home-coming, and the sound of it rolled the yesterdays back upon him in
a deluge. He knew where he was now; he recalled exactly what he would
find at the next turn in the river. A few minutes later he heard the
wheezy chug, chug, chug of the old gold dredge at McCoffin's Bend. It
would be the Betty M., of course, with old Andy Duggan at the windlass,
his black pipe in mouth, still scooping up the shifting sands as he had
scooped them up for more than twenty years. He could see Andy sitting
at his post, clouded in a halo of tobacco smoke, a red-bearded,
shaggy-headed giant of a man whom the town affectionately called the
River Pirate. All his life Andy had spent in digging gold out of the
mountains or the river, and like grim death he had hung to the bars
above and below McCoffin's Bend. Keith smiled as he remembered old
Andy's passion for bacon. One could always find the perfume of bacon
about the Betty M., and when Duggan went to town, there were those who
swore they could smell it in his whiskers.

Keith left the river trail now for the old logging road. In spite of
his long fight to steel himself for what Conniston had called the
"psychological moment," he felt himself in the grip of an uncomfortable
mental excitement. At last he was face to face with the great gamble.
In a few hours he would play his one card. If he won, there was life
ahead of him again, if he lost--death. The old question which he had
struggled to down surged upon him. Was it worth the chance? Was it in
an hour of madness that he and Conniston had pledged themselves to this
amazing adventure? The forest was still with him. He could turn back.
The game had not yet gone so far that he could not withdraw his
hand--and for a space a powerful impulse moved him. And then, coming
suddenly to the edge of the clearing at McCoffin's Bend, he saw the
dredge close inshore, and striding up from the beach Andy Duggan
himself! In another moment Keith had stepped forth and was holding up a