So it was that McMurdo, the self-confessed fugitive from justice, took up his abode under the roof of the Shafters, the first step which was to lead to so long and dark a train of events, ending in a far distant land.

Chapter 2 — The Bodymaster

McMurdo was a man who made his mark quickly.  Wherever he was the folk around soon knew it.  Within a week he had become infinitely the most important person at Shafter’s.  There were ten or a dozen boarders there; but they were honest foremen or commonplace clerks from the stores, of a very different calibre from the young Irishman.  Of an evening when they gathered together his joke was always the readiest, his conversation the brightest, and his song the best.  He was a born boon companion, with a magnetism which drew good humour from all around him.

And yet he showed again and again, as he had shown in the railway carriage, a capacity for sudden, fierce anger, which compelled the respect and even the fear of those who met him.  For the law, too, and all who were connected with it, he exhibited a bitter contempt which delighted some and alarmed others of his fellow boarders.

From the first he made it evident, by his open admiration, that the daughter of the house had won his heart from the instant that he had set eyes upon her beauty and her grace.  He was no backward suitor.  On the second day he told her that he loved her, and from then onward he repeated the same story with an absolute disregard of what she might say to discourage him.

“Someone else?” he would cry.  “Well, the worse luck for someone else!  Let him look out for himself!  Am I to lose my life’s chance and all my heart’s desire for someone else?  You can keep on saying no, Ettie:  the day will come when you will say yes, and I’m young enough to wait.”

He was a dangerous suitor, with his glib Irish tongue, and his pretty, coaxing ways.  There was about him also that glamour of experience and of mystery which attracts a woman’s interest, and finally her love.  He could talk of the sweet valleys of County Monaghan from which he came, of the lovely, distant island, the low hills and green meadows of which seemed the more beautiful when imagination viewed them from this place of grime and snow.

Then he was versed in the life of the cities of the North, of Detroit, and the lumber camps of Michigan, and finally of Chicago, where he had worked in a planing mill.  And afterwards came the hint of romance, the feeling that strange things had happened to him in that great city, so strange and so intimate that they might not be spoken of.  He spoke wistfully of a sudden leaving, a breaking of old ties, a flight into a strange world, ending in this dreary valley, and Ettie listened, her dark eyes gleaming with pity and with sympathy—­those two qualities which may turn so rapidly and so naturally to love.