The old voice trembled a bit and he stopped to look aside into the little pocket he had been exploring. Billy Brue looked back down the canyon, where the swift stream brawled itself into white foam far below. "He wouldn't use his legs; I prodded him about it constant--" He stopped again to brace himself against the shock. Billy Brue still looked away. "I told him high altitudes and high livin' would do any man--" Again he was silent. "But all he'd ever say was that times had changed since my day, and I wasn't to mind him." He had himself better in hand now. "Why, I nursed that boy when he was a dear, funny little red baby with big round eyes rollin' around to take notice; he took notice awful quick--fur a baby. Oh, my! Oh, dear! Dan'l!" Again he stopped. "And it don't seem more'n yesterday that I was a-teachin' him to throw the diamond hitch; he could throw the diamond hitch with his eyes shut --I reckon by the time he was nine or ten. He had his faults, but they didn't hurt him none; Dan'l J. was a man, now--" He halted once more. "The dead millionaire," began Billy Brue, reading from the obituary in the Skiplap _Weekly Ledge_, "was in his fifty-second year. Genial, generous to a fault, quick to resent a wrong, but unfailing in his loyalty to a friend, a man of large ideas, with a genius for large operations, he was the type of indefatigable enterprise that has builded this Western empire in a wilderness and given rich sustenance and luxurious homes to millions of prosperous, happy American citizens. Peace to his ashes! And a safe trip to his immortal soul over the one-way trail!" "Yes, yes--it's Dan'l J. fur sure--they got my boy Dan'l that time. Is that all it says, Billy? Any one with him?" "Why, this here despatch is signed by young Toler--that's his confidential man." "Nobody else?" The old man was peering at him sharply from under the grey protruding brows. "Well, if you must know, Uncle Peter, this is what the notice says that come by wire to the _Ledge_ office," and he read doggedly: "The young and beautiful Mrs. Bines, who had been accompanying her husband on his trip of inspection over the Sierra Northern, is prostrated by the shock of his sudden death." The old man became for the first time conscious of the tears in his eyes, and, pulling down one of the blue woollen shirt sleeves, wiped his wet cheeks. The slow, painful blush of age crept up across the iron strength of his face, and passed. He looked away as he spoke. "I knew it; I knew that. My Dan'l was like all that Frisco bunch. They get tangled with women sooner or later. I taxed Dan'l with it. I spleened against it and let him know it. But he was a man and his own master--if you can rightly call a man his own master that does them things. Do you know what-fur woman this one was, Billy?"