“No—she never told me.” Seguis, in a dazed manner, indicated the camp where Maria still prowled about. “Wh—who was he?”
“The—the same as mine! The man who sits in the commissioner's chair to-day—”
“Not McTavish, the McTavish?” cried the half-breed, trembling from head to foot. “No, no, it can't be! Don't say so!”
“But it is, and that's all there is about it,” growled Donald, grimly. “Why? What difference does it make to you?”
“Then you—you, Captain McTavish, you are my half-brother?”
“Yes.”
“And I was about to kill you, and I have already tried once, and my mother has tried, and Tom—oh, why haven't I known this before? Why didn't she tell me?”
For the moment, Seguis seemed utterly lost in the mazes of his own thoughts and memories. He stood with folded arms, his head hanging upon his breast, while his lips moved in self-communion. Then came the reaction, and disbelief, and it was necessary to go over the ground with him from beginning to end. Concisely and briefly, Donald outlined the whole march of events that had led up to this inevitable revelation.
Then, as never before, the Hudson Bay man realized how far-reaching and potent are the little things of life, and, after all, how far from free agents we are sometimes. Forty-five years before, perhaps, his father, alone in the wilds, had yielded to the warm, dusky beauty of an Indian princess, and now, when, by all the laws of chance and custom, that germ of evil should have expired, it sprang into life and propagated a harvest of intrigue and death. And he, the son, by no fault of his own, was unwillingly but unavoidably involved in the penalty.
To Seguis the meaning of it all came as a blinding flash. In an instant, he analyzed his heritage of ambition and knew the desires of his mother for what they were. He looked back now upon his life of advancement with discerning eyes, and, suddenly, ahead of him, not far now since this revelation, he saw a shining goal.