drink and gamble and carry a pistol. It's ten years since he did
the killing, down in Quebec, and I don't suppose the police will get
him now. He's been counted dead. I recognised him here the night after I
asked her how she liked the name of Finden. She doesn't know that I
ever knew him. And he didn't recognise me-twenty-five years since we met
before! It would be better if he went under the sod. Is he pretty sick,
father?"

"He will die unless the surgeon's knife it cure him before twenty-four
hours, and--"

"And Doctor Brydon is sick, and Doctor Hadley away at Winnipeg, and this
is two hundred miles from nowhere! It looks as if the police'll never
get him, eh?"

"You have not tell any one--never?"

Finden laughed. "Though I'm not a priest, I can lock myself up as tight
as anny. There's no tongue that's so tied, when tying's needed, as the
one that babbles most bewhiles. Babbling covers a lot of secrets."

"So you t'ink it better Meydon should die, as Hadley is away and Brydon
is sick-hein?"

"Oh, I think--"

Finden stopped short, for a horse's hoofs sounded on the turf beside
the house, and presently Varley, the great London surgeon, rounded the
corner and stopped his horse in front of the veranda.

He lifted his hat to the priest. "I hear there's a bad case at the
hospital," he said.

"It is ver' dangerous," answered Father Bourassa; "but, voila, come in!
There is something cool to drink. Ah yes, he is ver' bad, that man from
the Great Slave Lake."

Inside the house, with the cooling drinks, Varley pressed his questions,
and presently, much interested, told at some length of singular cases
which had passed through his hands--one a man with his neck broken, who
had lived for six months afterward.

"Broken as a man's neck is broken by hanging--dislocation, really--the
disjointing of the medulla oblongata, if you don't mind technicalities,"
he said. "But I kept him living just the same. Time enough for him
to repent in and get ready to go. A most interesting case. He was a
criminal, too, and wanted to die; but you have to keep life going if you
can, to the last inch of resistance."

The priest looked thoughtfully out of the window; Finden's eyes were
screwed up in a questioning way, but neither made any response to
Varley's remarks. There was a long minute's silence. They were all three
roused by hearing a light footstep on the veranda.

Father Bourassa put down his glass and hastened into the hallway