“I had the choice, to take or leave you,” Paul responded. “You were an unconscious witness. Why should I have opened the subject at all?” Both knew that this answer was an evasion. By forcing the tie they had merely marked the want of ease and confidence between them. As “Packer John” Paul could have enjoyed, nay, loved this man; as his father, the sum and finality of his filial dreams, the supplanter of that imaginary husband of his mother's youth, the thing was impossible. And the father knew it and did not resent it in the least, only pitied the boy for his needless struggle. He was curious about him, too. He wanted to understand him and the life he had come out of: his roundabout way of reaching the simplest conclusions; his courage in argument, and his personal shying away from the truth when found. More than all he longed for a little plain talk, the exile's hunger for news from home. It pleased him when Paul, rousing at this deliberate challenge, spoke up with animation, as if he had come to some conclusion in his own mind. It could not be expected he would express it simply. The packer had become used to his oddly elaborate way of putting things. “If we had food enough and time, we might afford to waste them discussing each other's personal appearance. _I_ propose we talk to some purpose.” “Talking sure burns up the food.” The packer waited. “I wish I knew what my father was doing with himself, all those years when his family were giving him the honors of the dead.” “I warned ye about this pumping out old shafts. You can't tell what you'll find in the bottom. I suppose you know there are things in this world, Boy, a good deal worse than death?” “Desertion is worse. It is not my father's death I want explained, it is his life, your life, in secret, these twenty years! Can you explain that?” The packer doubled his bony fist and brought it down on the bunk-side. “Now you talk like a man! I been waiting to hear you say that. Yes, I can answer that question, if you ain't afeard of the answer!” “I am keeping alive to hear it!” said Paul in a guarded voice. “You might say you're keeping me alive to tell it. It's a good thing to git off of one's mind; but it's a poor thing to hand over to a son. All I've got to leave ye, though: the truth if you can stand it! Where do you want I should begin?” “At the night when you came back to One Man Station.” “How'd you know I come back?” “You were back there in your fever, living over something that happened in that place. There was a wind blowing and the door wouldn't shut. And something had to be lifted,”--the old man's eyes, fixed upon his son, took a look of awful comprehensions,--“something heavy.”