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Bolstered up against his pillows, he did not look the part of the fiend he was confessing himself to be to the people about him Sickness had not emaciated him The bronze of his lean, clean-cut face had faded a little, but the tanning of wind and sun and campfire was still there His blue eyes were perhaps dulled soed hih over one tee fro at him, as his lips quietly and calmly confessed hiiveness, one would have said that his crih his , as he sat bolstered up in his cot, Kent could see the slow-reat Athabasca River as it , and he saw the cool, thickundulations of wilderness ridges and hills, and through that openhe caught the sweet scents that came with a soft wind from out of the forests he had loved for so many years

"They've been an, "and when this nice little thing you're proo with my eyes on them"

So his cot was close to the

Nearest to hian In his face, more than in any of the others, was disbelief Kedsty, Inspector of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, in charge of N Division during an indefinite leave of absence of the superintendent, was paler even than the girl whose nervous fingers were swiftly putting upon paper every word that was spoken by those in the rooeant, was like one struck dumb The little, smooth-faced Catholic missioner whose presence as a witness Kent had requested, sat with his thin fingers tightly interlaced, silently placing this aiven up to him They had all been Kent's friends, his intiirl, whom Inspector Kedsty had borrowed for the occasion With the littlein s of the deep forests, and of the great north beyond the forests O'Connor's friendship was a friendship bred of the brotherhood of the trails It was Kent and O'Connor who had brought down the two Eskimo murderers from the mouth of the Mackenzie, and the adventure had taken them fourteen months Kent loved O'Connor, with his red face, his red hair, and his big heart, and to hi this friendship now