“No, you don’t.  If you’ve gone and lied to her, and made me out a little tin angel, you deserve what’s coming.  Anyway, I won’t stay long, and I’ll stop down here with the boys.  Call me Jack Jones and let it go at that.  Honest, Ches, I don’t want to get mixed up with no more females.  I’m plumb scared of ’em.  Lordy me, that coffee sure does smell good to me!”

Mason looked at him doubtfully, saw that Ford was, for the time being, absolutely devoid of anything remotely approaching penitence for his sins, or compunction over his appearance, or uneasiness over “Kate’s” opinion of him.  He was hungry.  And since it is next to impossible to whip up the conscience of a man whose thoughts are concentrated upon his physical needs, Mason was wise enough to wait, though the one point which he considered of vital importance to them both—­the question of Ford’s acceptance or refusal of the foremanship of the Double Cross—­had not yet been touched upon.

While Ford ate with a controlled voraciousness which spoke eloquently of his twenty-four hours of fasting and exposure, Mason gossiped inattentively and studied the man.

Eight years leave their impress of mental growth or deterioration upon a man.  Outwardly Ford was not much changed since Mason had come with him out of Alaska and lost sight of him afterwards.  There was the maturity which the man of thirty possessed and which the virile young fellow of twenty-one had lacked.  There was the same straight glance, the same atmosphere of squareness and mental poise.  Those were qualities which Mason set down as valuable factors in his estimate of the man.  Besides, there were other signs which did not make so pleasant a reading.

Eight years—­and a few of them, at least, had been spent wastefully in tearing down what the other years had built; Mason had heard that Ford was “going to the dogs,” and that by the short trail men blazed for themselves centuries ago and which those who came after have made a highway—­the whisky trail.  Mason had heard, now and then, of ten thousand dollars coming to Ford upon the death of his father and going almost as suddenly as it had come.  That, at least, had been the rumor.  Also he had heard, just lately, that Ford had taken to gambling as a profession and to terrorizing Sunset periodically as a pastime.  And Mason remembered the Ford Campbell who had carried him on his back out of a wild place in Alaska, and had nearly starved himself that the sick man’s strength might not fail him utterly.  He had remembered—­had Ches Mason; and, being one of those tenacious souls who cling to friendship and to a resilient faith in the good that is in the worst of us, he had thrown out a tentative life-line, as it were, and hoped that Ford might clutch it before he became quite submerged in the sodden morass of inebriety.

Ford may or may not have grasped eagerly at the line.  At any rate he was there in the mess-house of the Double Cross, and he was not quite so sodden as Mason had feared to find him—­provided he found him at all.  So much, at least, was encouraging, and for the rest, Mason was content to wait.