Steele briefly spoke of his new work there, of the magnitude of the project and the desire he had had that his father might be with him. "I'm proud of you," his father said. "God knows I have not been the parent I would or should have been." "It's enough for me if your heart's easy now." "I feel as if I were gaining peace at last and--and I must speak. In San Mateo--ah, Steele, you will hear of me there,--you may have to fight the damning influence of my name and past, but I know now you'll come through it. And all I pray for is that you can retain a little love for me despite everything." "Whatever it is I shall hear of my father, I should rather hear it from his lips than from strangers'." The hand in his closed spasmodically. For a long time nothing was said, and the only sound in the room was the ticking of the tin clock on the shelf busily measuring off the seconds of the old man's failing span. To Steele it was as if his father was slowly summoning the few remaining shreds of his fortitude to reveal the cancer of his past. "I'm a branded murderer," he said at last, gasping. "But you never killed a man out of mere wanton desire to slay," Steele responded firmly. "I too have killed men in fights in Mexico. That fact doesn't weight my mind." "In the line of your duty, in the line of your duty. But I was drunk. He was a friend. When I became sober, I saw him with a bullet hole in his head." "Do you remember nothing of shooting him?" "Nothing, nothing." "How do you know you killed him?" his son demanded with inexorable logic. "What is the proof?" A low groan escaped his father. "Men said I had killed him. But my own mind was blank." "Who were the men? Were they present at the time?" "They were four--Sorenson, Vorse, Gordon, Burkhardt." "Were you arrested and tried?" "No. They helped me to escape. Because of your mother, they said, and because they said they were my friends. But I never felt they were really friends. For they were always against new-comers and wanted to keep things in their own hands. You were only three or four years old at that time, Steele, so you wouldn't remember anything about matters there." "What were you doing at San Mateo, father?" Now that the hideous past at last stood uncovered the son was able to turn upon it his incisive mind; he would drag out and scrutinize every bone of the skeleton which had terrorized his father and shadowed his own life Facts faced are never so dreadful as fears unmaterialized. And more, he sought with all the love of a son for circumstances that would mitigate, excuse, or even justify his father's act.