‘Bless you!’ exclaims Geoffrey, clutching the prize. ‘Welcome to our tents! I would welcome Beelzebub if he brought me a pipe of tobacco. But if one fills, all fill—that’s understood. We are brothers in misfortune, and must share alike.’ ‘Fill, and be quick about it,’ says the stranger. So the three fill their pipes, light them, and their souls float into Elysium on the wings of the seraph tobacco. The stranger also fills and lights and smokes silently, but not with a paradisiac air, rather with the gloomy aspect of some fallen spirit, to whose lost soul sensuous joys bring no contentment. His large dark eyes—seeming unnaturally large in his haggard face—wander slowly round the walls of the hut, mark the bunks filled with dried prairie grass, and each provided with a buffalo robe. Indications of luxury these. Actual starvation would have reduced the wanderers to boiling down strips of their buffalo skins into an unsavoury soup. Slowly those great wan eyes travel round the hut. Listlessly, yet marking every detail—the hunting knives and fishing tackle hanging against the wall, Geoffrey’s handsome collection of rifles, which have been the admiration of every Indian who has ever beheld them. The stranger’s gaze lingers upon these, and an envious look glimmers in his eyes. Signs of wealth these. He glances at the three companions, and wonders which is the man who finds the money for the expedition, and owns these guns. There could hardly be three rich fools mad enough to waste life and wealth on such wanderings. He concludes that one is the dupe, the other two adventurers, trading, or hoping to trade, upon his folly. His keen eye lights on Hossack, the man who talked about Balliol. Yes, he has a prosperous stall-fed look. The other, Lucius, has too much intelligence. The little German is too old to spend his substance upon so wild a scheme. Those observant eyes of the stranger’s have nearly completed their circuit, when they suddenly fix themselves, seem visibly to dilate, and kindle with a fire that gives a new look to his face. He sees an object hanging against the wall, to him as far above all the wonders of modern gunnery as the diamonds of Golconda are above splinters of glass. He points to it with his bony finger, and utters a strange shrill cry of rapture—the ejaculation of a creature who by long solitude, by hardship and privation, and the wild life of forests and deserts, has lapsed into an almost savage condition. ‘A fiddle!’ he exclaims, after that shrill scream of delight has melted into a low chuckling laugh. ‘It’s more than a year since I’ve seen a fiddle, since I lost mine crossing the McKenzie river. Let me play upon it.’ This in a softer, more human tone than any words he had previously spoken, looking from one to the other of the three men with passionate entreaty. ‘What! you play the fiddle, do you?’ asked Lucius, emptying the ashes from his pipe with a long sigh of regret. ‘It is yours, then?’