"Mebbe not."

The veins were beating like live cords in the man's throat and at his
temples.

"'Twas just the same as Father Corraine bein' here, when mother had
Sunday, wasn't it?"

The man made no reply, but a gloom drew down his forehead, and his lips
doubled in as if he endured physical pain. He got to his feet and paced
the floor. For weeks he had listened to the same kind of talk from this
wounded, and, as he thought, dying son, and he was getting less and less
able to bear it. The boy at nine years of age was, in manner of speech,
the merest child, but his thoughts were sometimes large and wise. The
only white child within a compass of three hundred miles or so; the
lonely life of the hills and plains, so austere in winter, so melted to a
sober joy in summer; listening to the talk of his elders at camp-fires
and on the hunting-trail, when, even as an infant almost, he was swung in
a blanket from a tree or was packed in the torch-crane of a canoe; and,
more than all, the care of a good, loving--if passionate--little mother:
all these had made him far wiser than his years. He had been hours upon
hours each day alone with the birds, and squirrels, and wild animals, and
something of the keen scent and instinct of the animal world had entered
into his body and brain, so that he felt what he could not understand.

He saw that he had worried his father, and it troubled him. He thought of
something. "Daddy," he said, "let me have it."

A smile struggled for life in the hunter's face, as he turned to the wall