hiteness of
snow-field and glacier. He first of all despatched a message to Banff
for Elizabeth's commissions. Then he made straight for the ugly frame
house of which Delaine had given him the address. It was kept by a
couple well known to him, an Irishman and his wife who made their living
partly by odd jobs on the railway, partly by lodging men in search of
work in the various construction camps of the line. To all such persons
Anderson was a familiar figure, especially since the great strike of the
year before.

The house stood by itself in a plot of cleared ground, some two or three
hundred yards from the railway station. A rough road through the pine
wood led up to it.

Anderson knocked, and Mrs. Ginnell came to the door, a tired, and
apparently sulky woman.

"I hear you have a lodger here, Mrs. Ginnell," said Anderson, standing
in the doorway, "a man called McEwen; and that he wants to see me on
some business or other."

Mrs. Ginnell's countenance darkened.

"We have an old man here, Mr. Anderson, as answers to that name, but
you'll get no business out of him--and I don't believe he _have_ any
business with any decent crater. When he arrived two days ago he was
worse for liquor, took on at Calgary. I made my husband look after him
that night to see he didn't get at nothing, but yesterday he slipped us
both, an' I believe he's now in that there outhouse, a-sleeping it off.
Old men like him should be sent somewhere safe, an' kep' there."

"I'll go and see if he's awake, Mrs. Ginnell. Don't you trouble to come.
Any other lodgers?"

"No, sir. There was a bunch of 'em left this morning--got work on the
Crow's Nest."

Anderson made his way to the little "shack," Ginnell's house of the
first year, now used as a kind of general receptacle for tools, rubbish
and stores.

He looked in. On a heap of straw in the corner lay a huddled figure, a
kind of human rag. Anderson paused a moment, then entered, hung the lamp
he had brought with him on a peg, and closed the door behind him.

He stood looking down at the sleeper, who was in the restless stage
before waking. McEwen threw himself from side to side, muttered, and
stretched.

Slowly a deep colour flooded Anderson's cheeks and brow; his hands
hanging beside him clenched; he checked a groan that was also a shudder.
The abjectness of the figure, the terrible identification proceeding in
his mind, the memories it evoked, were rending and blinding him. The
winter