Finden sighed. “Ten years ago he was a man to look at twice—before he did It and got away. Now his own mother wouldn’t know him—bad ’cess to him! I knew him from the cradle almost. I spotted him here by a knife-cut I gave him in the hand when we were lads together. A divil of a timper always both of us had, but the good-nature was with me, and I didn’t drink and gamble and carry a pistol. It’s ten years since he did the killing, down in Quebec, and I don’t suppose the police will get him now. He’s been counted dead. I recognized him here the night after I asked her how she liked the name of Finden. She doesn’t know that I ever knew him. And he didn’t recognize me—twenty-five years since we met before! It would be better if he went under the sod. Is he pretty sick, father?”
“He will die unless the surgeon’s knife it cure him before twenty-four hours, and—”
“And Doctor Brydon is sick, and Doctor Hadley away at Winnipeg, and this is two hundred miles from nowhere! It looks as if the police’ll never get him, eh?”
“You have not tell any one—never?”
Finden laughed. “Though I’m not a priest, I can lock myself up as tight as anny. There’s no tongue that’s so tied, when tying’s needed, as the one that babbles most bewhiles. Babbling covers a lot of secrets.”
“So you t’ink it better Meydon should die, as Hadley is away and Brydon is sick—hein?”
“Oh, I think—”
Finden stopped short, for a horse’s hoofs sounded on the turf beside the house, and presently Varley, the great London surgeon, rounded the corner and stopped his horse in front of the veranda.
He lifted his hat to the priest. “I hear there’s a bad case at the hospital,” he said.
“It is ver’ dangerous,” answered Father Bourassa; “but, voilà, come in! There is something cool to drink. Ah, yes, he is ver’ bad, that man from the Great Slave Lake.”