d about. "Wh--who was he?"

"The--the same as mine! The man who sits in the commissioner's
chair to-day--"

"Not McTavish, _the_ McTavish?" cried the half-breed, trembling
from head to foot. "No, no, it can't be! Don't say so!"

"But it is, and that's all there is about it," growled Donald,
grimly. "Why? What difference does it make to you?"

"Then you--you, Captain McTavish, you are my half-brother?"

"Yes."

"And I was about to kill you, and I have already tried once, and
my mother has tried, and Tom--oh, why haven't I known this before?
Why didn't she tell me?"

For the moment, Seguis seemed utterly lost in the mazes of his own
thoughts and memories. He stood with folded arms, his head hanging
upon his breast, while his lips moved in self-communion. Then came
the reaction, and disbelief, and it was necessary to go over the
ground with him from beginning to end. Concisely and briefly, Donald
outlined the whole march of events that had led up to this inevitable
revelation.

Then, as never before, the Hudson Bay man realized how far-reaching
and potent are the little things of life, and, after all, how far
from free agents we are sometimes. Forty-five years before, perhaps,
his father, alone in the wilds, had yielded to the warm, dusky
beauty of an Indian princess, and now, when, by all the laws of
chance and custom, that germ of evil should have expired, it sprang
into life and propagated a harvest of intrigue and death. And he,
the son, by no fault of his own, was unwillingly but unavoidably
involved in the penalty.

To Seguis the meaning of it all came as a blinding flash. In an
instant, he analyzed his heritage of ambition and knew the desires
of his mother for what they were. He looked back now upon his life
of advancement with discerning eyes, and, suddenly, ahead of him,
not far now since this revelation, he saw a shining goal.

"Then, I am the rightful heir of the commissioner?" he asked, in
an awed voice.

"Yes," Donald answered, bitterly. "You are everything and, by law,
can have everything; I am no one, and, by the same law, can have
nothing but what affection or pity dictates. But it is not because
of this that I spoke to you," he went on, proudly. "It was to save
my life at least for a little while, as I have work to do."

"And so have I--so have I!" muttered Seguis, abstractedly, his eyes
burning bright. "It's all right, McTavish; nothing will come of
this. You can either stay, or I'll fit