y, silencing by sheer terror her parents' endeavours to keep them
at least till morning, rather than drive in his half-intoxicated
condition across the uncleared country in the moonlight.

In the early morning Harold stood at their door dazed and bleeding,
with his eldest child crushed and moaning in his arms. Almost without
a word he gave it to the grandmother, and then guided the men at hand,
striding on silently before them, to the precipitous bank of a deep
gulley some twelve miles off. In the bottom lay the carriage broken to
pieces, and beside it, where Harold had dragged them out, Meg and her
baby both quite dead--where he had driven headlong down in the darkness.

The sun was burning hot when they brought her back in the cart, Harold
walking behind with the little one in his arms, and when he had laid it
down at home, the elder one waited till he took it. It was a fine boy
of two years old, the thing he loved best in the world; but with a
broken spine there was no hope for it, and for a whole day and night he
held it, pacing the room, and calling it, speaking to and noticing no
one else, and touching no food, only slaking his thirst with the liquor
that stood at hand, until the poor little thing died in convulsions.

Unhappily, he had scarcely laid it down beside its mother and brother,
when he saw his rival in the outer room of the store, and with one
deadly imprecation, and a face which Eustace could not think of without
horror, challenged him to fight, and in a second or two had struck him
down, with a fractured skull. But the deed was done in undoubted brain
fever. That was quite established, and for ten days after he was
desperately ill and in the wildest delirium, probably from some injury
to the head in the fall, aggravated by all that followed.

Neiher magistrate nor doctor was called in, but Prometesky came to
their help, and when he grew calmer, brought him home, where his
strength rallied, but his mind was for some time astray. For weeks he
alternated between moods of speechless apathy and hours of frenzy,
which, from his great strength, must have been fatal to someone if he
had not always known his gentle, feeble old uncle, and obeyed his
entreaties, even when Prometesky lost power with him.

In this remote part of the country no one interfered; the Crees, whose
presence maddened him, were afraid to approach, and only Prometesky
sustained the hopes of the two Eustaces by his conviction that