As he stared again at the seated figure, the grim fact reared like a grisly specter, deriding, thrusting its haggard presence upon him. In this little community, which apparently he had forsaken and to which he had by chance returned, he stood a rogue and a scoundrel, a thing to point the finger at and to avoid! The question that had burned his brain to fire flamed up again. The town despised him. What had been his career? How had he become a pariah? And by what miracle had he been so altered as to look upon himself with loathing? He was dimly conscious withal that some fundamental change had passed over him, though how or when he could not tell. Some mysterious moral alchemy had transmuted his elements. What he had been he was no more. He was no longer even the man who had awakened in the box-car. Yet the debts of the unknown yesterday must be paid in the coin of the known to-day! He lifted himself upright, dropping his feet to the floor. At the movement the man on the doorstep rose quickly and came forward. "You're better, Hugh," he said. "Take it easy, though. Don't get up just yet--I'm going to cook you some breakfast." He turned to the hearth, kicked the smoldering log-ends together and set a saucepan on them. "You'll be stronger when you've got something between your ribs," he added. "How long have I been lying here?" asked Harry. "Only since last night. You've had a fever." "Where is my dog?" "Dog?" said the other. "I never knew you had one." Harry's lips set bitterly. It had fared more hardly, then, than he. It had been a ready object for the crowd to wreak their hatred upon, because it belonged to him--because it was Hugh Stires' dog! He leaned back a moment against the cabin wall, with closed eyes, while Prendergast stirred the heating mixture, which gave forth a savory aroma. "Is this your cabin, my friend?" The figure bending over the hearth straightened itself with a jerk and the blinking yellow eyes looked hard at him. Prendergast came close to the bunk. "That's the game you played in the town," he said with a surly sneer. "It's all right for those that take it in, but you needn't try to bamboozle me, pretending you don't know your own claim and cabin! I'm no such fool!" A dull flush came to Harry's face. Here was a page from that iniquitous past that faced him. His own cabin? And his own claim? Well, why not? "You are mistaken," he said calmly. "I am not pretending. I can not remember you." Prendergast laughed in an ugly, derisive way. "I suppose you've forgotten the half-year we've lived here together, and the gold-dust we've gathered in now and again--slipped it all, have you?"