Now that the sun and the blue sky had cleared his brain, he saw the hundred pit-falls in his way, the hundred little slips that might be made, the hundred traps waiting for any chance blunder on his part.  Deliberately he was on his way to the hangman.  Down there—­every day of his life—­he would rub elbows with him as he passed his fellow men in the street.  He would never completely feel himself out of the presence of death.  Day and night he must watch himself and guard himself, his tongue, his feet, his thoughts, never knowing in what hour the eyes of the law would pierce the veneer of his disguise and deliver his life as the forfeit.  There were times when the contemplation of these things appalled him, and his mind turned to other channels of escape.  And then—­always—­he heard Conniston’s cool, fighting voice, and the red blood fired up in his veins, and he faced home.

He was Derwent Conniston.  And never for an hour could he put out of his mind the one great mystifying question in this adventure of life and death, who was Derwent Conniston?  Shred by shred he pieced together what little he knew, and always he arrived at the same futile end.  An Englishman, dead to his family if he had one, an outcast or an expatriate—­and the finest, bravest gentleman he had ever known.  It was the WHYFORE of these things that stirred within him an emotion which he had never experienced before.  The Englishman had grimly and determinedly taken his secret to the grave with him.  To him, John Keith—­who was now Derwent Conniston—­he had left an heritage of deep mystery and the mission, if he so chose, of discovering who he was, whence he had come—­and why.  Often he looked at the young girl’s picture in the watch, and always he saw in her eyes something which made him think of Conniston as he lay in the last hour of his life.  Undoubtedly the girl had grown into a woman now.

Days grew into weeks, and under Keith’s feet the wet, sweet-smelling earth rose up through the last of the slush snow.  Three hundred miles below the Barrens, he was in the Reindeer Lake country early in May.  For a week he rested at a trapper’s cabin on the Burntwood, and after that set out for Cumberland House.  Ten days later he arrived at the post, and in the sunlit glow of the second evening afterward he built his camp-fire on the shore of the yellow Saskatchewan.

The mighty river, beloved from the days of his boyhood, sang to him again, that night, the wonderful things that time and grief had dimmed in his heart.  The moon rose over it, a warm wind drifted out of the south, and Keith, smoking his pipe, sat for a long time listening to the soft murmur of it as it rolled past at his feet.  For him it had always been more than the river.  He had grown up with it, and it had become a part of him; it had mothered his earliest dreams and ambitions; on it he had sought his first adventures; it had been his chum, his friend, and his comrade, and the fancy struck him that in the