home.

"If you get up, with this fever on you, and the leg in that state, you
will have blood-poisoning," said Anderson quietly, "which will either
kill you or detain you here for weeks. You say you want to talk business
with me. Well, here I am. In an hour's time I must go to Calgary for an
appointment. Suppose you take this opportunity."

McEwen stared at his son. His blue eyes, frowning in their wrinkled
sockets, gave little or no index, however, to the mind behind them. The
straggling white locks falling round his blotched and feverish face
caught Anderson's attention. Looking back thirty years he could remember
his father vividly--a handsome man, solidly built, with a shock of fair
hair. As a little lad he had been proud to sit high-perched beside him
on the wagon which in summer drove them, every other Sunday, to a
meeting-house fifteen miles away. He could see his mother at the back of
the wagon with the little girls, her grey alpaca dress and cotton
gloves, her patient look. His throat swelled. Nor was the pang of
intolerable pity for his mother only. Deep in the melancholy of his
nature and strengthened by that hateful tie of blood from which he could
not escape, was a bitter, silent compassion for this outcast also. All
the machinery of life set in motion and maintaining itself in the clash
of circumstance for seventy years to produce _this_, at the end! Dismal
questionings ran through his mind. Ought he to have acted as he had done
seventeen years before? How would his mother have judged him? Was he not
in some small degree responsible?

Meanwhile his father began to talk fast and querulously, with plentiful
oaths from time to time, and using a local miner's slang which was not
always intelligible to Anderson. It seemed it was a question of an old
silver mine on a mountainside in Idaho, deserted some ten years before
when the river gravels had been exhausted, and now to be reopened, like
many others in the same neighbourhood, with improved methods and
machinery, tunnelling instead of washing. Silver enough to pave
Montreal! Ten thousand dollars for plant, five thousand for the claim,
and the thing was done.

He became incoherently eloquent, spoke of the ease and rapidity with
which the thing could be resold to a syndicate at an enormous profit,
should his "pardners" and he not care to develop it themselves. If
George would find the money--why, George should make his fortune, like
the rest, though he had b