In the meanwhile--" he turned anxiously, almost piteously, "do you care to go with me, Ba'tiste ?" Heavily, silently, the French-Canadian joined him, and together they walked down the narrow road to the camp.

Neither spoke for a long time.

Ba'tiste walked with his head deep between his shoulders, and Houston knew that memories were heavy upon him, memories of his Julienne and the day that he came home to find, instead of a waiting wife, only a mound beneath the sighing pines and a stalwart cross above it.

As for Houston, his own life had gone gray with the sudden recurrence of the past.

He lived again the first days of it all, when life had been one constant repetition of questions, then solitude, questions and solitude, as the homicide squad brought him up from his cell to inquire about some new angle that they had come upon, to question him regarding his actions on the night of the death of Tom Langdon, then to send him back to "think it over" in the hope that the constant tangle of questions might cause him to change his story and give them an opening wedge through which they could force him to a confession.