I daresay I made a rather
dramatic entrance, falling upon you, so to speak, out of the dark."

"I've a suspicion that you enjoy that kind of thing," Harding rejoined.
"You're a man with the dramatic feeling; guess you find it useful now
and then."

Clarke's eyes twinkled, but it was not with wholesome humour. They
were keen, but he looked old and forbidding as he sat with the smoke
blowing about him and the ruddy firelight on his face.

"There's some truth in your remark and I take it as a compliment, but
my arrival's easily explained. I saw your fire in the distance and
curiosity brought me along."

"What are you doing up here?"

"Going on a visit to my friends the Stonies. Though it's a long way, I
look them up now and then."

"From what I've heard of them they don't seem a very attractive lot,"
Blake interposed. "But we haven't offered you any supper. Benson, you
might put on the frying-pan."

"No thanks," said Clarke. "I'm camped with two half-breeds a little
way back. The Stonies, as you remark, are not a polished set, but
we're on pretty good terms and it's their primitiveness that makes them
interesting. You can learn things civilized folk don't know much about
from these people."

"In my opinion it's knowledge that's not worth much to a white man,"
Harding remarked contemptuously. "Guess you mean the secrets of their
medicine-men? What isn't gross superstition is trickery."

"There you are wrong. They have some tricks, rather clever ones,
though that's not unusual with the professors of a more advanced
occultism; but living, as they do, in direct contact with Nature in her
most savage mood, they have found clues to things that we regard as
mysteries. Anyhow, they have discovered a few effective remedies that
aren't generally known yet to medical science."

He spoke with some warmth and had the look of a genuine enthusiast, but
Harding laughed.

"Medical science hasn't much to say in favour of hoodoo practices, so
far as I know. But I understand you are a doctor."

"I was pretty well known in London."

"Then," said Harding bluntly, "what brought you to Sweetwater?"

"If you haven't heard, I may as well tell you, because the thing isn't
a secret at the settlement." Clarke turned and his eyes rested on
Blake. "I'm by no means the only man who has come to Canada under a
cloud. There was a famous police-court affair I figured in, and though
nothing was proved against me my practice a