"Best go straight on with the story. You want the boy to know it all—not in pieces." Hendrie went on smoking.
Leyburn turned to Frank again.
"And it's a pretty story," he assured him. "Listen. A week after we started down the trail these two followed us with a scout. They, too, got caught in the blizzard. They got caught in the open. They were high up in the hills. An accident happened. They lost their gold, dropped with a lot of their baggage over a precipice. This man got mad. He loved gold. He cared for nothing else. Your mother was nothing beside it. She was just a burden. Finally they made camp a few miles from us. After a while this man saw our smoke in the distance. He stole out on the excuse of fetching wood. He tramped to our camp. He came there when I was away for wood and Charlie had just died. Finding Charlie dead, and no one about, he stole our gold, our dogs and sled, our provisions and blankets, and hit the trail south, leaving your mother with the scout, and me to walk back to their camp or starve. That's the man who is your father. That's the man you've gone over to, and sacrificed your pledges to humanity for. Do you understand what you've done? Do you? You've helped this criminal, this skunk of a man who dishonored your mother, and left her and her unborn child on the long winter trail to die, this thief, this ghoul who could rob the dead, and renounced your most sacred pledges. By God, you are your father's son!"
The scorn and hatred the man flung into his final charge was far, far beyond the power of words.
He looked for its effect, waiting for Frank to take up his challenge. But he remained disappointed.
"Well?" he urged, with gathering fury.
Still there was no answer in the darkened room.
But though he remained silent Frank's heart was beating hard. A strange excitement was plunging wildly through his veins. He felt that he wanted to reach out his strong young hands and do hurt. He felt at that moment, and during the moments he was hearkening to the venomous story, aggravated by every hateful inflection that could goad, that relief could only come in violence. And his desire was to silence that hateful voice, and choke the story it was telling back into the throat of the man telling it. It did not hurt him to hear these things of his own father because he was his father. They hurt him because they were on the tongue of this man, who, from the bottom of his heart, he had learned so to despise and hate.
Alexander Hendrie shot a sidelong glance into the boy's face. It was a furtive glance, watchful and anxious. Then his eyes returned to their dark brooding.
A moment later, as Frank made no response to the man's challenge, Hendrie removed the cigar from his mouth.