Hallam sat silent a moment, for he knew the prospectors and survey packers who passed their lives amidst the desolate ranges and in the shadowy bush and their superstitions.

“You have had trouble with him before?” he said.

“Yes,” said Damer, “I have.  He cut my partner down with an axe back there in Washington.  It was in the big rush in the Baker foothills, and we had a hard crowd standing in with us; but I had to pull out, and Alton and another man made most of five thousand dollars out of the claim I left.”

“The Bluebird?” said Hallam reflectively.  “I remember that rush.  Alton did himself well.  Wasn’t there a man called Nailer mixed up in the affair?”

“There was,” said Damer, who seemed to shiver a little.  “He was my partner.  We’d have had the claim, and Alton wouldn’t have worried anybody again, if Nailer had kept his nerve that night.  Something went wrong with the spring of his Winchester.—­and Alton didn’t give him another chance.”

The silence that followed was, somewhat impressive.  Hallam was trying to remember what he had read about the affray in question in a Tacoma paper, while Damer once more saw in fancy a man spring half-dressed through the wisp of smoke that drifted about a little tent.  He remembered with an unpleasant distinctness the crash of the rifle shot that rang amidst the shadowy pines, and the grim face of the man who whirled an axe that glinted in the moonlight about his head.  He saw the flash of its descent—­and then brushing the memories from him stretched out a hand that shook a little towards the whisky on the table.

“Well,” he said, “I owe Alton a good deal, and that’s why I went up to Somasco when you told me, but he has been too much for me again, and now I feel it in me that if I’m wise I’ll let that man alone.”

He drank a little whisky, and sat still, staring vacantly before him with a vague apprehension in his eyes, while the strained tenseness of his expression and attitude was not without its effect on Hallam, and it was unfortunate he did not yield to the impulse which prompted him to let Damer go.  He, however, shook off the fancy with a little, impatient laugh.

“It’s not going to suit me to have you slipping out of the country,” he said.  “I want you right here, though it would be quite easy to find a man with twice the grit you have in you.  You let Alton whip you off your claim in Washington, and—­for I’ve a notion of what has happened—­’most pound the head off you yesterday.  Now you want to light out, leaving him to laugh at you?”

Damer flushed a little, and a look of vindictive malice crept into his eyes as he rose.

“That’s about enough!” he said.  “You’re quite a different man from Alton.  I’m going on.”

“Sit down!” said Hallam sharply.  “I’m quite as dangerous to you.  Take some more whisky, and listen to me, though I didn’t think it would be necessary to go into the thing again.  I was with the men who found Gordon at the bottom of his shaft on the Quatchigan.”