They began to talk presently of those old days in America, but Lucius shrank with a strange dread from that one subject which he was most anxious to speak about. There was one faintest shadow of a doubt which a few words from Absalom Schanck could dispel. That worthy, in talking over past experiences, dwelt more on the physical privations they had undergone—above all, on their empty larder. ‘When I count my tinned provisions—man improves daily in the art of tinned provisions—I can scarcely believe I was one time so near to starve. I sometimes feel as if I could never eat enough to make up for that treatful beriod.’ ‘Yes,’ said Lucius gloomily, without the faintest idea of what the other had been saying. ‘I was very ill yonder, wasn’t I, Schanck, when you bled me?’ ‘Yes, and after. Vhen you did rave—ach, mein Gott, how you did rave!’ ‘My brain was on fire when I shot that wretch. Yet I think, had I been full master of my senses, which I believe I was not, I should have done just the same. Tell me, Schanck, you who knew all, and were my witness in that trying hour, did I commit a great crime when I killed that man?’ ‘I think you gommit no grime at all vhen you did shoot him, and if you had killed him it vould have been one very good job.’ ‘_If_ I had killed him!’ cried Lucius, starting up. ‘Is there any doubt of his death?’ ‘Sit down, Daforen, be dranguil; the man is not worth that we should be uneasy for him. You asked if there is any doubt of his death? There is this much doubt, das when I saw him last he was alife.’ ‘Good God!’ cried Lucius; ‘and I have suffered an agony of remorse about that man, wretch as I knew him to be. I have carried the burden of a great sin on my soul day and night; my dreams have been haunted, my lonely hours miserable.’ He clasped his hands before his face with a passionate gesture, and a hoarse sob broke from that breast, from which a load had been suddenly lifted. The sense of relief, of thankfulness, was keen as the keenest pain. ‘Tell me,’ he cried eagerly—‘tell me all about it, Schanck. Was not that shot fatal? I aimed straight at his heart.’ ‘And you hit him zumvare,’ answered the German, ‘for vhen I vent out and looked apout for him an hour aftervarts, there were draces of bloot on the snow; but it couldn’t have been his heart, or he vould hardly have been able to grawl avay. I followed him a little vay by that drack of bloot, and the broken snow through which he had tragged himself along; but I could not go far; I was anxious about you, and I went back to the hut. If the man lay dead in the snow, or if he was shifering under the binedrees, kroaning with the bain of his vounds, I cared not.’ ‘Was that the last you saw of him,’ asked Lucius—‘those traces of blood on the snow?’ ‘It vas the last for one long time. If you vill be patient I vill tell you all the story.’