But the Honourable paused. He had punished his friend enough. He stepped forward and laid his hand on Sir Duke’s shoulder. “Duke, you want to pick up the threads where they were dropped. You dropped them. Ask me nothing about the ends that Emily Dorset held. I conspire no more. But go you and learn your fate. If one remembers, why should the other forget?”
Sir Duke’s light heart and eager faith came back with a rush. “I’ll start for England at once. I’ll know the worst or the best of it before three months are out.” The Honourable’s slow placidity turned.
“Three months.—Yes, you may do it in that time. Better go from Victoria to San Francisco and then overland. You’ll not forget about my hunting traps, and—oh, certainly, Gordineer; come in.”
“Say,” said Gordineer. “I don’t want to disturb the meeting, but Shon’s in chancery somehow; breathing like a white pine, and thrashing about! He’s red-hot with fever.”
Before he had time to say more, Sir Duke seized the candle and entered the room. Shon was moving uneasily and suppressing the groans that shook him. “Shon, old friend, what is it?”
“It’s the pain here, Lawless,” laying his hand on his chest.
After a moment Sir Duke said, “Pneumonia!”
From that instant thoughts of himself were sunk in the care and thought of the man who in the heart of Queensland had been mate and friend and brother to him. He did not start for England the next day, nor for many a day.
Pretty Pierre and Jo Gordineer and his party carried Sir Duke’s letters over into the Pipi Valley, from where they could be sent on to the coast. Pierre came back in a few days to see how Shon was, and expressed his determination of staying to help Sir Duke, if need be.
Shon hovered between life and death. It was not alone the pneumonia that racked his system so; there was also the shock he had received in his flight down the glacier. In his delirium he seemed to be always with Lawless: