as white as paper, he was that mad. 'I'll teach you your proper place, you damn fo'castle swine!' he yelled, striking my father in the face with his free hand. Well, my father jerked himself clear and give him one on the jaw that put him to sleep for an hour or two."

At this, Harley halted in his talk, and his walk, at one and the same moment, and began to cut tobacco for his pipe.

"Go ahead!" exclaimed young Marsh.

"Well, all that row was kept quiet," continued Harley. "My father sailed away—and then came a report that pieces of the wreck of his ship had gone ashore on the Bahamas. Then people who knew about the marked card began to talk. It looked as if what the Spanish count had said, in the old days—or what people supposed he had said—had some truth in it. His girl—she who was afterward my mother—nearly went crazy. Then, one fine day, my father turned up, sound as a bell—the only survivor of the wreck of his ship. He got his share of the underwriter's money, and invested it in a one-third interest in another and smaller vessel. He had no trouble in getting the job of skipper of her; but he had plenty of trouble with his sweetheart and her parents, for they were all sure that the red crosses were really the marks of the devil and had caused the loss of his ship. My father laughed at them; and well he might, since his ship had gone down in a hurricane that had wrecked half a dozen other vessels, and he was the only man to be saved from all his crew. 'If the devil had anything to do with it,' he said, 'he certainly made a mess of it.' But it took him a whole week to calm them down and get the girl's promise to marry him on his return from his next voyage.

"On the very night before he was to sail, when he was on his way to the ship from saying good-by to my mother and the old people, a man sprang out from behind a pile of lumber on one of the wharves, and struck at him; but my father jumped back in time and struck in return with a loaded stick which he carried. The man let a yelp of pain out of him, and ran up the wharf to the dark streets of the city. My father struck a light and presently found something that he had heard drop on the planks when the fellow yelped—a long knife with a point sharp as a needle.

"He went aboard his ship, wrote a letter, packed up the knife in a box, and first thing in the morning sent both letter and knife ashore to a magistrate. Then he sailed away. He returned after three months, with a cargo of sugar and molasses—and his left arm in a sling. He had been stabbed, one night, in Bridgetown, Barbados. That was a thing that did not often happen in Barbados.

"Immediately upon his return, he made quiet inquiries for young Mr. Jackson. But Jackson had gone away, months before. There had been some talk about the police going to look for Jackson too, just about the time my father had sailed away. My father never gave the red crosses two thoughts; but he often remembered the look in Jackson's face that night they had fought in the street after the game of cards.

"Well, they married, and my father gave up the sea, moved to the mouth of the Miramichi, and started shipbuilding. That was on my mother's account. He did a good business, and they were happy. I was their first child. Five years later, Nell came. About six months after that an envelope was left at the house for him by a poor old half-witted character in the town, who had once been a sailor. When my father came home from the office he opened the envelope—and out fell a blue-backed playing card onto the carpet. My mother went into a dead faint, without waiting to see the face of it. When my father turned it over, there were the two red crosses!"

"Did they catch Jackson?" asked David Marsh.

"No," returned Harley. "My father ran out of the house, maybe to find the poor half-wit who had brought it to him, and he was shot dead within ten yards of his own door."

"By Jackson?" cried David, in a husky voice.

"It must have been. No one was caught. The shock killed my mother. That is the story, Davy. There wasn't much money for Nell and me, by the time I was old enough to notice things—and we came here, as you know, nine years ago."

"But—who'd want to play the old trick on me?" asked Marsh anxiously. "And who is there here that knows anything about it? Jackson? What would he care about Nell and me?"

"Some rival, perhaps," suggested Harley. "The devil only knows! Perhaps some one who dislikes you knows the old story; but—don't ask me," he added nervously.

"There is Dick Goodine, the trapper," said Marsh. "He is sweet on Nell. But what does he know—and how could he do it? Hell! Jim, it beats me!"

CHAPTER III

DAVID MARSH DECIDES TO SPEAK—AND DOESN'T

Jim Harley decided, before morning, that he must tell the tragic story to Rayton. He also decided that there was no need, at present, of telling either Nell or his wife of the mysterious advent of the two red marks into Samson's Mill Settlement.

Young David Marsh spent a restless night, going over and over all that Jim had told him. He came to the conclusion, at last, that the red crosses themselves were harmless, and utterly foolish, and that the real danger and tragedy lay in the human fate that had always inspired their appearance. Then his active mind quested far and near in search of an enemy of his own to correspond with the Spanish count of the first tragedy, and with young Jackson of the second—and not only that, but he must find an enemy who was in love with Nell Harley, and who knew the story of the red crosses. He thought of every man he had ever met, young and middle-aged; but he soon saw that this was too wide a field to explore. He could only bring to mind one man who, to his certain knowledge, had paid any attention to Nell Harley—and this was Dick Goodine. Likewise, he could think of only one man in the community with whom he was not on fairly friendly terms—and this, too, was Goodine.

Goodine had French blood in his veins, and was known to be eccentric; but he had never been considered dangerous in any way. He was a good-looking young woodsman who spent his summers in idleness, and his winters in trapping furs. Sometimes he did a little business in David Marsh's own chosen field, and guided "sports" into the wilderness after moose and caribou. But this was not often, for Dick Goodine's pride was even quicker than his temper. "It's not white men's work," he had said to David, not long before, in the course of the very argument that had caused the coolness that now existed between them. "It's Injun's work—or nigger's. The guidin' is good enough; but when it comes to cookin' for them, and pullin' off their wet boots at night—oh, t' hell with it! It may suit you, but it don't suit me."

But how should Dick Goodine know anything about the story of the red crosses, even if the state of his feelings had become sufficiently violent to incite him to make use of them? And he had not been at Rayton's, last night. How could he have marked the card? So David dismissed the trapper from his mind, for the time, and turned elsewhere for a solution of the mystery.

There was young Rayton, the Englishman. The thing had happened in his house, and the marked card belonged to him. He was a stranger to the settlement, for he had been only six months in the place. He seemed honest and harmless—but that was not enough to clear him. The dazzling smile, clear, gray eyes, and ready haw-haw might cover an unscrupulous and vicious nature. What was known in Samson's Mill Settlement of his past? Nothing but a few unlikely sounding anecdotes of his own telling. He had traveled in other parts of the province, looking for a farm that suited both his tastes and his purse, so he might very easily have heard something of the fate of Jim Harley's father.

So far, so good! But was he in love with Nell Harley? He had shown no signs of it, certainly; and yet if he took an