running under it, was the old home.  The building was hidden, but through a break in the trees he could see the top of the old red brick chimney glowing in the sun, as if beckoning a welcome to him over the tree tops.  He forgot Shan Tung; he forgot McDowell; he forgot that he was John Keith, the murderer, in the overwhelming sea of loneliness that swept over him.  He looked out into the world that had once been his, and all that he saw was that red brick chimney glowing in the sun, and the chimney changed until at last it seemed to him like a tombstone rising over the graves of the dead.  He turned to the door of the bungalow with a thickening in his throat and his eyes filmed by a mist through which for a few moments it was difficult for him to see.

The bungalow was darkened by drawn curtains when he entered.  One after another he let them up, and the sun poured in.  Brady had left his place in order, and Keith felt about him an atmosphere of cheer that was a mighty urge to his flagging spirits.  Brady was a home man without a wife.  The Company’s agent had called his place “The Shack” because it was built entirely of logs, and a woman could not have made it more comfortable.  Keith stood in the big living-room.  At one end was a strong fireplace in which kindlings and birch were already laid, waiting the touch of a match.  Brady’s reading table and his easy chair were drawn up close; his lounging moccasins were on a footstool; pipes, tobacco, books and magazines littered the table; and out of this cheering disorder rose triumphantly the amber shoulder of a half-filled bottle of Old Rye.

Keith found himself chuckling.  His grin met the lifeless stare of a pair of glass eyes in the huge head of an old bull moose over the mantel, and after that his gaze rambled over the walls ornamented with mounted heads, pictures, snowshoes, gun-racks and the things which went to make up the comradeship and business of Brady’s picturesque life.  Keith could look through into the little dining-room, and beyond that was the kitchen.  He made an inventory of both and found that McDowell was right.  There were nutcrackers in Brady’s establishment.  And he found the bathroom.  It was not much larger than a piano box, but the tub was man’s size, and Keith raised a window and poked his head out to find that it was connected with a rainwater tank built by a genius, just high enough to give weight sufficient for a water system and low enough to gather the rain as it fell from the eaves.  He laughed outright, the sort of laugh that comes out of a man’s soul not when he is amused but when he is pleased.  By the time he had investigated the two bedrooms, he felt a real affection for Brady.  He selected the agent’s room for his own.  Here, too, were pipes and tobacco and books and magazines, and a reading lamp on a table close to the bedside.  Not until he had made a closer inspection of the living-room did he discover that the Shack also had a telephone.