The fire leaping and crackling before his eyes was like a powerful medicine.  It stirred things that had lain dormant within him.  It consumed the heavy dross of four years of stupefying torture and brought back to him vividly the happenings of a yesterday that had dragged itself on like a century.  All at once he seemed unburdened of shackles that had weighted him down to the point of madness.  Every fiber in his body responded to that glorious roar of the fire; a thing seemed to snap in his head, freeing it of an oppressive bondage, and in the heart of the flames he saw home, and hope, and life—­the things familiar and precious long ago, which the scourge of the north had almost beaten dead in his memory.  He saw the broad Saskatchewan shimmering its way through the yellow plains, banked in by the foothills and the golden mists of morning dawn; he saw his home town clinging to its shore on one side and with its back against the purple wilderness on the other; he heard the rhythmic chug, chug, chug of the old gold dredge and the rattle of its chains as it devoured its tons of sand for a few grains of treasure; over him there were lacy clouds in a blue heaven again, he heard the sound of voices, the tread of feet, laughter—­life.  His soul reborn, he rose to his feet and stretched his arms until the muscles snapped.  No, they would not know him back there—­now!  He laughed softly as he thought of the old John Keith—­“Johnny” they used to call him up and down the few balsam-scented streets—­his father’s right-hand man mentally but a little off feed, as his chum, Reddy McTabb, used to say, when it came to the matter of muscle and brawn.  He could look back on things without excitement now.  Even hatred had burned itself out, and he found himself wondering if old Judge Kirkstone’s house looked the same on the top of the hill, and if Miriam Kirkstone had come back to live there after that terrible night when he had returned to avenge his father.

Four years!  It was not so very long, though the years had seemed like a lifetime to him.  There would not be many changes.  Everything would be the same—­everything—­except—­the old home.  That home he and his father had planned, and they had overseen the building of it, a chateau of logs a little distance from the town, with the Saskatchewan sweeping below it and the forest at its doors.  Masterless, it must have seen changes in those four years.  Fumbling in his pocket, his fingers touched Conniston’s watch.  He drew it out and let the firelight play on the open dial.  It was ten o’clock.  In the back of the premier half of the case Conniston had at some time or another pasted a picture.  It must have been a long time ago, for the face was faded and indistinct.  The eyes alone were undimmed, and in the flash of the fire they took on a living glow as they looked at Keith.  It was the face of a young girl—­a schoolgirl, Keith thought, of ten or twelve.  Yet the eyes seemed older; they seemed pleading with someone, speaking a message that had come spontaneously out of the soul of the child.  Keith closed the watch.  Its tick, tick, tick rose louder to his ears.  He dropped it in his pocket.  He could still hear it.