeems? You are wet!"

"But so happy that I don't feel it, Gray Goose."

He could make her out only dimly there in the darkness of the berth.
Her face was a pale shadow, and she had loosened her damp hair so that
the warmth and dry air might reach it more easily. Kent wondered if she
could hear the beating of his heart. He forgot the fire, and the
darkness grew thicker. He could no longer see the pale outline of her
face, and he drew back a little, possessed by the thought that it was
sacrilegious to bend nearer to her, like a thief, in that gloom. She
sensed his movement, and her hand reached to him and lay lightly with
its fingertips touching his arm.

"Jeems," she said softly. "I'm not sorry--now--that I came up to
Cardigan's place that day--when you thought you were dying. I wasn't
wrong. You are different. And I made fun of you then, and laughed at
you, because I knew that you were not going to die. Will you forgive
me?"

He laughed happily. "It's funny how little things work out, sometimes,"
he said. "Wasn't a kingdom lost once upon a time because some fellow
didn't have a horseshoe? Anyway, I knew of a man whose life was saved
because of a broken pipe-stem. And you came to me, and I'm here with
you now, because--"

"Of what?" she whispered.

"Because of something that happened a long time ago," he said.
"Something you wouldn't dream could have anything to do with you or
with me. Shall I tell you about it, Marette?"

Her fingers pressed slightly upon his arm. "Yes."

"Of course, it's a story of the Police," he began. "And I won't mention
this fellow's name. You may think of him as that red-headed O'Connor,
if you want to. But I don't say that it was he. He was a constable in
the Service and had been away North looking up some Indians who were
brewing an intoxicating liquor from roots. That was six years ago. And
he caught something. Le Mort Rouge, we sometimes call it--the Red
Death--or smallpox. And he was alone when the fever knocked him down,
three hundred miles from anywhere. His Indian ran away at the first
sign of it, and he had just