tired.'

The torrent roared in the heart of the primeval silence. The peak and
the star swam apart from each other in the solemn spaces of the sky.
Under the tent, which showed ghostly in the starlight, the man lay
silent for hours, but when next he spoke his voice was choked with
tears.

'Not that,' he said--'not that! I can endure the rest, but no
repentance. To repent would drive me mad.'

II

Twice a day the mountains echoed to the clangour of the passing express
train, and at intervals less settled and orderly to the slower rumble of
luggage-trucks, laden or empty. The iron artery stretched from coast
to coast, and here and there touched and fed a ganglion. To one living
alone in those mountain fastnesses the roar and shriek and roll brought
insistent memories of the world. No inmate of the oubliette could have
been more lonely, and yet life was accessible, and even near.

A month went by. The solitary man of the camp fished and shot, ate,
drank, wandered, slept, and saw no face and heard no voice. He had run
out of supplies, and having pencilled a note to that effect, had slipped
it, with a five-dollar bill, under the door of the railside shanty. His
wants had been supplied--they extended to tea and biscuit only--and he
had taken care to be out of the way. Sometimes he heard a distant shot,
and knew that the man of the shanty was afoot in search of game. Within
a very little distance of the railway track sport could be had in
plenty.

Loneliness was broken at last. The rustle of boughs and the sound of
steps and voices reached the Solitary's ears one day as he sat at his
favourite outlook staring down the gorge. At the first note of one of
the voices he started and changed colour. Nobody would have taken him
for a man of cities now, with his beard of a month's growth, and his
tanned hands and face. The open-air colour was the stronger for being
new. With continued exposure it would fade from a red tan to a yellow.
Deep as it was now, it paled at the first-heard sound of the approaching
voice. The man threw a soul of anger and hatred into his ears and
listened.

'About a month?' the voice said 'Yes. I heard of his leaving Winnipeg on
the twentieth. I went on to Vancouver and found he wasn't there. Then I
got news of a fellow stopping off here, and, of course, it couldn't
be anybody else. He's my brother-in-law, and I've got a letter for him
which I'm pledged to put into his hands.'

'Indeed, sir!'