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“Jacques Grassette!” he cried, in consternation and emotion, for under another name the murderer had been tried and sentenced, nor had his identity been established–the case was so clear, the defence had been perfunctory, and Quebec was very far away!

“M’sieu’!” was the respectful response, and Grassette’s fingers twitched.

“It was my sister’s son you killed, Grassette,” said the Governor, in a low, strained voice.

“Nom de Dieu!” said Grassette, hoarsely.

“I did not know, Grassette,” the Governor went on–“I did not know it was you.”

“Why did you come, m’sieu’?”

“Call him ‘your Honor,'” said the Sheriff, sharply.

Grassette’s face hardened, and his look, turned upon the Sheriff, was savage and forbidding. “I will speak as it please me. Who are you? What do I care? To hang me–that is your business; but, for the rest, you spik to me differen’! Who are you? Your father kep’ a tavern for thieves, vous savez bien!” It was true that the Sheriff’s father had had no savory reputation in the West.

The Governor turned his head away in pain and trouble, for the man’s rage was not a thing to see–and they both came from the little parish of St. Francis, and had passed many an hour together.

“Never mind, Grassette,” he said, gently. “Call me what you will. You’ve got no feeling against me; and I can say with truth that I don’t want your life for the life you took.”

Grassette’s breast heaved. “He put me out of my work, the man I kill. He pass the word against me, he hunt me out of the mountains, he call–tete de diable! he call me a name so bad. Everything swim in my head, and I kill him.”

The Governor made a protesting gesture. “I understand. I am glad his mother was dead. But do you not think how sudden it was? Now here, in the thick of life, then, out there, beyond this world in the dark–in purgatory.”

The brave old man had accomplished what every one else, priest, lawyer, Sheriff, and watcher, had failed to do: he had shaken Grassette out of his blank isolation and obdurate unrepentance, had touched some chord of recognizable humanity.

“It is done–bien, I pay for it,” responded Grassette, setting his jaw. “It is two deaths for me. Waiting and remembering, and then with the Sheriff there the other–so quick, and all.”

The Governor looked at him for some moments without speaking. The Sheriff intervened again officiously.

“His Honor has come to say something important to you,” he remarked, oracularly.

“Hold you–does he need a Sheriff to tell him when to spik?” was Grassette’s surly comment. Then he turned to the Governor. “Let us speak in French,” he said, in patois. “This rope-twister will not understan’. He is no good–I spit at him!”

The Governor nodded, and, despite the Sheriff’s protest, they spoke in French, Grassette with his eyes intently fixed on the other, eagerly listening.

“I have come,” said the Governor, “to say to you, Grassette, that you still have a chance of life.”

He paused, and Grassette’s face took on a look of bewilderment and vague anxiety. A chance of life–what did it mean?

“Reprieve?” he asked, in a hoarse voice.

The Governor shook his head. “Not yet; but there is a chance. Something has happened. A man’s life is in danger, or it may be he is dead; but more likely he is alive. You took a life; perhaps you can save one now. Keeley’s Gulch, the mine there!”

“They have found it–gold?” asked Grassette, his eyes staring. He was forgetting for a moment where and what he was.

“He went to find it, the man whose life is in danger. He had heard from a trapper who had been a miner once. While he was there a landslip came, and the opening to the mine was closed up.”

“There were two ways in. Which one did he take?” cried Grassette.

“The only one he could take, the only one he or any one else knew. You know the other way in–you only, they say.”