St.
Francis, and had passed many an hour together.

"Never mind, Grassette," he said, gently. "Call me what you will. You've
got no feeling against me; and I can say with truth that I don't want your
life for the life you took."

Grassette's breast heaved. "He put me out of my work, the man I kill. He
pass the word against me, he hunt me out of the mountains, he call--_tete
de diable_! he call me a name so bad. Everything swim in my head, and I
kill him."

The Governor made a protesting gesture. "I understand. I am glad his
mother was dead. But do you not think how sudden it was? Now here, in the
thick of life, then, out there, beyond this world in the dark--in
purgatory."

The brave old man had accomplished what every one else, priest, lawyer,
Sheriff, and watcher, had failed to do: he had shaken Grassette out of his
blank isolation and obdurate unrepentance, had touched some chord of
recognizable humanity.

"It is done--_bien_, I pay for it," responded Grassette, setting his jaw.
"It is two deaths for me. Waiting and remembering, and then with the
Sheriff there the other--so quick, and all."

The Governor looked at him for some moments without speaking. The Sheriff
intervened again officiously.

"His Honor has come to say something important to you," he remarked,
oracularly.

"Hold you--does he need a Sheriff to tell him when to spik?" was
Grassette's surly comment. Then he turned to the Governor. "Let us speak
in French," he said, in _patois_. "This rope-twister will not understan'.
He is no good--I spit at him!"

The Governor nodded, and, despite the Sheriff's protest, they spoke in
French, Grassette with his eyes intently fixed on the other, eagerly
listening.

"I have come," said the Governor, "to say to you, Grassette, that you
still have a chance of life."

He paused, and Grassette's face took on a look of bewilderment and vague
anxiety. A chance of life--what did it mean?

"Reprieve?" he asked, in a hoarse voice.

The Governor shook his head. "Not yet; but there is a chance. Something
has happened. A man's life is in danger, or it may be he is dead; but more
likely he is alive. You took a life; perhaps you can save one now.
Keeley's Gulch, the mine there!"

"They have found it--gold?" asked Grassette, his eyes staring. He was
forgetting for a moment where and what he was.

"He went to find it, the man whose life is in danger. He had heard from a
trapper who had been a miner once. While he