sunk in the stove, and it
was then towards two o'clock in the morning, when man's vitality is at
its lowest. The young doctor Horton had brought in from a distant
settlement shivered a little as he rose and stooped over the bed.

Damer glanced at him out of glazing eyes, and made a faint gesture. "I
have no use for you," he said. "It's Alton I want."

The doctor crossed over to Horton, who sat in a corner. "If there is
anything you want to ask him lose no time," he said. "The man can't
last until the morning."

"Well," said Horton gravely, "it would be a favour if you went down for
Neilson, the surveyor. He's sitting up waiting. You see we want some
witnesses not connected with the thing in case he's going to tell us
anything. Harry, you'd better talk to him."

Alton crossed the room and sat down by the bed. He had, as it
happened, come out almost scatheless from the fall into the ravine,
which was not the case with his assailant, who had been carried down to
the settlement with the life just clinging to his crushed body. All
that was possible had been done for him, and now Alton waited with
intense suspense, with something akin to compassion in his eyes, and
his anger diverted from the dying wretch to the man who had made use of
him.

"You're going to talk?" he said. "Well, it's only square to warn you
that it will be all put down."

Damer glanced at Horton, who sat with a pen in his hand and a paper on
his knee, and from him to the surveyor holding one or two Government
appointments, who came quietly in.

"That's all right," he said very slowly. "Well, I wanted to kill you,
but I don't know that I've a great deal against you now. You and the
boys did what you could for me, and it was a man in the city who held
me to it. Oh, yes, he's sitting down there raking in the dollars, and
don't care two cents that the man he sent up to make them is dying
here. The thing's not square, anyway."

Alton was sensible of a faint disgust, but he remembered that he could
not afford to be fastidious, because the men he had drawn into his
venture must stand or fall with him.

"We want to know who he is," he said.

There was a glimmer of malice in Damer's face. "Well," he said, and
the strained voice grew clearer, "it was Hallam of the Tyee. There was
something I did that gave him a pull on me, and that man has no mercy
for anybody."

Alton heard the scratching of Horton's pen. "And Hallam hired you to
mur