table, surrounded by a
group of miners, leading the singing, roaring out the doggerel chorus
of a local mining ballad:

"Oh, we'll be there with our bags of gold
When the Judgment trumpets blare,
When the stars drop dead and the moon stands cold,
Tell the angels we'll be there."

Ha, the power of the man and his consciousness of conquest!

Half to himself he began to hum the tune, beating time on the bare
boards with his moccasined feet. In a moment Spurling had jumped up,
"For God's sake, stop! I can't endure that," he cried. "Oh, to think
of it, that I am come to this, and that it is like this we meet after
all these years!" He covered his face with his hands, and, sinking
weakly back in the chair, commenced to sob. Granger went towards him,
and bending over him, flung an arm around his neck. For the moment the
body before him was forgotten; the noble spirit of the man who had
once stood by and helped him, was alone remembered. "Druce, tell me
all," he said.

"I can't; you would shun me."

"Then why did you come if you could not trust me?"

"There was nowhere else to go--no other way of escape. They were all
around me."

"Who were all around you?"

"Those who had come to take me to be hanged."

Granger gasped, and shrank aside. Then his worst conjecture was
correct--it was as bad as that! murder had been done.

Spurling drew himself up suddenly, throwing back his hands and
uncovering a face of ghastly paleness. One might have supposed that he
had been the startled witness to the confession, instead of the man
who had made it.

"What was that I said just now?" he asked. "You must not believe it.
It is not true; I am tired and overstrained. They've hunted me so long
that I myself have come almost to believe their squalid accusations.
Don't look at me like that; I tell you I am innocent. . . . Oh well,
perhaps I did fire the shot; but, if I did, it was an accident. I
didn't know that the rifle had gone off until I saw him drop . . . and
when I laid my hand on him to lift him up, I found that he was dead.
Ugh! Then I hid him in a hole in the ice, and, because he had been my
friend, I thought he would lie quiet forever there and never tell."

While these words had been in the saying, Granger had drawn nearer and
nearer, so that now the two men stood face to face, almost touching,
staring into one another's eyes. Who was this friend who had been
shot? Could it have been Mordaunt? He sei