n she had been reading to
him, at his own request, the sayings of the Man on the Mount, that he
referred for the first time to the details of the accident which had so
nearly blotted him out. Upon his asking, she related the few and simple
facts of the rescue, modestly minimizing her own part in it, and giving
her companion in the catboat full credit.

"The writer-man," he said thoughtfully, when she had finished telling
him how Griswold had worked over him in the boat, and how he would not
give up. "I remember; you fetched him out to the hotel with you one day:
no, you needna fear I'll be forgetting him." Then, with a shrewd look
out of the steel-gray eyes: "How long have you been knowing him, Maggie,
child?"

"Oh, for quite a long time," she hastened to say. "He came here, sick
and helpless, one day last spring, and--well, there isn't any hospital
here in Wahaska, you know, so we took him in and helped him get over the
fever, or whatever it was. This was his room while he stayed with us."

Andrew Galbraith wagged his head on the pillow.

"I know," he said. "And ye're doing it again for a poor auld man whose
siller has never bought him anything like the love you're spending on
him. You're everybody's good angel, I'm thinking, Maggie, lassie."
Though he did not realize it, his sickness was bringing him day by day
nearer to his far-away boyhood in the Inverness-shire hills, and it was
easy to slip into the speech of the mother-tongue. Then, after a long
pause, he went on: "He wasna wearing a beard, a red beard trimmed down
to a spike--this writer-man, when ye found him, was he?"

She shook her head. "No; I have never seen him with a beard."

The sick man turned his face to the wall, and after a time she heard him
repeating softly the words which she had just read to him. "But if ye
forgive not men ... neither will your Father forgive...." And again,
"Judge not that ye be not judged." When he turned back to her there were
new lines of suffering in the gray old face.

"I'm sore beset, child; sore beset," he sighed. "You were telling me
that MacFarland and Johnson will be here to-night?"

"Yes; they should both reach Wahaska this evening."

Another pause, and at the end of it: "That man Broffin: you'll remember
you asked me one day who he was, and I tell 't ye he was a special
officer for the bank. Is he still here?"

"He is; I saw him on the street this morning."

Again Andrew Galbraith turned his face away, an