He sat down, rolling out like a great bag of jelly in the one chair in the cell, and began to fan himself with his hat.  Kent had already taken stock of the situation.  In Fingers’ florid countenance and in his almost colorless eyes he detected a bit of excitement which Fingers was trying to hide.  Kent knew what it meant.  Father Layonne had found it necessary to play his full hand to lure Fingers up the hill, and had given him a hint of what it was that Kent had in store for him.  Already the psychological key had begun to work.

Kent sat down on the edge of his cot and grinned sympathetically.  “It hasn’t always been like this, has it, Fingers?” he said then, leaning a bit forward and speaking with a sudden, low-voiced seriousness.  “There was a time, twenty years ago, when you didn’t puff after climbing a hill.  Twenty years make a big difference, sometimes.”

“Yes, sometimes,” agreed Fingers in a wheezy whisper.

“Twenty years ago you were—­a fighter.”

It seemed to Kent that a deeper color came into Dirty Fingers’ pale eyes in the few seconds that followed these words.

“A fighter,” he repeated.  “Most men were fighters in those days of the gold rushes, weren’t they, Fingers?  I’ve heard a lot of the old stories about them in my wanderings, and some of them have made me thrill.  They weren’t afraid to die.  And most of them were pretty white when it came to a show-down.  You were one of them, Fingers.  I heard the story one Winter far north.  I’ve kept it to myself, because I’ve sort of had the idea that you didn’t want people to know or you would have told it yourself.  That’s why I wanted you to come to see me, Fingers.  You know the situation.  It’s either the noose or iron bars for me.  Naturally one would seek for assistance among those who have been his friends.  But I do not, with the exception of Father Layonne.  Just friendship won’t save me, not the sort of friendship we have today.  That’s why I sent for you.  Don’t think that I am prying into secrets that are sacred to you, Fingers.  God knows I don’t mean it that way.  But I’ve got to tell you of a thing that happened a long time ago, before you can understand.  You haven’t forgotten—­you will never forget—­Ben Tatman?”

As Kent spoke the name, a name which Dirty Fingers had heard no lips but his own speak aloud in nearly a quarter of a century, a strange and potent force seemed suddenly to take possession of the forest bencher’s huge and flabby body.  It rippled over and through him like an electrical voltaism, making his body rigid, stiffening what had seemed to be fat into muscle, tensing his hands until they knotted themselves slowly into fists.  The wheeze went out of his breath, and it was the voice of another man who answered Kent.

“You have heard—­about—­Ben Tatman?”

“Yes.  I heard it away up in the Porcupine country.  They say it happened twenty years ago or more.  This Tatman, so I was told, was a young fellow green from San Francisco—­a bank clerk, I think—­ who came into the gold country and brought his wife with him.  They were both chuck-full of courage, and the story was that each worshiped the ground the other walked on, and that the girl had insisted on being her husband’s comrade in adventure.  Of course neither guessed the sort of thing that was ahead of them.