e had just
been regretting, was not dead. "Why must we torture him? Why can't we
leave him alone, and lay him decently in his grave?"

"Perhaps in order that we may prevent you from being hanged."

"From being hanged! You mistake me for Spurling, Pere Antoine; your
memory must be failing. What have I done to deserve such courtesy at
the hands of Fate? Why should men want to hang me?"

"For the murder of Strangeways."

Granger stood back, and drew himself erect, as if by asserting his
physical cleanness and manhood he could refute the accusation. He
lifted up his head and gazed with a fixed stare on the landscape,
seeing nothing. Yes, it was true, they could make that accusation;
there was sufficient evidence for suspecting him and, with the aid of
a few lies and inaccurate statements on the part of his
enemies--Robert Pilgrim, for instance, and Indians whom he had
offended--sufficient evidence might be got together to bring him to
the gallows. A fitting ending that for the son of the ambitious mother
who had stinted herself and planned for his success, and a most
appropriate sequel to the example of reckless bravery set by the last
two generations of his father's house!

Dimly, slowly, as he stood there in the northern icy drizzle, with his
eyes on the muddy river hurrying toward its freedom between jagged
banks, he came very wretchedly to realise that there was only one way
in which he could save himself, a way, albeit, which both his loyalty
and honour forbade, by becoming ardent in the pursuit and effecting
the capture of Spurling, that so he might prove his innocence. An
emotion of shame and self-disgust throbbed through him that it should
have been possible for him, even for a moment, to entertain such a
coward's thought as that. He shook himself free from temptation and
looked about. What was Pere Antoine doing? What had he meant by saying
that he was perhaps preventing him from being hanged? Did he still
believe him to be guilty, as he had evidently done at first?

Pere Antoine was intent upon his undertaking; when asked, he only
shook his head, saying, "If I believed you guilty, why should I
endeavour to find the signs which will prove you innocent? Would I do
that, do you think, if I believed you to be a guilty man?"

Granger was softened by those words; they meant a great deal to him at
such a time, spoken as they were curtly by one who was so eager to
rehabilitate his character before all the world th