many questions to ask Gordon about old friends. By the time these had been answered Macdonald was chatting easily with Sheba. The man had been in many out-of-the-way corners of the world, had taken part in much that was dramatic and interesting. If the experience of the Irish girl had been small, her imagination had none the less gone questing beyond the narrow bars of her life upon amazing adventure. She listened with glowing eyes to the strange tales this man of magnificent horizons had to tell. Never before had she come into contact with any one like him.
The others too succumbed to his charm. He dominated that little dining-room because he was a sixty-horse-power dynamo. For all his bulk he was as lean as a panther and as sinewy. There was virility in the very economy of his motions, in the reticence of his speech. Not even a fool could have read weakness there. When he followed Sheba into the living-room, power trod in his long, easy stride.
Paget was superintendent of the Lucky Strike, a mine owned principally by Macdonald. The two talked business for a few minutes over their cigars, but Diane interrupted gayly to bring them back into the circle. Adroitly she started Macdonald on the account of a rescue of two men lost in a blizzard the year before. He had the gift of dramatizing his story, of selecting only effective details. There was no suggestion of boasting. If he happened to be the hero of any of his stories the fact was of no importance to him. It was merely a detail of the picture he was sketching.
Gordon interrupted with a question a story he was telling of a fight he had seen between two bull moose.
"Did you say that was while you were on the way over to inspect the Kamatlah coal-fields for the first time?"
The eyes of the young man were quick with interest.
"Yes."
"Four years ago last spring?"
Macdonald looked at him with a wary steadiness. Some doubt had found lodgment in his mind. Before he could voice it, if, indeed, he had any such intention, Elliot broke in swiftly—
"Don't answer that question. I asked it without proper thought. I am a special agent of the General Land Office sent up to investigate the Macdonald coal claims and kindred interests."
Slowly the rigor of the big Scotchman's steely eyes relaxed to a smile that was genial and disarming. If this news hit him hard he gave no sign of it. And that it was an unexpected blow there could be no doubt.
"Glad you've come, Mr. Elliot. We ask nothing but fair play. Tell the truth, and we'll thank you. The men who own the Macdonald group of claims have nothing to conceal. I'll answer that question. I meant to say two years ago last spring."
His voice was easy and his gaze unwavering as he made the correction, yet everybody in the room except Sheba knew he was deliberately lying to cover the slip. For the admission that he had inspected the Kamatlah field just before his dummies had filed upon it would at least tend to aggravate suspicion that the entries were not bona-fide.
It was rather an awkward moment. Diane blamed herself because she had brought the men together socially. Why had she not asked Gordon more explicitly what his business was? Peter grinned a little uncomfortably. It was Sheba who quite unconsciously relieved the situation.
"But what about the big moose, Mr. Macdonald? What did it do then?"
The Alaskan went back to his story. He was talking for Sheba alone, for the young girl with eager, fascinated eyes which flashed with sympathy as they devoured selected glimpses of his wild, turbulent career. Her clean, brave spirit was throwing a glamour over the man. She saw him with other eyes than Elliot's. The Government official admired him tremendously. Macdonald was an empire-builder. He blazed trails for others to follow in safety. But Gordon could guess how callously his path was strewn with brutality, with the effects of an ethical color-blindness largely selfish, though even he did not know that the man's primitive jungle code of wolf eat wolf had played havoc with Sheba's young life many years before.
Diane, satisfied that Macdonald had scored, called upon Sheba.
"I want you to sing for us, dear, if you will."
Sheba accompanied herself. The voice of the girl had no unusual range, but it was singularly sweet and full of the poignant feeling that expresses the haunting pathos of her race.
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