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 would not send for you. She knew you were wounded yourself; you were just recovering; you were to go back in battle; she could not bring you to her as she was. But she had to send word to you; so she did, through a medium."

"I see," said Barney. "But only once, you said."

"Once, she told me. After that, she had nothing to do with the messages to you; whatever you got, or Miss Ethel got from her father, Mrs. Cullen knew nothing about till after they were sent."

The housekeeper, as though distrusting herself, opened the doors which she had secured and slipped away. Barney made no effort to recall her. For many minutes, left alone, he remained in the room before his mother's portrait. "Since she was a little girl, she fought him," he repeated to himself; and his thoughts went to what Ethel had told him of her grandfather's life in the northern woods long ago when James Quinlan—he of the flaming torch—had been a sawyer for Lucas Cullen, and something had happened which had given J. Q. a hold on Cullen which Lucas had not broken until that night Kincheloe went to Resurrection Rock. Barney began more clearly to understand; and what he comprehended was that the matter of his birth and the giving of him to Noah Jo and the loss of him were only incidents in the struggle between his mother and Lucas Cullen which had been going on long before he was born.

For a time, on account of her desperate injuries, his mother had been obliged to relinquish the fight; and in that emergency it seemed—yes, it seemed—that after his mother had sent him a message through the medium in London, somehow the spirits of the dead had endeavored to continue her struggle by summoning him