he said. "After all, the thing doesn't
affect you in any way."

Laura glanced down at her hands, and Nasmyth guessed what she was
thinking, for they were hard, and work-roughened. The toil that her
hands showed was, as he realized, only a part of her burden.

"I think it affects me a very great deal," she declared slowly.

Then a curious compassion for her troubled the man. She was young and
very comely, and it was, he felt, cruelly hard on her that, bearing
her father's shame, she must lead a life of hard labour at that
desolate ranch. He felt an almost uncontrollable desire to comfort
her, and to take her cares upon himself, but that was out of the
question, since he was merely a ranch-hand, a Bush-chopper, who owed
even the food he ate and the clothes he wore to her. There is, as he
realized then, after all, very little one can do to lighten another's
load, but in that moment the half-formed aspirations that she had
called into existence in his mind expanded suddenly. There was, he
felt, no reason why he should not acquire money and influence, once he
made the effort.

"Miss Waynefleet," he said haltingly, "I can only offer you my sincere
sympathy. Still"--and perhaps he did not recognize how clear the
connection of ideas was--"I am going down to see about that
dam-building contract to-morrow."

Then Laura smiled, and took up her sewing again. Her burden, as she
realized, was hers alone, but she knew that this man would no longer
drift. She had called up his latent capacities, and he would prove his
manhood.

CHAPTER V

THE FLOOD

The autumn afternoon was oppressively hot when Gordon, floundering
among the whitened driftwood piled along the river-bank, came upon
Nasmyth, who lay upon a slope of rock, with his hands, which were
badly bruised, clenched upon a drill. Another man, who stood upon a
plank inserted into a crevice, swung a hammer, and its ponderous head
came ringing down upon the drill, which Nasmyth jerked round at every
stroke, so many times to the minute, with rhythmic regularity. As
Nasmyth was apparently too busily engaged just then to trouble about
him, Gordon sat down on a big log, and taking out his pipe, looked
about him when he had lighted it.

The river had made a gap for itself in the great forest that filled
the valley, and the sombre firs that rose in serried ranks upon its
farther bank rolled back up the hillside, streaked here and there with
a little thin white mist. A m