“They’ve got that fellow up at Slocane,” he said to a companion.  “Yes, sir, sent him down for trial, and it took a special guard to keep the boys off him.  I guess if he’d done it down our way they wouldn’t have worried, but put him in a tar-keg and set a light to him.  They’re way behind the times in the Dominion.”

“Killed him in his sleep for a hundred dollars,” said another man, glancing over the reader’s shoulder, but Miss Deringham was not interested in the murder she remembered having heard about.  She was, however, a trifle astonished to see that her father was watching the gathering group with a serious look in his eyes, but he glanced down somewhat hastily at his papers when he met her gaze.  Then the voices grew less distinct, and that of the man dictating broke monotonously through them until a steward approached her father with an envelope in his hand.

“Mr. Forel has just sent it down, sir,” he said.  “You’re Mr. Deringham?”

Deringham tore the envelope open, and while he sat staring at the paper inside it his daughter noticed that there was a little pale spot in his cheek.  His hand also appeared to tremble slightly when, saying nothing, he passed the telegram across to her.

“Regret to inform you that my partner met with accident in the ranges, and his condition is critical,” it read.  “Can you send us nurse or capable woman?  Mrs. Margery ill.  Seaforth, Somasco.”

Alice Deringham shivered a little.  “He is evidently dangerously injured.”

“It appears so,” said Deringham, and his daughter afterwards remembered that his voice was hoarse and strained.

The girl, however, said nothing for a while.  She was not impulsive, and her face remained almost as cold in its clear whiteness as the panelling behind it, but her heart beat a little faster than usual, and she was trying somewhat unsuccessfully to analyze her sensations.  In the meanwhile the voices of the men who now surrounded the one with the paper reached her, and she noticed vacantly that her father seemed to be listening to them.

“They’ll hang him, anyway,” said one.

“Made no show at all when they got him hiding in the bush,” said another.  “Still, you couldn’t expect much from that kind of man.  Killed him for a hundred dollars in his bed.”

“Yes, sir,” said the first speaker.  “And he didn’t get all of them.  The man was his own cousin, and too sick to do anything.  Well, thank God, we haven’t got many vermin of that kind in the Dominion.”

Deringham, who had picked up the telegram, let it slip from his fingers as he rose, and the girl wondered at the change in him.  He seemed to have grown suddenly haggard, and the lines upon his face were much more apparent than usual.

“You will excuse me a minute,” he said, and the girl noticed the curious deliberation of his movements and the stoop in his shoulders as he crossed the saloon.