“Good to you—­I don’t understand.”

“I come to thank ye, Mr. Thayor.  I see ye once the day ye got the buck.  Father told me your name after ye’d gone.  He and me eat up what ye left, and I got the money ye left fer me—­Myra Hathaway’s takin’ care of it—­she’s got my leetle gal.  Yes—­I seen ye more ’n once.  You ain’t never seen me—­folks don’t see me as a rule; but I’ve seen you many a time when ye’ve stepped by me and I’ve been layin’ hid out; times when I’d starved if it hadn’t been for him”—­and he nodded across the fire to Blakeman.

“I caught a partridge once he’d winged,” he went on, “and give it to him, seein’ he was a city man and wouldn’t know me.  He see I was poor—­thought I had run away from some gov’ment place and I let it go at that.  He used to give me what was left from the kitchen; he’d come out and leave it hid for me ’long ’bout dark—­your hired man asleep over thar, I’m talkin’ ’bout.  He said you wouldn’t mind—­not if you knowed how bad off I was for a snack to eat.  I might hev stole it from ye more’n once, but I ain’t never stole nothin’—­I ain’t a thief, Mr. Thayor.”

“Why didn’t you come to me?” asked Thayor, after a moment’s pause.  He was strangely moved at the man’s story.  “I would have helped you, Dinsmore.  I have told Holcomb repeatedly I wanted to help you.”

“So Billy told me, and so did my father—­but I ‘most give up bein’ helped.”

“How long have you been in this misery of yours?”

“A long time,” he replied nervously; “a long time.  Thar’s been days and nights when I wished I was dead.”

“After you killed Bailey?” asked Thayor quietly, meeting the eyes of the outcast.  The figure beside him began to tremble, clenching his bony hands in an effort to steady them; then he looked up.

“You know?” he faltered huskily.  “You know?” he repeated.

Thayor nodded.

“You know what I done!  God knows I had a right to!  They say I ain’t fit to live among men.”

Again Thayor stared into the fire.

“How they’ve hounded me,” Dinsmore went on, clearing his thin voice as best he could—­a voice unaccustomed to conversation.  “The winter’s the worst; you ain’t never been hounded in winter.  You ain’t never knowed what it is to go hongry and alone.  It’ll give ye a new idee consarnin’ folks.  I used to think I knew the woods, but I tell ye I know ’em now.  I’ve got friends in ’em now,” he went on, as if confiding a secret; “sometimes a fox will leave me what he ain’t ate—­I’ve known a wolverine git a dum sight more human than them that’s been huntin’ me.  Him and me shared the same cave—­he got to know me—­he was a great fisher.  I got him out of a trap twice—­he see I warn’t goin’ to hurt him.”

Thayor sat looking steadily into the hollow, tired eyes like a man in a dream, forgetting even to question him further.  Moreover, he knew he was telling the truth, and that Dinsmore’s frankness was proof enough that he had much to say to him of importance.  Somehow he felt that in his disconnected narrative he would slowly lead to it.  His character in this respect was much like his father’s.