“What is the matter with me? Before I came here, if I had an idea I stuck to it, and didn’t have any nonsense when I knew I was right. I am getting sensitive--the thing I find everywhere in this country: fear of feeling or giving pain; as though the bad tooth out isn’t better than the bad tooth in. When I really get sentimental I’ll fold my Arab tent--so help me, ye seventy Gods of Yath!” A little while after he was at Mrs. Cawley’s bed, the landlord handing him a glass of hot grog, Jock’s mother eyeing him feverishly from the quilt. Gaston quietly felt her wrist, counting the pulse-beats; then told Cawley to wet a cloth and hand it to him. He put it gently on the woman’s head. The eyes of the woman followed him anxiously. He sat down again, and in response to her questioning gaze, began the story of Jock’s life as he knew it. Cawley stood leaning on the foot-board; the woman’s face was cowled in the quilt with hungry eyes; and Gaston’s voice went on in a low monotone, to the ticking of the great clock in the next room. Gaston watched her face, and there came to him like an inspiration little things Jock did, which would mean more to his mother than large adventures. Her lips moved now and again, even a smile flickered. At last Gaston came to his father’s own death and the years that followed; then the events in Labrador. He approached this with unusual delicacy: it needed bravery to look into the mother’s eyes, and tell the story. He did not know how dramatically he told it--how he etched it without a waste word. When he came to that scene in the Fort, the three men sitting, targets for his bullets,--he softened the details greatly. He did not tell it as he told it at the Court, but the simpler, sparser language made it tragically clear. There was no sound from the bed, none from the foot-board, but he heard a door open and shut without, and footsteps somewhere near. How he put the body in the tree, and prayed over it and left it there, was all told; and then he paused. He turned a little sick as he saw the white face before him. She drew herself up, her fingers caught away the night-dress at her throat; she stared hard at him for a moment, and then, with a wild, moaning voice, cried out: “You killed my boy! You killed my boy! You killed my boy!” Gaston was about to take her hand, when he heard a shuffle and a rush behind him. He rose, turned swiftly, saw a bottle swinging, threw up his hand... and fell backwards against the bed. The woman caught his bleeding head to her breast and hugged it. “My Jock, my poor boy!” she cried in delirium now. Cawley had thrown his arms about the struggling, drunken assailant--Jock’s poaching friend. The mother now called out to the pinioned man, as she had done to Gaston: “You have killed my boy!” She kissed Gaston’s bloody face. A messenger was soon on the way to Ridley Court, and in a little upper room Jacques was caring for his master. CHAPTER IX. HE FINDS NEW SPONSORS