eached this place. It was thought he wouldn't
live to reach the camp. But he is a man of great pluck. He held up till
his foot touched this platform. Then he succumbed."

"If he was as sick as that," I muttered, "why did he leave Santa Fe? He
must have known what it would mean to be sick here."

"I don't think he did. This is his first visit to the mine. He evidently
knew nothing of the difficulties of the road. But he would not stop. He
was determined to reach the camp, even after he had been given a sight
of it from the opposite mountain. He told them that he had once crossed
the Sierras in midwinter. But he wasn't a sick man then."

"Doctor, they don't know who killed his wife."

"He didn't."

"I know, but under such circumstances every fact bearing on the event is
of immense importance. There is one which Mr. Fairbrother only can make
clear. It can be said in a word--"

The grim doctor's eye flashed angrily and I stopped.

"Were you a detective from the district attorney's office in New York,
sent on with special powers to examine him, I should still say what I am
going to say now. While Mr. Fairbrother's temperature and pulse remain
where they now are, no one shall see him and no one shall talk to him
save myself and his nurse."

I turned with a sick look of disappointment toward the road up which
I had so lately come. "Have I panted, sweltered, trembled, for three
mortal hours on the worst trail a man ever traversed to go back with
nothing for my journey? That seems to me hard lines. Where is the
manager of this mine?"

The doctor pointed toward a man bending over the edge of the great hole
from which, at that moment, a line of Mexicans was issuing, each with a
sack on his back which he flung down before what looked like a furnace
built of clay.

"That's he. Mr. Haines, of Philadelphia. What do you want of him?"

"Permission to stay the night. Mr. Fairbrother may be better to-morrow."

"I won't allow it and I am master here, so far as my patient is
concerned. You couldn't stay here without talking, and talking makes
excitement, and excitement is just what he can not stand. A week from
now I will see about it--that is, if my patient continues to improve. I
am not sure that he will."

"Let me spend that week here. I'll not talk any more than the dead. Maybe
the manager will let me carry sacks."

"Look here," said the doctor, edging me farther and farther away from
the tent he hardly let out of his s