do a dying man the biggest favor he ever asked
in his life?"

"I should be most happy, sir, most happy."

"It's this," said Kent. "I want to know if that girl actually leaves on
the down-river scow tonight. If I'm alive tomorrow morning, will you
tell me?"

"I shall do my best, sir."

"Good. It's simply the silly whim of a dying man, Mercer. But I want to
be humored in it. And I'm sensitive--like yourself. I don't want
Cardigan to know. There's an old Indian named Mooie, who lives in a
shack just beyond the sawmill. Give him ten dollars and tell him there
is another ten in it if he sees the business through, and reports
properly to you, and keeps his mouth shut afterward. Here--the money is
under my pillow."

Kent pulled out a wallet and put fifty dollars in Mercer's hands.

"Buy cigars with the rest of it, old man. It's of no more use to me.
And this little trick you are going to pull off is worth it. It's my
last fling on earth, you might say."

"Thank you, sir. It is very kind of you."

Mercer belonged to a class of wandering Englishmen typical of the
Canadian West, the sort that sometimes made real Canadians wonder why a
big and glorious country like their own should cling to the mother
country. Ingratiating and obsequiously polite at all times, he gave one
the impression of having had splendid training as a servant, yet had
this intimation been made to him, he would have become highly
indignant. Kent had learned their ways pretty well. He had met them in
all sorts of places, for one of their inexplicable characteristics was
the recklessness and apparent lack of judgment with which they located
themselves. Mercer, for instance, should have held a petty clerical job
of some kind in a city, and here he was acting as nurse in the heart of
a wilderness!

After Mercer had gone with the breakfast things and the money, Kent
recalled a number of his species. And he knew that under their veneer
of apparent servility was a thing of courage and daring which needed
only the right kind of incentive to rouse it. And when roused, it was
peculiarly efficient in a secretive, artful-dodger sort of way. It
would not stand up before a gun. But it would creep under the mouths of
guns on a black night. And Kent was positive his fifty dollars would
bring him results--if he lived.

Just why he wanted the information he was after, he could not have told
himself. It was a pet aphorism between O'Connor and him that they had
ofte