I'll tell you. I won't tell that——. He'd give his word and break it before the breath was out of my body. Tempest!"

"All right All right." Tempest's quiet steady voice came into the following torrent of curses and cries. "I'm here. What is it you want to tell me, Ducane?"

He took Dick's place by the mattress, and Dick stood up, holding the weak light so that the two faces shone on the gloom for him: Ducane's, with ragged beard and staring eyes and white haggard face and a hand that fumbled incessantly at his trembling lips; Tempest's, with the well-poised head, the thick hair pushed back from the square forehead, the healthy-brown, finely-cut grave face. It seemed to him that he had never really seen Tempest's physical beauty until he saw it in contrast with Ducane. Then Ducane began to speak, and his words were broken with the sobbing of a child and the curses of a man.

"I didn't want to have his blood on my hands. But it was the price. If he got off and shut the mouth of the Quatre Fourches Indians—it was the price——"

"He was to save your skin if you saved his soul," interpreted Dick.

"I didn't want——" A spasm halted Ducane, and then he continued with the tears running down his face. "How could I get at a priest out here? How could I give him the paper? But I promised. There were to be masses for his soul—not as a murderer——"

Tempest remembered afterwards how just then Dick's hand bore heavily down on his shoulder, and Dick said:

"Let me take your place. Let me hear what he has to say. This is my business—not yours."

Tempest shook him off.

"Be quiet," he said. "What is that, Ducane? Robison was a murderer, you remember. He murdered Ogilvie."

"No, he didn't. I don't want his blood—but how could I get at a priest out here——"

Sharp and clear before his brain-sight Dick was seeing the face of Grange's Andree when he had asked her in Grange's back-parlour why she was crying. He interrupted again.

"Tempest, will you let me——"