her face and figure escaped his
greedy eyes. She was very beautiful, so beautiful to him that he
stirred restlessly, chafing irritably under the restraint he was
putting upon himself. Again and again he asked himself why he was fool
enough to do as he was doing. She was his. There was no one to stop
him, no one but--her.

Ah! There was the trouble. Such was the man's temper that nothing
could satisfy him that gave him no difficulty of attaining. His was
the appetite of an epicure in all things. Everything in its way must
be of the best, and to be of the best to him it must be the most
difficult of achievement.

He waited with what patience he could until the letter was written.
Then he watched Jessie seal and address it. Then she rose and stood
staring down at the cruel missive. She knew it was cruel now, for,
trading on the knowledge of the man who was to receive it, she had
appealed through the channel of her woman's weakness to all that great
spirit which she knew to abide in her little husband's heart.

James understood something of what was passing in her mind. And it
pleased him to think of what he had forced her to do--pleased him as
cruelty ever pleases the truly vicious.

At last she held the missive out to him.

"There it is," she said. And as his hand closed upon it her own was
drawn sharply away, as though to avoid contact with his.

"Good," he said, with a peculiar grin.

For a moment the silence remained unbroken. Then the woman raised
appealing eyes to his face.

"You won't hurt Zip?" she said in a voice that would surely have
heartened the object of her solicitude had he heard it.

The man shook his head. His jaws were set, and his smile was
unpleasing.

"Guess any hurtin' Zip gets'll be done by you."

"Ah, no, no!"

The woman reached out wildly for the letter, but James had passed
swiftly out of the room.

CHAPTER XIII

BIRDIE AND THE BOYS

The derelicts of a mining camp must ever be interesting to the student
of human nature, so wide is the field for study. But it were better to
be a student, simply, when probing amongst the refuse heaps of life's
debris. A sentimentalist, a man of heart, would quickly have it broken
with the pity of it all. A city's tragedies often require search to
reveal them, but upon the frontier tragedy stalks unsepulchered in the
background of nearly every life, ready to leap out in all its naked
horror and settle itself leech-like upon the sympathe