ursed that hard-hearted old Scotchman,
who, because his daughter married a man against whom he chanced to have
a spite, refused to forgive. He's a cold-blooded monster, that's what he
is, and I would tell him so to his face."

"I suspected that he bore that relationship to you--grandfather--there's
considerable about your faces that gives the secret away," remarked
Cuthbert.

"I may look like him in face, but thank Heaven I'm a true Dugdale in my
feelings. I know you'll forgive me if I make the story short, because it
rouses up the old feelings inside, and sad memories always make me hate
him more and more.

"After my mother and father died, which was less than a year ago, he
heard of it somehow, and has tried to make up with me ever since,
sending messages with letters, asking me to come and live with him; but
his repentance came too late, for she was not here to know that he was
sorry; and I utterly refused to even hold any correspondence with the
man who would have let his own child go hungry or freeze to death
because she would not come and ask his forgiveness, something my father
would never hear of.

"Well, what do you think, finding that I wouldn't come to him of my own
free will, this domineering ruler of the Saskatchewan sent a party of
his halfbreeds up to the region where I was trapping and kidnapped me
outright--yes, I was carried a prisoner in their boat to this post, and
actually confined in a cabin as if I had been guilty of a crime. He had
the nerve to send me word that it had all been done without his
knowledge, his men thinking they were doing him a favor, and that he
would see me in the morning, when he hoped explanations might bring
about an understanding between us--if I persisted in my determination to
have nothing to do with him, I would then be at liberty to depart.

"I never so much as sent him an answer, I was so furious at being
dragged to his post like a wretch who had robbed traps; but during the
night I found a way to escape from the cabin, and taking an old canoe, I
fled down the river. The rest you know already. That is my story in a
nutshell, boys. I could talk for hours, and even then fail to tell you
all I've gone through since I was a little shaver, for I soon learned
the sad story of my mother, and how she had suffered because her father
refused to forgive.

"My father was only a timber-cruiser, a man with little education, but
an honest man at that. He was never able to make