The emphasis on the word “once” conveyed the suggestion which had evidently just occurred to him.

“Oh, I know all about that story.”  Alec spoke with the scorn of superior information, casting off the disagreeable suggestion.  “I was there myself.”

“You were, were you?  Well, so was I, and I tell you I know no more than babe unborn whether this old gentleman’s Cameron or not.”

Alec’s mind was singularly free from any turn for speculative thought.  He intended to bring Bates to see the dead in the morning, and that would decide the matter.  He saw no sense in debating a question of fact.

“I was one of the fellows in that survey,” explained Harkness, “and if you’re the fellow we saw at the station, as I reckon you are, then I don’t know any more about this old gentleman I’ve been housing than you do.”

Trenholme had an impulse to command silence, but, resisting it, only kept silence himself and resumed his tread over the uneven ground.

“’Tisn’t true,” broke in the other again, in unexpected denial of his own words, “that that’s all I know.  I know something more; ’tisn’t much, perhaps, but as I value my soul’s salvation, I’ll say it here.  Before I left the neighbourhood of Turrifs, I heard of this old gentleman here a-making his way round the country, and I put in currency the report that he was Cameron, and I’ve no doubt that that suggestion made the country folks head him off towards Turrifs Station as far as they could influence his route; and that’ll be how he came there at Christmas time.  Look you here!  I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now, whether he was or wasn’t—­I didn’t think he was—­but for a scheme I had afoot I set that idea going.  I did it by telegraphing it along the line, as if I’d been one of the operators.  The thing worked better than I expected.”

Alec listened without the feeling of interest the words were expected to arouse.  To his mind a fellow who spoke glibly about his soul’s salvation was either silly or profane.  He had no conception that this man, whose way of regarding his own feelings, and whose standard of propriety as to their expression, differed so much from his own, was, in reality, going through a moral crisis.

“Well?” said he.

“Well, I guess that’s about all I have to say.”

“If you don’t know anything more, I don’t see that you’ve told me anything.”  He meant, anything worth telling, for he did not feel that he had any interest with the other’s tricks or schemes.

“I do declare,” cried Harkness, without heeding his indifference, “I’m just cut up about this night’s affair; I never thought Job would set on anyone but his wife.  I do regret I brought this good old gentleman to this place.  If some one offered me half Bates’s land now, I wouldn’t feel inclined to take it.”

Trenholme returned to his pacing, but when he had passed and re-passed, he said, “Cameron doesn’t seem to have been able to preach and pray like an educated man; but Bates is here, he will see him to-morrow, and if he doesn’t claim the body, the police will advertise.  Some one must know who the old man is.”