tch himself and guard himself, his
tongue, his feet, his thoughts, never knowing in what hour the eyes of
the law would pierce the veneer of his disguise and deliver his life as
the forfeit. There were times when the contemplation of these things
appalled him, and his mind turned to other channels of escape. And
then--always--he heard Conniston's cool, fighting voice, and the red
blood fired up in his veins, and he faced home.

He was Derwent Conniston. And never for an hour could he put out of his
mind the one great mystifying question in this adventure of life and
death, who was Derwent Conniston? Shred by shred he pieced together
what little he knew, and always he arrived at the same futile end. An
Englishman, dead to his family if he had one, an outcast or an
expatriate--and the finest, bravest gentleman he had ever known. It was
the WHYFORE of these things that stirred within him an emotion which he
had never experienced before. The Englishman had grimly and
determinedly taken his secret to the grave with him. To him, John
Keith--who was now Derwent Conniston--he had left an heritage of deep
mystery and the mission, if he so chose, of discovering who he was,
whence he had come--and why. Often he looked at the young girl's
picture in the watch, and always he saw in her eyes something which
made him think of Conniston as he lay in the last hour of his life.
Undoubtedly the girl had grown into a woman now.

Days grew into weeks, and under Keith's feet the wet, sweet-smelling
earth rose up through the last of the slush snow. Three hundred miles
below the Barrens, he was in the Reindeer Lake country early in May.
For a week he rested at a trapper's cabin on the Burntwood, and after
that set out for Cumberland House. Ten days later he arrived at the
post, and in the sunlit glow of the second evening afterward he built
his camp-fire on the shore of the yellow Saskatchewan.

The mighty river, beloved from the days of his boyhood, sang to him
again, that night, the wonderful things that time and grief had dimmed
in his heart. The moon rose over it, a warm wind drifted out of the
south, and Keith, smoking his pipe, sat for a long time listening to
the soft murmur of it as it rolled past at his feet. For him it had
always been more than the river. He had grown up with it, and it had
become a part of him; it had mothered his earliest dreams and
ambitions; on it he had sought his first adventures; it had been his
chum, his f