"Don't! Don't feel so bad!" she said. "He was weak and wild then. But he
was all right afterwards. He was happy with me."

"I've owed Cassy this for a good many years, dad," said Black Andy, "and
it had to be paid. She's got better stuff in her than any Baragar."

.........................

An hour later, the old man said to Cassy at the door of her room: "You
got to stay here and git well. It's yours, the same as the rest of
us--what's here."

Then he went downstairs and sat with Aunt Kate by the fire.

"I guess she's a good woman," he said at last. "I didn't use her right."

"You've been lucky with your women-folk," Aunt Kate answered quietly.

"Yes, I've been lucky," he answered. "I dunno if I deserve it. Mebbe
not. Do you think she'll git well?"

"It's a healing air out here," Aunt Kate answered, and listened to the
wood of the house snapping in the sharp frost.

MARCILE

That the day was beautiful, that the harvest of the West had been a
great one, that the salmon-fishing had been larger than ever before,
that gold had been found in the Yukon, made no difference to Jacques
Grassette, for he was in the condemned cell of Bindon Jail, living out
those days which pass so swiftly between the verdict of the jury and the
last slow walk with the Sheriff.

He sat with his back to the stone wall, his hands on his knees, looking
straight before him. All that met his physical gaze was another stone
wall, but with his mind's eye he was looking beyond it into spaces far
away. His mind was seeing a little house with dormer windows, and a
steep roof on which the snow could not lodge in winter-time; with a
narrow stoop in front where one could rest of an evening, the day's work
done; the stone-and-earth oven near by in the open, where the bread
for a family of twenty was baked; the wooden plough tipped against the
fence, to wait the "fall" cultivation; the big iron cooler in which the
sap from the maple trees was boiled, in the days when the snow thawed
and spring opened the heart of the wood; the flash of the sickle and the
scythe hard by; the fields of the little narrow farm running back from
the St. Lawrence like a riband; and, out on the wide stream, the
great rafts with their riverine population floating down to Michelin's
mill-yards.

For hours he had sat like this, unmoving, his gnarled red hands clamping
each leg as though to hold him steady while he gazed; and he saw himself
as a little lad, bar