ship to ship, dragged you out of every
rum-hole in every port, for your own sake!"

He lay back exhausted, his chest rising and falling painfully, his
eyelids fluttering over his burning eyes.

Dan stepped back, and, silenced, stared at the dying man.

Larry clung to his last moments of life, fighting for strength to
finish. He struggled, and raised himself on one elbow.

"For you!" he screamed. "No, for Mary! For Mary, my own flesh and
blood--Mary, the child of the woman I beat when I was drunk an' left to
starve when I got ready!"

Through the stateroom door the sun's flat rays struck full on Larry's
inspired face. He swayed on his elbow; his head fell forward. By a final
effort he steadied himself. His last words came in ringing command.

"Go back! Go--" he faltered, gasping for breath--"go home sober to Mary
an' the child that's comin'!"

The fire of anger drifted slowly from Larry's dying gaze. The little man
fell back. The Bunker Mouse went out, all man, big at the end.

RAINBOW PETE[13]

[Note 13: Copyright, 1917, by The Pictorial Review Company.
Copyright, 1918, by Richard Matthews Hallet.]

BY RICHARD MATTHEWS HALLET

From _The Pictorial Review_

In pursuance of a policy to detain us on the island at Sick Dog until
the arrival of his daughter, Papa Isbister thought fit to tell us the
fate of Rainbow Pete, of whose physical deformity and thirst for gold we
knew something already. Rainbow Pete had come to Mushrat Portage,
playing his flute, at a time when preparations were being made to blast
a road-bed through the wilderness for the railroad.

Mushrat Portage had been but recently a willow clump, and a black rock
ledge hanging over a precipitous valley: the hand of the Indian could be
seen one day parting the leaves of the trail, and on the next, drills
came and tins of black powder, and hordes of greedy men, blind with a
burning zeal for "monkeying with powder" as our host of Sick Dog said.
They were strange men, hoarse men, unreasonable men who cast
sheep's-eyes at the dark woman from Regina, whose shack, rented of
Scarecrow Charlie, crowned the high point of the ledge. She was the only
woman on Mushrat, and at a time just before the blasting began, when
Rainbow Pete sauntered over the trail with his pick and his flute and
his dirty bag of rock specimens, she was hungrily watched and waited on
by the new inhabitants of that ancient portage--Mushrat, whose destinies
were soon to be so s