"My dear, you ask a great and solemn question. Let me introduce the young
man, that you may get your answer at the fountain-head."

"Wait a moment, Duke. Sit down and tell me when and where you met these
men, and why you have continued the acquaintance."

"Molly," he said, obeying her, "you are a terrible inquisitor, and the
privacy of one's chamber were the kinder place to call one to account.
But I bend to your implacability. . . . Mr. Vandewaters, like myself, has
a taste for roving, though our aims are not identical. He has a fine
faculty for uniting business and pleasure. He is not a thorough
sportsman--there is always a certain amount of enthusiasm, even in the
unrewarded patience of the true hunter; but he sufficeth. Well, Mr.
Vandewaters had been hunting in the far north, and looking after a
promising mine at the same time. He was on his way south at one angle, I
at another angle, bound for the same point. Shon McGann was with me;
Pierre with Vandewaters. McGann left me, at a certain point, to join his
wife at a Barracks of the Riders of the Plains. I had about a hundred
miles to travel alone. Well, I got along the first fifty all right. Then
came trouble. In a bad place of the hills I fell and broke an ankle bone.
I had an Eskimo dog of the right sort with me. I wrote a line on a bit of
birch bark, tied it round his neck, and started him away, trusting my
luck that he would pull up somewhere. He did. He ran into Vandewaters's
camp that evening. Vandewaters and Pierre started away at once. They had
dogs, and reached me soon.

"It was the first time I had seen Pierre for years. They fixed me up, and
we started south. And that's as it was in the beginning with Mr. John
Vandewaters and me."