ot guilty. And--" he looked sharply toward the younger man--"you
say to go on?"

"Go on," said Fairchild, and he spoke the words between tightly
clenched teeth. Harry turned his light before him, and once more
shielded it with his big hand. A step--two, then:

"Look--there--over by the footwall!"

Fairchild forced his eyes in the direction designated and stared
intently. At first it appeared only like a succession of disjointed,
broken stones, lying in straggly fashion along the footwall of the
drift where it widened into the stope, or upward slant on the vein.
Then, it came forth clearer, the thin outlines of something which
clutched at the heart of Robert Fairchild, which sickened him, which
caused him to fight down a sudden, panicky desire to shield his eyes
and to run,--a heap of age-denuded bones, the scraps of a miner's
costume still clinging to them, the heavy shoes protruding in comically
tragic fashion over bony feet; a huddled, cramped skeleton of a human
being!

They could only stand and stare at it,--this reminder of a tragedy of a
quarter of a century agone. Their lips refused to utter the words that
strove to travel past them; they were two men dumb, dumb through a
discovery which they had forced themselves to face, through a fact
which they had hoped against, each more or less silently, yet felt sure
must, sooner or later, come before them. And now it was here.

And this was the reason that twenty years before Thornton Fairchild,
white, grim, had sought the aid of Harry and of Mother Howard. This
was the reason that a woman had played the part of a man, singing in
maudlin fashion as they traveled down the center of the street at
night, to all appearances only three disappointed miners seeking a new
field. And yet--

"I know what you 're thinking." It was Harry's voice, strangely hoarse
and weak. "I 'm thinking the same thing. But it must n't be. Dead
men don't alwyes mean they 've died--in a wye to cast reflections on
the man that was with 'em. Do you get what I mean? You've said--" and
he looked hard into the cramped, suffering face of Robert
Fairchild--"that you were going to 'old your father innocent. So 'm I.
We don't know, Boy, what went on 'ere. And we 've got to 'ope for the
best."

Then, while Fairchild stood motionless and silent, the big Cornishman
forced himself forward, to stoop by the side of the heap of bones which
once had represented a man, to touch gingerly the cl