"Going on a visit to my friends, the Stonies. Though it's a long way,
I look them up now and then."
"From what I've heard of them, they don't seem a very attractive lot," Blake interposed. "But we haven't offered you any supper. Benson, you might put on the frying-pan."
"No, thanks," said Clarke. "I'm camped with two half-breeds a little way back. The Stonies, as you remark, are not a polished set; but we're on pretty good terms, and it's their primitiveness that makes them interesting. You can learn things civilized men don't know much about from these people."
"In my opinion, it's knowledge that's not worth much to a white man," Harding remarked contemptuously. "Guess you mean the secrets of their medicine-men? What isn't gross superstition is trickery."
"There you are wrong. They have some tricks, rather clever ones, though that's not unusual with the professors of a more advanced occultism; but living, as they do, in direct contact with nature in her most savage mood, they have found clues to things that we regard as mysteries. Anyway, they have discovered a few effective remedies that aren't generally known yet to medical science."
He spoke with some warmth, and had the look of a genuine enthusiast; but Harding laughed.
"Medical science hasn't much to say in favor of hoodoo practises, so far as I know. But I understand you are a doctor?"
"I was pretty well known in London."
"Then," Harding asked bluntly, "what brought you to Sweetwater?"
"If you haven't heard, I may as well tell you, because the thing isn't a secret at the settlement." Clarke turned and his eyes rested on Blake. "I'm by no means the only man who has come to Canada under a cloud. There was a famous police-court affair that I figured in. Nothing was proved against me, but my practise afterward fell to bits. As a matter of fact, I was absolutely innocent of the offense. I had acted without much caution, out of pity, and laid myself open to an attack that was meant to cover the escape of the real criminal."