“Can I do anything for you?” Anderson inquired, standing beside him.

“Get me out of this blasted hole as soon as possible!  That’s about all you can do!  I’ve told that woman to get me my things, and help me into the other room—­but she’s in your pay, I suppose.  She won’t do anything I tell her, drat her!”

“The doctor left orders you were to keep quiet to-day.”

McEwen vowed he would do nothing of the kind.  He had no time to be lolling in bed like a fine lady.  He had business to do, and must get home.

“If you get up, with this fever on you, and the leg in that state, you will have blood-poisoning,” said Anderson quietly, “which will either kill you or detain you here for weeks.  You say you want to talk business with me.  Well, here I am.  In an hour’s time I must go to Calgary for an appointment.  Suppose you take this opportunity.”

McEwen stared at his son.  His blue eyes, frowning in their wrinkled sockets, gave little or no index, however, to the mind behind them.  The straggling white locks falling round his blotched and feverish face caught Anderson’s attention.  Looking back thirty years he could remember his father vividly—­a handsome man, solidly built, with a shock of fair hair.  As a little lad he had been proud to sit high-perched beside him on the wagon which in summer drove them, every other Sunday, to a meeting-house fifteen miles away.  He could see his mother at the back of the wagon with the little girls, her grey alpaca dress and cotton gloves, her patient look.  His throat swelled.  Nor was the pang of intolerable pity for his mother only.  Deep in the melancholy of his nature and strengthened by that hateful tie of blood from which he could not escape, was a bitter, silent compassion for this outcast also.  All the machinery of life set in motion and maintaining itself in the clash of circumstance for seventy years to produce this, at the end!  Dismal questionings ran through his mind.  Ought he to have acted as he had done seventeen years before?  How would his mother have judged him?  Was he not in some small degree responsible?

Meanwhile his father began to talk fast and querulously, with plentiful oaths from time to time, and using a local miner’s slang which was not always intelligible to Anderson.  It seemed it was a question of an old silver mine on a mountainside in Idaho, deserted some ten years before when the river gravels had been exhausted, and now to be reopened, like many others in the same neighbourhood, with improved methods and machinery, tunnelling instead of washing.  Silver enough to pave Montreal!  Ten thousand dollars for plant, five thousand for the claim, and the thing was done.

He became incoherently eloquent, spoke of the ease and rapidity with which the thing could be resold to a syndicate at an enormous profit, should his “pardners” and he not care to develop it themselves.  If George would find the money—­why, George should make his fortune, like the rest, though he had behaved so scurvily all these years.