The new-comer was first to make a move.  Walking over to the centre of the room, he stopped and looked upon his subjects.

“Well, of all the infernally lazy people I ever saw!” he commented, “you beat them, Jennie!  Get up and cook something to eat; it’s way after noon, and I’m hungry.”

The woman said nothing, but the boy slid to his feet, facing the intruder.

“Mamma’s sick and can’t get up,” he explained as impersonally as to a stranger.  “Besides, there isn’t anything to cook.  She said so.”

The man’s brow contracted into a frown.

“Speak when you’re spoken to, young upstart!” he snapped.  “Out with you, Jennie!  I don’t want to be monkeyed with to-day!”

He hung up his coat and cap, and loosened his belt a hole; but no one else in the room moved.

“Didn’t you hear me?” he asked, looking warningly toward the bunk.

“Yes,” she replied.

Autocrat under his own roof, the man paused in surprise.  Never before had a command here been disobeyed.  He could scarcely believe his own senses.

“You know what to do, then,” he said sharply.

For the first time a touch of color came into the woman’s cheeks, and catching the man’s eyes she looked into them unfalteringly.

“Since when did I become your slave, Tom Blair?” she asked slowly.

The words were a challenge, the tone was that of some wild thing, wounded, cornered, staring death in the face, but defiant to the end.  “Since when did you become my owner, body and soul?”

Any sportsman, any being with a fragment of admiration for even animal courage, would have held aloof then.  It remained for this man, bred amid high civilization, who had spent years within college halls, to strike the prostrate.  As in the frontier saloon, so now his hand went involuntarily to his throat, clutched at the binding collar until the button flew; then, as before, his face went white.

“Since when!” he blazed, “since when!  I admire your nerve to ask that question of me!  Since six years ago, when you first began living with me.  Since the day when you and the boy,—­and not a preacher within a hundred miles—­” Words, a flood of words, were upon his lips; but suddenly he stopped.  Despite the alcohol still in his brain, despite the effort he made to continue, the gaze of the woman compelled silence.

“You dare recall that memory, Tom Blair?” The words came more slowly than before, and with an intensity that burned them into the hearer’s memory.  “You dare, knowing what I gave up for your sake!” The eyes blazed afresh, the dark head was raised on the pillows.  “You know that my son stands listening, and yet you dare throw my coming to you in my face?”

White to the lips went the scarred visage of the man, but the madness was upon him.

“I dare?” To his own ears the voice sounded unnatural.  “I dare?  To be sure I dare!  You came to me of your own free-will.  You were not a child!” His voice rose and the flush returned to his face.  “You knew the price and accepted it deliberately,—­deliberately, I say!”