of combat, for the sharp contrasts of life, for the common and the base;
he thirsted even for the white whiskey against which he had warned
his groom. He was reckless--not blindly, but wilfully, wildly reckless,
caring not at all what fate or penalty might come his way.

"What do I care!" he said to himself. "I shall never squeal at any
penalty. I shall never say in the great round-up that I was weak and
I fell. I'll take my gruel expecting it, not fearing it--if there is
to be any gruel anywhere, or any round-up anywhere!"

A figure suddenly appeared coming round the bend of the road before him.
It was Rouge Gosselin. Rouge Gosselin was inclined to speak. Some
satanic whim or malicious foppery made Charley stare him blankly in the
face. The monocle and the stare stopped the bon soir and the friendly
warning on Rouge Gosselin's tongue, and the pilot passed on with a
muttered oath.

Gosselin had not gone far, however, before he suddenly stopped and
laughed outright, for at the bottom he had great good-nature, in keeping
with his "six-foot" height, and his temper was friendly if quick. It
seemed so absurd, so audacious, that a man could act like Charley Steele,
that he at once became interested in the phenomenon, and followed slowly
after Charley, saying as he went: "Tiens, there will be things to watch
to-night!"

Before Charley was within five hundred yards of the tavern he could hear
the laughter and song coming from the old seigneury which Theophile
Charlemagne called now the Cote Dorion Hotel, after the name given to the
point on which the house stood. Low and wide-roofed, with dormer windows
and a wide stoop in front, and walls three feet thick, behind, on the