The persistence of
the shadow he invested with his gambler's symbolism. Silent, inexorable,
not to be shaken off, he took it as the fate which waited at the last
turn when chips were cashed in and gains and losses counted up. Fortune
La Pearle believed in those rare, illuminating moments, when the
intelligence flung from it time and space, to rise naked through eternity
and read the facts of life from the open book of chance. That this was
such a moment he had no doubt; and when he turned inland and sped across
the snow-covered tundra he was not startled because the shadow took upon
it greater definiteness and drew in closer. Oppressed with his own
impotence, he halted in the midst of the white waste and whirled about.
His right hand slipped from its mitten, and a revolver, at level,
glistened in the pale light of the stars.

"Don't shoot. I haven't a gun."

The shadow had assumed tangible shape, and at the sound of its human
voice a trepidation affected Fortune La Pearle's knees, and his stomach
was stricken with the qualms of sudden relief.

Perhaps things fell out differently because Uri Bram had no gun that
night when he sat on the hard benches of the El Dorado and saw murder
done. To that fact also might be attributed the trip on the Long Trail
which he took subsequently with a most unlikely comrade. But be it as it
may, he repeated a second time, "Don't shoot. Can't you see I haven't a
gun?"

"Then what the flaming hell did you take after me for?" demanded the
gambler, lowering his revolver.

Uri Bram shrugged his shoulders. "It don't matter much, anyhow. I want
you to come with me."

"Where?"

"To my shack, over on the edge of the camp."

But Fortune La Pearle drove the heel of his moccasin into the snow and
attested by his various deities to the madness of Uri Bram. "Who are
you," he perorated, "and what am I, that I should put my neck into the
rope at your bidding?"

"I am Uri Bram," the other said simply, "and my shack is over there on
the edge of camp. I don't know who you are, but you've thrust the soul
from a living man's body,--there's the blood red on your sleeve,--and,
like a second Cain, the hand of all mankind is against you, and there is
no place you may lay your head. Now, I have a shack--"

"For the love of your mother, hold your say, man," interrupted Fortune La
Pearle, "or I'll make you a second Abel for the joy of it. So help me, I
will! With a thousand men to lay me