This was not particularly tactful, since, without intending it, he made it evident that he felt his comrade had been to some extent remiss; but Agatha smiled.
“Oh,” she replied, “I understand! You needn’t labor with excuses. But doesn’t the same thing apply to you?”
“It certainly did. Now, however, things have become a little easier. My holding is larger than Gregory’s, and I have a foreman who can look after it for me.”
“Gregory said that you were a great friend of his.”
Wyllard seized this opportunity. “He was a great friend of mine and I like to think it means the same thing. In fact it’s reasonably certain that he saved my life for me.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Agatha; “that is a thing he didn’t mention. How did it come about?”
Wyllard was glad to tell the story. He was anxious to say all he honestly could in Hawtrey’s favor.
“We were at work on a railroad trestle—a towering wooden bridge, in British Columbia. It stretched across a deep ravine with great boulders and there was a stream in the bottom of it. He stood high up on a staging close beneath the rails. A fast freight, a huge general produce train came down the track, with one of the new big locomotives hauling it, and when the cars went banging by above us we could hardly hold on to the bridge. The construction foreman was a hustler, and we had to get the spikes in. I was swinging the hammer when I felt the plank beneath me slip. The train, it seems, had jarred loose the bolt around which we had our lashings. For a moment I felt that I was going down into the gorge, and then Gregory leaned out and grabbed me. He had only one free hand to do it with, and when he felt my weight one foot swung out from the stringer he had sprung to. It seemed certain that I would pull him with me, too. We hung like that for a space—I don’t quite know how long.”
He paused for a moment, apparently feeling the stress of it again, and there was a faint thrill in his voice when he went on.
“It was then,” he said, “I knew just what kind of man Gregory Hawtrey was. Anybody else would have let me go; but he held on. I got my hand on some of the framing, and he swung me on to the stringer.”