“How is supper, Tom?” said Paul. “Any prairie chicken? Partridge?” “Huh! Chicken! partridge! deer!” “Great Cæsar’s ghost! Tom, you don’t mean to say you’ve got all that?” cried Paul. “Huh!” grunted Tom, delighted. “Plenty, plenty on mountain.” “Oh, I say, old boy! What about four o’clock tomorrow morning, eh?” said Paul. “Tomorrow? No! Business first. Tonight and tomorrow to business. After that I’m your man. By the way, does the young lady by any chance handle a gun?” “Handle a gun? Rather! At least, she could six years ago.” “Paul! Paul!” said Dalton solemnly. “What have I done that the gods should so order my lot?” After supper, while Paul and old Tom went over the guns and the hunting gear and made all preparations for a week’s hunt, Dalton buried himself in his papers, seeking to discover how he might utilise the soft pedal without injuring his case, with the result that before they went to sleep he had his new campaign fully planned. “It’s all right, Paul,” he said. “We will get him all the same, but with considerably less suffering to the old sinner.” “I am not anxious to make him suffer, Dalton. I have got over that a bit. He will get all he deserves, but not from me,” said Paul. “Paul, you are a long way better man than I am,” said Dalton. “When I see what you have lost through that old devil’s crime, I tell you I see red. And I can’t understand how you take it as you do.” Paul sat silently smoking for some minutes, looking into the fire. “It is because of what all this brings back to me, Dalton, that I am able to keep my hands off him and perhaps one day—to forgive him—not yet, not yet—but perhaps some day. That’s my mother’s chair you are sitting in——No! No! Sit down; I want you to sit there,” he added as Dalton sprang up from the chair. He rose and took from a side table a Bible. “This was her Bible, Dalton,” he said, his voice vibrating with emotion. “I am going to read her last lesson to me.” Dalton laid his pipe down while Paul read to him the immortal words which have set for men whose hearts are hot with the passion for vengeance the ideal of the Master of mankind. “I say not unto you until seven times, but until seventy times seven.” Then, turning the pages to the story of His Passion, he read again, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” “I have not arrived yet, Dalton, at the mountain peak, God knows. For seven years I have been funking it, as utterly beyond me. But tonight I glimpse it far up in the clouds. Here my mother learned to forgive, here my father found forgiveness, and here I begin to feel how much I need forgiveness. There’s a lot of humbug in me, Dalton.” “Oh, darn it all, Paul, cut that out, unless you want to condemn me to hell straightway.”