you the earlier.'

"At first I would not believe my own judgment, but drove my anger down
by replying, 'He is no traitor; he is my friend.' But at night when I
came up, and you spoke to me pityingly about my hard luck and your own
increasing wealth, I knew what you meant. Mordaunt didn't seem to
mind; he had ten thousand dollars of his own, so he only said, 'Give
him time. He's all right. He'll remember and come round. His head's
turned for the moment by his fortune and he's lost his standards of
what is just. I daresay if this happened to you or me, we should have
been as bad.'

"But that did not comfort me much, for I thought, 'A man who can
betray and lie to you once, can always lie and betray.' I could not
sleep at night for thinking about it and I brooded over it all the
day; there was ever before my eyes the vision of you, sailing up the
Great Amana without me.

"If nothing else had happened and it had remained at that, I suppose I
should have finished my winter's contract with you and have gone out
again in the spring, either with Mordaunt or alone, prospecting for
myself. As it was, I began to argue with myself. 'What better right
has Spurling to this gold than I?' I said. 'If I had chosen this
claim, as I might have done, all the wealth which is now his would
have been mine. Had that been the case, I should have held to my
bargain and have dealt squarely by him. Since he refuses to allow me
the share which he promised me, I have a right to take it.'

"You know what followed, how I hid some nuggets in my shirt, and you
accused me and discovered them. You called me a thief, and threatened
to expose me to the law of the mining camp. I told you that, since we
had made that agreement to share conjointly whatever we found, I had
as big a right to take charge of some of the gold as you yourself.
Then you laughed in my face and struck me, asking if that was the
usual way in which a labourer spoke to his employer. That blow drove
me mad. I made no reply, for I had become suddenly crafty; I awaited a
revenge that was certain and from which there could be no rebound.
From that day forward the lust to kill was upon me; wherever I looked
I saw you dead, and was glad. When the Northern Lights shot up they
seemed to me, instead of green or yellow, to be always crimson, the
bloodcolour. When they crept and rustled through the snow along the
mountain heights, I fancied that they were a band of murderers who
fled from thei