"
"You faced a blizzard to bring him in. Mr. Strong told me how you risked
your life by carrying him through the storm--how you wouldn't give up
and leave him, though you were weak and staggering yourself. He says it
was a miracle you ever got through."
The big mine-owner brushed this aside as of no importance. "We don't
leave sick men to die in a blizzard up North. But that's not the point."
"I think it has a bearing on the matter--that you saved him from the
blizzard--and took him in--and nursed him like a brother till he died."
"I'm not heartless," said Macdonald impatiently. "Of course I did that.
I had to do it. I couldn't do less."
"Or more," she suggested. "You may have made a hard bargain with him,
but you wiped that out later."
"That's just what I didn't do. Don't think my conscience is troubling
me. I'm not such a mush-brained fool. If it had not been for you I would
never have thought of it again. But you are his daughter. What I cheated
him out of belongs to you--and you are my friend."
"Don't use that word about what you did, please. He wasn't a child. If
you got the best of him in a bargain, I don't think father would think
of it that way."
The difficulty was that he could not tell her the truth about her
father's weakness for drink and how he had played upon it.
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