Arrangements for his journey were about complete. Before he had left New York he had turned everything into ready cash that could be so turned, so that even when he first reached Missouri his personal effects had not made travel a burden to him. During the past weeks all the balance of his belongings that possessed any negotiability whatsoever had been turned into meal. And his meal sack was empty! By no sort of foreknowledge can a man accustomed to enough money for current expenses,--a goodly budget as recognised by the class of which Steering was an exemplar,--imagine, during his easy circumstances, how he would feel if ever things should so go against him that he would be left staring into an empty meal sack. Steering felt an awkward incompetence to realise the case now. He had looked at the sack at close range, patted it, as though to mollify its consequences to him, pooh-poohed it, taken it philosophically, taken it smilingly, but he had been all the time unable to get his eyes off it, even though he had finally carried it down to the river's edge and hung it upon the bough of the weeping willow tree. His eyes were still upon it, he was still regarding it at long range, through the shack door, getting the foreshorten of it, getting the middle distance, getting the perspective, utterly unable to stop his ceaseless staring into the emptiness of it, stop wondering what next and how next.

 

He got up and went to the door of the shack and looked out. By and by it occurred to him that the case would be much worse if there were anyone besides himself concerned. All the vague fleeting sympathies that had ever been aroused within him by newspaper stories of starving families, the nearest he had ever come to the actuality of starving families, quivered and stirred within him. The first thing he knew, he was feeling infinitely relieved that he had no starving family. He had a sensitive and active imagination, and, as he pictured the hungry little children that he did not have, tears of gratitude came into his eyes, and he blew gay kisses to those airy little folks.

 

It was glorious weather. Wild spring flowers were abundant, and there were cheerful whiskings among the trees where the birds and squirrels were busy again. The young shoots strained with the urge of the sap, making little popping noises. Steering started now and again and held his head waitingly. He had been watching and hoping for Piney for days, and was on the alert. Every noise, however, resolved itself into the noise of bird, squirrel, or sapling. There was never the voice nor the footfall of the human. Once that very afternoon, he had been so sure that he had heard Piney's pony up on the bluff that he had gone up there searchingly, joyfully. But except for a little scatter, that he took to be the lift of a covey of quail somewhere off in the Gulch bushes, not a sound or sign came up to the bluff. Steering mourned for Piney. If the tramp-boy had not gone away, things might have been more bearable. But the lad's jealousy and his love for Steering were in battle royal now, and Piney kept far from his hero, on the misty hills. Uncle Bernique was off on the hills, too, almost all the time; at the moment of this present crisis Bernique had been away for days. It was the merciless loneliness of the effort there at Redbud that had been most effective in dulling Steering's endurance. If he had been less lonely he might have devised ways of standing Missouri yet longer. Up at Dade farm they kept telling him, when he went up there for one of his visits to the little girl with the cherries on her hat, that he had "malary." It did not seem to him a very able diagnosis, but, as he had admitted to Miss Madeira, something was the matter with him, and it had now become his notion that the quicker he got out of Missouri the quicker he would be cured of the something. He was all ready to commence his treatment; he had corn-dodgers for supper that night, and for breakfast next morning, and with the morning sun he meant to travel on. The only reason that he did not start now, this minute, was because--well, she had come up the river road about this hour once, and he was waiting. Circumstanced as he was now, with the only three people whom he could count as friends in Missouri almost always away from him, life had come to mean little but this feverish, alert waiting. He went out and sat down by the shivering Di for his very last wait for any of the three.

 

It was there that old Bernique came upon him. Steering was shivering a little, too.

 

"Dieu! You have the malaria!" was the Frenchman's greeting.

 

"Go 'long, I have no such thing; I'm only as lonely as the devil." Steering got up and shook hands with the old man with so much energy that Bernique made a grimace of pain. "Come up here and talk," cried Steering, his eagerness to hear the sound of a human and friendly voice making him overlook the excitement under which Bernique laboured. He tied Bernique's horse to a bush and drew the old man up the bluff. "Where have you been this time? Where is Piney? Hello! what's the matter with you anyhow? struck another lode?"

 

Old Bernique spread out his palms avertingly. "You go fas'," he protested. "Wait, I beg. I have again had those exper-r-ience that so much disturb me. But no, I have not found anothaire lode, though I have been on the hills vair' long time. Thees day I come a-r-round by the way of Canaan. At the pos'-office I am stop'." The old man was talking now with his eyes burning into Steering's eyes, an expression of horror flattening his face; he held the four fingers of one lean hand pressed to his mouth, so that his words came out inarticulate and broken, though they seemed to scorch his throat like balls of fire. "At the pos'-office one say to me, 'Here is lettaire for you!' I take the lettaire and read.... Now, I ask you, Mistaire Steering, to take it and read." Bernique drew forth a letter from his pocket and thrust it into Steering's hand with a finely dramatic gesture. He had the appreciation of his race for climax.

 

The letter, Steering saw at once, was in the same gnarled handwriting as that letter which Crittenton Madeira had given him to read on the first day of his arrival in Canaan, and its contents made evident the same gnarled personality that had been made evident by that first letter.

 

"Read it aloud," said Bernique, and Steering read:

 

"'Deep Canyon, Colorado, September 23rd, 1899,' hey! what's the matter with the date, where's the slow-boy been?"

 

"Read on, Mistaire Steering," said Bernique grimly. But Steering looked at the post-mark on the envelope in his hand before he read on.

 

"Post-mark's dated April 23rd, 1900--why----"

 

"Read on!" cried old Bernique. "It is explain'," and Steering read on.

 

    "'My dear Placide:--You and I were good friends in the days that we spent in prospecting over the Canaan hills, and, even though I incurred your displeasure when I abandoned the hills, I am depending upon the old friendship to influence you to do a last friendly act for me. It is not necessary for me to acquaint you with the detail of humiliations and persecutions to which I have been subjected by the man of whom I was once so foolish as to borrow money, any more than it is necessary for me to condone to you the desire that has developed within me to make him bite the dust, even as he has made me bite it. I am not remorseless in this. I gave him his chance to escape me, but, quite as I anticipated, he has fallen into the trap that I set for him; else would you not be reading this letter to-day, nearly a year after it was written.

 

    "'Look close now, friend Placide. Nearly a year prior to the date that you will get this, that is to say on the 23rd of last September, the same day that I write this letter to you, I wrote Crittenton Madeira that I should be dead when my letter reached him, dead under an assumed name, in a strange land. It was the God's truth. I was dead when the letter reached him. You are reading a letter from the dead now, friend Placide.'" Steering stopped for a moment with a little shiver, but Bernique urged him on, and he read again--"'Placide, in that letter to Madeira were my instructions to turn over the Canaan Tigmores to Bruce Steering, because, I being dead, the hills were due to pass on to my heir. Well, Placide, has Madeira done that? Has he carried out my instructions? Has he fulfilled his trust? Has Steering possession of the Canaan Tigmores?

 

    "'Like the thief that he is, Madeira has not done his part. Had he done it, you would not be reading this letter to-day. I wrote it and placed it with the clerk of Snow Mountain County, the county in which I died, to be mailed to you on the 23rd of April, 1900, only in case no inquiry had ever come from Madeira to verify my death. No inquiry has ever come! So the clerk of the county, who is my executor, mails this letter to you. This letter, Placide, is to attest that for seven months Crittenton Madeira has been in unlawful possession of the Canaan Tigmores, defrauding my heir and holding land under my name after being advised of my death and of the means of verifying the advice. There are now, in the keeping of the clerk of Snow Mountain County, two sealed envelopes, to be delivered by him, the one to you, the one to Crittenton Madeira. Madeira's has never been called for. See that yours is. In it you will find the credentials of my identity, my sworn statements, and the documents that prove my late encumbency of the entail. I am buried in the pauper's field in the cemetery of Deep Canyon. The stone slab that I have directed to be put over me bears the inscription, "James Gray, Died September 23, 1899."

 

    "'Get your proofs together, Placide, and carry them to the defrauded heir. I have not forgotten the letters that I received from him, nor his young eagerness to get at the land that is now his and that should have been his nearly a year ago. Put the proofs before him. And I pray that he may be quick and sure to deal out judgment and retribution. He ............