"
His voice was easy and his gaze unwavering as he made the correction,
yet everybody in the room except Sheba knew he was deliberately lying
to cover the slip. For the admission that he had inspected the Kamatlah
field just before his dummies had filed upon it would at least tend to
aggravate suspicion that the entries were not _bona-fide_.
It was rather an awkward moment. Diane blamed herself because she had
brought the men together socially. Why had she not asked Gordon more
explicitly what his business was? Peter grinned a little uncomfortably.
It was Sheba who quite unconsciously relieved the situation.
"But what about the big moose, Mr. Macdonald? What did it do then?"
The Alaskan went back to his story. He was talking for Sheba alone,
for the young girl with eager, fascinated eyes which flashed with
sympathy as they devoured selected glimpses of his wild, turbulent
career. Her clean, brave spirit was throwing a glamour over the man.
She saw him with other eyes than Elliot's. The Government official
admired him tremendously. Macdonald was an empire-builder. He blazed
trails for others to follow in safety. But Gordon could guess how
callously his path was strewn with brutality, with the effects of an
ethical color-blindness largely selfish, though even he did not know
that the man's primitive jungle code of wolf eat wolf had played havoc
with Sheba's young life many years before.
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