by which a party in force could approach it. This
was to Chivers obviously too strategic a position to intrust to his
prisoner, and the sentry who guarded its approach, five hundred yards
away, was left unchanged. But there was another "blind" trail, or
cut-off, to the left, through the thickest undergrowth of the woods,
known only to his party. To place Collinson there was to insure him
perfect immunity from the approach of an enemy, as well as from any
confidential advances of his fellow sentry. This done, he drew a cigar
from his pocket, and handing it to Collinson, lighted another for
himself, and leaning back comfortably against a large boulder, glanced
complacently at his companion.

"You may smoke until I go, Mr. Collinson, and even afterwards, if you
keep the bowl of your pipe behind a rock, so as to be out of sight of
your fellow sentry, whose advances, by the way, if I were you, I should
not encourage. Your position here, you see, is a rather peculiar one.
You were saying, I think, that a lingering affection for your wife
impelled you to keep this place for her, although you were convinced of
her death?"

Collinson's unaffected delight in Chivers's kindliness had made his
eyes shine in the moonlight with a doglike wistfulness. "I reckon I
did say that, Mr. Chivers," he said apologetically, "though it ain't
goin' to interfere with you usin' the shanty jest now."

"I wasn't alluding to that, Collinson," returned Chivers, with a large
rhetorical wave of the hand, and an equal enjoyment in his companion's
evident admiration of him, "but it struck me that your remark,
nevertheless, implied some doubt of your wife's death, and I don't know
but that your doubts are right."

"Wot's that?" said Collinson, with a dull glow in his face.

Chivers blew the smoke of his cigar lazily in the still air. "Listen,"
he said. "Since your miraculous conversion a few moments ago, I have
made some friendly inquiries about you, and I find that you lost all
trace of your wife in Texas in '52, where a number of her fellow
emigrants died of yellow fever. Is that so?"

"Yes," said Collinson quickly.

"Well, it so happens that a friend of mine," continued Chivers slowly,
"was in a train which followed that one, and picked up and brought on
some of the survivors."

"That was the train wot brought the news," said Collinson, relapsing
into his old patience. "That's how I knowed she hadn't come."

"Did you ever hear the nam