e in my hand, and, as I arrived at
the door of the cabin, raising my eyes, saw you coming up-stream with
your dogs, with your head bent low as if you were tired. Also I saw in
the moonlight that _that other_ was noiselessly following you, stride
by stride, stealing up behind. I saw him waving his arms to me,
gesticulating madly and signing to me to kneel down and fire.

"Suddenly all power of resistance left me; with my eyes upon his face,
the memory of all the wrongs which you had dealt me, and my hatred of
you, swam uppermost in my mind. I knelt down in the snow to take
steadier aim and had my finger on the trigger, when the gun was
snatched from behind. I turned fiercely round and found Mordaunt
standing there. 'Quick,' he said, 'come inside.' He thrust the rifle
beneath a pile of furs, and bade me tumble into my bunk and pretend
sleep. Shortly after, I heard you come in and say that one of your
dogs had been shot dead; but I did not stir. You came over and gazed
down suspiciously at me, but seemed satisfied with Mordaunt's account
of how I had been lying there for the past two hours wearied out with
the day's work. Next day I could not look you in the eyes; also the
memory of a woman I had loved had come suddenly back and changed me,
making me ashamed. So two nights later I gathered together the few
things I had and, abandoning my claim, fled.

"If I could not trust myself with you, I could not trust myself in the
Yukon. Every miner travelling with gold seemed to me a possible victim
for my crime. I went about in fear lest I should see that evil thing,
which called himself _myself_, returning to keep me company through
life. I fled to escape him and, hoping to leave him behind me in the
Klondike, went over the winter trail to Skaguay, the route by which
two years earlier we had fought our way up, took steamer to Vancouver
and came on thence to Winnipeg. My money was all but exhausted when I
got there, I was broken in spirit and at my wit's end. By chance I met
with Wrath, on whose claim in our first winter we had worked. He had
gone back to his independent trading, and, at my request for
employment, sent me up here to look after his interests at Murder
Point. I was glad to come; after my experience on the Sleeping River,
I was distrustful of myself in the company of men, never knowing when
that _foreshadowing of my evil desires_ might not return to hound me
on to fresh villainies and despair. For one who wished to