“Look at him,” said Alton gravely.  “You should know him.  I think this is the third time.”

“Damer!” said Seaforth hoarsely.  “We were trailing him, and knew he couldn’t be far off when we saw your fire.  We took it for his.  Is he dead?”

“No,” said Alton gravely, “I hope not.  We have some use for him.  Go back and get the lariat, and we’ll try to heave him up.”

CHAPTER XXXII

ALTON HOLDS HIS HAND

It was very quiet and somewhat chilly in the little back room of Horton’s hotel when Damer, who lay on a trestle-cot, moved his head a trifle and made a feeble sign.  The fire had sunk in the stove, and it was then towards two o’clock in the morning, when man’s vitality is at its lowest.  The young doctor Horton had brought in from a distant settlement shivered a little as he rose and stooped over the bed.

Damer glanced at him out of glazing eyes, and made a faint gesture.  “I have no use for you,” he said.  “It’s Alton I want.”

The doctor crossed over to Horton, who sat in a corner.  “If there is anything you want to ask him lose no time,” he said.  “The man can’t last until the morning.”

“Well,” said Horton gravely, “it would be a favour if you went down for Neilson, the surveyor.  He’s sitting up waiting.  You see we want some witnesses not connected with the thing in case he’s going to tell us anything.  Harry, you’d better talk to him.”

Alton crossed the room and sat down by the bed.  He had, as it happened, come out almost scatheless from the fall into the ravine, which was not the case with his assailant, who had been carried down to the settlement with the life just clinging to his crushed body.  All that was possible had been done for him, and now Alton waited with intense suspense, with something akin to compassion in his eyes, and his anger diverted from the dying wretch to the man who had made use of him.

“You’re going to talk?” he said.  “Well, it’s only square to warn you that it will be all put down.”

Damer glanced at Horton, who sat with a pen in his hand and a paper on his knee, and from him to the surveyor holding one or two Government appointments, who came quietly in.

“That’s all right,” he said very slowly.  “Well, I wanted to kill you, but I don’t know that I’ve a great deal against you now.  You and the boys did what you could for me, and it was a man in the city who held me to it.  Oh, yes, he’s sitting down there raking in the dollars, and don’t care two cents that the man he sent up to make them is dying here.  The thing’s not square, anyway.”

Alton was sensible of a faint disgust, but he remembered that he could not afford to be fastidious, because the men he had drawn into his venture must stand or fall with him.

“We want to know who he is,” he said.

There was a glimmer of malice in Damer’s face.  “Well,” he said, and the strained voice grew clearer, “it was Hallam of the Tyee.  There was something I did that gave him a pull on me, and that man has no mercy for anybody.”