"I walked openly into the railroad depot and asked for a package yesterday. You forget that I partly changed my appearance, while, so far as memory serves, only two police troopers occasionally saw me. The others?—you should know your own kind better, Ormesby. Do you think any settler in this region would take money—and Lane offered a round sum—for betraying me?"
"No," I answered with a certain pride; "that is to say, not unless he were a nominee of the man you name."
No proof of this was needed, but one was supplied us. A man who presently strode out of a hollow stopped and stared at Boone. He was, to judge from his appearance, one of the stolid bushmen who come out West from the forests of Northern Ontario—tireless men with ax and plow, but with little knowledge of anything else.
"I'm kind of good at remembering faces, and I've seen you before," he said. "You are the man who used to own my place."
"How often have you seen me?" asked Boone.
"Once in clear daylight, twice back there at night," answered the stranger.
"Did you know that you could have earned a good many dollars by telling the police as much?" asked Boone; and the other regarded him with a frown.
"I'm a peaceable man when people will let me be; but I don't take that kind of talk from anybody."
"I was sure, or I shouldn't have asked you," said Boone. "They don't raise mean Canadians yonder in the country you came from among the rocks and trees. You're not overrich, either, are you? to judge from my own experience, for I put more money into the land than I ever took out of it. However, that doesn't concern the main thing. Just now I'm a hungry man."
The big axman's face relaxed, and he laughed the deep, almost silent, laugh which those like him learn in the shadow of the northern pines. There is as little mirth in it as there is in most of their hard lives, but one can generally trust them with soul and body.