“Kalman, my boy, don’t make a mistake.  Life is a long thing, and can be very dreary.”  There was no mistaking the pain in Jack’s voice.

“Is it, Jack?” said Kalman.  “I am afraid you are right.  But I can never forget—­my father was a foreigner, and I am one, and the tragedy of that awful night can never be wiped from her mind.  The curse of it I must bear!”

“But, Kalman, you are not ashamed of your blood—­of your father?”

Then Kalman lifted up his head and his voice rang out.  “Of my blood?  No.  But it is not hers.  Of my father?  No.  To me he was the just avenger of a great cause.  But to her,” his voice sank to a hoarse whisper, “he was a murderer!  No, Jack, it may not be.”

“But, Kalman, my boy,” remonstrated Jack, “think of all—­”

“Think?  For these five years I have thought till my heart is sore with thinking!  No, Jack, don’t fret.  I don’t.  Thank God there are other things.  There is work, a people to help, a country to serve.”

“Other things!” said French bitterly.  “True, there are, and great things, but, Kalman, boy, I have tried them, and to-night after thirty years, as I speak to you—­my God!—­my heart is sick of hunger for something better than things!  Love! my boy, love is the best!”

“Poor Jack!” said Kalman softly, “dear old boy!” and went out.  But of that hunger of the heart they never spoke again.

And now at the end of five years’ absence she was coming again.  How vivid to Kalman was his remembrance of the last sight he had of her.  It was at the Night Hawk ranch, and on the night succeeding that of the tragedy at the mine.  In the inner room, beside his father’s body, he was sitting, his mind busy with the tragic pathos of that grief-tortured, storm-beaten life.  Step by step, as far as he knew it, he was tracing the tear-wet, blood-stained path that life had taken; its dreadful scenes of blood and heart agony were passing before his mind; when gradually he became aware that in the next room the Sergeant, with bluff and almost brutal straightforwardness, was telling her the story of Rosenblatt’s dreadful end.  “And then, begad! after grilling the wretch for all that time, didn’t the infernal, bloodthirsty fiend in the most cheerful manner touch off the powder and blow the man into eternity.”  Then through the thin partition he heard her faint cry of horror.  He remembered how, at the Sergeant’s description of his father, something seemed to go wrong in his brain.  He had a dim remembrance of how, dazed with rage, he had felt his way out to the next room, and cried, “You defamer of the dead! you will lie no more!” He had a vivid picture of how in horror she had fled from him while he dragged out the Sergeant by the throat into the night, and how he had been torn from him by the united efforts of Brown and French together.  He remembered how, after the funeral service, when he had grown master of himself again, he had offered the Sergeant his