t of referring to
the childish old woman with, all due form, for he saw Bates liked it.

"Hoots! What are you saying, man? Would ye have had the lassie leave the
burden on my mind that she'd gone out of her father's house penniless?
'Twas the one kindness she did me to take the gold."

CHAPTER VI.

One evening Alec Trenholme sat down to write to his brother. Bates had
urged him to write, and, after a due interval, of his own accord he
wrote. The urging and the writing had a certain relation of cause and
effect, but the writer did not think so. Also, the letter he wrote was
very different from the document of penitence and recantation that Bates
had advised, and now supposed him to be writing.

He gave a brief account of what he had done before he accepted the post
of station-master at Turrifs Station, and then,

"I liked it well enough," he wrote, "until one night a queer thing
happened. As evening came on, a man drove up bringing a coffin
to be sent by train to the next village for burial. When I was left
alone with the thing, the man inside got up--he really did, I saw him.
I shut him in and ran to fetch the carter, but couldn't catch him.
When I came back, the man had got out and ran into the wood.
They had lined the box with a white bed-quilt, and we found that
some miles away in the bush the next day, but we never found the
man; and the queer thing is that there were two men and a girl who
seem to have been quite certain he was dead. One of them, a very
intelligent fellow that I am staying with now, thinks the carter must
have played some trick on the way; but I hardly believe that myself,
from the way the carter acted. I think he spoke the truth; he said
he had been alone on the road all day, and had been scared out of his
wits by hearing the man turn in the coffin. He seemed well frightened,
too. Of course, if this is true, the man could not really have
been dead; but I'm not trying to give an explanation; I'm just telling
you what occurred. Well, things went on quietly enough for
another month, and on the last night of the old year the place was
snowed up--tracks, roads, everything--and at midnight an old man
came about who answered to the description I had of the dead man,
clothes and all, for it seems they were burying him in his clothes.
He was rather deaf, and blind I think, though I'm not sure, and he
seemed to be wandering