ght fall so into his grave, and be done with
it.

V.

Bird walked up and down the room, talking; he seemed overjoyed with the
chance, and as if he could not forego it for a moment. "Well, sir, I
wish that I could say as much! But I have been here forty years, hoff
and on. I am born at Quebec"--in his tremulous inattention, Northwick
was aware that the man had said the same thing to him all those years
before, with the same sidelong glance for the effect of the fact upon
him--"and I came here when I was twenty. Now I am sixty. Hall the
Americans know me. I used to go into the bush with them for bear. Lots
of bear in the bush when I first came; now they get pretty scarce. I
have the best moose-dog. But I don't care much for the hunting now; I am
too hold. That's a fact. I am sixty; and forty winters I 'ave pass at
Haha Bay. You know why it is call Haha Bay? It is the hecho. Well, I
don't hear much ha-ha nowadays round this bay. But it is pretty here in
the summer; yes, very pretty. Prettier than Chicoutimi; and more gold in
the 'ills."

He let his bold, gay eye rest confidently on Northwick, as if to say he
knew what had brought him there, and he might as well own the fact at
once; and Northwick tried to get his mind to grapple with his real
motive. But his mind kept pulling away from him, like that unruly horse,
and he could not manage it. He knew, in that self which seemed apart
from his mind, that it would be a very good thing to let the man suppose
he was there to look into the question of the mines; but there was
something else that seemed to go with that intention; something like a
wish to get away from the past so remotely and so completely that no
rumor of it should reach him till he was willing to let it; to be absent
from all who had known him so long that no one of them would know him if
he saw him. He was there not only to start a pulp-mill, but to grow a
beard that should effectually disguise him. He recalled how he had
looked with that long beard in his dream; he put his hand to his chin
and felt the eight days' stubble there, and he wondered how much time it
would take to grow such a beard.

Bird went on talking. "I know that Chicoutimi Company. I told Markham
about the gold when he was here for bear. He is smart; but he don't know
heverything. You think he can make it pay with that invention? I doubt,
me. There is one place in those 'ills," and Bird came closer to
Northwick, and dropped his vo