understand … and make allowances … I guess that man's you, Billy."
Steele nodded thoughtfully. Into Hurley's troubled eyes there came the look of guilt, and Steele knew that there was no guilt in Hurley's heart. Down in the southland there was a wife and a baby boy … the little chap must be five or six now … and a shadow was over them both, the damp, sinister shadow of the white man's plague. For three years had Ed Hurley been fighting the fight with them, and there were times when he felt with bounding pulse that Rose and little Eddie were saved to him, times when he dreaded and his heart shrivelled within him. He had left them and come up here because he must have money, lots of money, to give them every chance in the world. Someday, when the most famous tubercular expert in the west allowed, he would bring them here, up into the clean air of the mountains.
All of this Steele knew.
"Next time I see you in public, Eddie, old man," he said in as gruff a voice as nature allowed him, which is saying rather a good deal, "I'll refuse to know you! We'll even stage a rough and tumble fist fight, if it'll help any. My love to Rose and the kid. They're the good old game sort, Ed. You can't down people of their kind."
And he was gone, headed at gallop for Summit City, a little mist whipped into his eyes by the last look of Hurley's face.
In the little resort town he observed interestedly the many fresh indications of prosperity. Several new
