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The Flaming Forest

by James Oliver Curwood · English · Gutenberg #4702 · 425,298 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Flaming Forest

Author: James Oliver Curwood


        
Release date: December 1, 2003 [eBook #4702]
                Most recently updated: December 28, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FLAMING FOREST ***




Produced by Robert Rowe, Charles Franks and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team. HTML version by Al Haines.










THE FLAMING FOREST


BY

JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD



AUTHOR OF THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN, THE COUNTRY BEYOND, THE ALASKAN,
ETC.





THE FLAMING FOREST




I

An hour ago, under the marvelous canopy of the blue northern sky, David
Carrigan, Sergeant in His Most Excellent Majesty's Royal Northwest
Mounted Police, had hummed softly to himself, and had thanked God that
he was alive. He had blessed McVane, superintendent of "N" Division at
Athabasca Landing, for detailing him to the mission on which he was
bent. He was glad that he was traveling alone, and in the deep forest,
and that for many weeks his adventure would carry him deeper and deeper
into his beloved north. Making his noonday tea over a fire at the edge
of the river, with the green forest crowding like an inundation on
three sides of him, he had come to the conclusion--for the hundredth
time, perhaps--that it was a nice thing to be alone in the world, for
he was on what his comrades at the Landing called a "bad assignment."

"If anything happens to me," Carrigan had said to McVane, "there isn't
anybody in particular to notify. I lost out in the matter of family a
long time ago."

He was not a man who talked much about himself, even to the
superintendent of "N" Division, yet there were a thousand who loved
Dave Carrigan, and many who placed their confidences in him.
Superintendent Me Vane had one story which he might have told, but he
kept it to himself, instinctively sensing the sacredness of it. Even
Carrigan did not know that the one thing which never passed his lips
was known to McVane.

Of that, too, he had been thinking an hour ago. It was the thing which,
first of all, had driven him into the north. And though it had twisted
and disrupted the earth under his feet for a time, it had brought its
compensation. For he had come to love the north with a passionate
devotion. It was, in a way, his God. It seemed to him that the time had
never been when he had lived any other life than this under the open
skies. He was thirty-seven now. A bit of a philosopher, as philosophy
comes to one in a sun-cleaned and unpolluted air, A good-humored
brother of humanity, even when he put manacles on other men's wrists;
graying a little over the temples--and a lover of life. Above all else
he was that. A lover of life. A worshiper at the shrine of God's
Country.

So he sat, that hour ago, deep in the wilderness eighty miles north of
Athabasca Landing, congratulating himself on the present conditions of
his existence. A hundred and eighty miles farther on was Fort McMurray,
and another two hundred beyond that was Chipewyan, and still beyond
that the Mackenzie and its fifteen-hundred-mile trail to the northern
sea. He was glad there was no end to this world of his. He was glad
there were few people in it. But these people he loved. That hour ago
he had looked out on the river as two York boats had forged up against
the stream, craft like the long, slim galleys of old, brought over
through the Churchill and Clearwater countries from Hudson's Bay. There
were eight rowers in each boat. They were singing. Their voices rolled
between the walls of the forests. Their naked arms and shoulders
glistened in the sun. They rowed like Vikings, and to him they were
symbols of the freedom of the world. He had watched them until they
were gone up-stream, but it was a long time before the chanting of
their voices had died away. And then he had risen from beside his tiny
fire, and had stretched himself until his muscles cracked. It was good
to feel the blood running red and strong in one's veins at the age of
thirty-seven. For Carrigan felt the thrill of these days when strong
men were coming out of the north--days when the glory of June hung over
the land, when out of the deep wilderness threaded by the Three Rivers
came romance and courage and red-blooded men and women of an almost
forgotten people to laugh and sing and barter for a time with the
outpost guardians of a younger and more progressive world. It was north
of Fifty-Four, and the waters of a continent flowed toward the Arctic
Sea. Yet soon would the strawberries be crushing red underfoot; the
forest road was in bloom, scarlet fire-flowers reddened the trail, wild
hyacinths and golden-freckled violets played hide-and-seek with the
forget-me-nots in the meadows, and the sky was a great splash of
velvety blue. It was the north triumphant--at the edge of civilization;
the north triumphant, and yet paying its tribute. For at the other end
were waiting the royal Upper Ten Thousand and the smart Four Hundred
with all the beau monde behind them, coveting and demanding that
tribute to their sex--the silken furs of a far country, the life's
blood and labor of a land infinitely beyond the pale of drawing-rooms
and the whims of fashion.

Carrigan had thought of these things that hour ago, as he sat at the
edge of the first of the Three Rivers, the great Athabasca. From down
the other two, the Slave and the Mackenzie, the fur fleets of the
unmapped country had been toiling since the first breakups of ice.
Steadily, week after week, the north had been emptying itself of its
picturesque tide of life and voice, of muscle and brawn, of laughter
and song--and wealth. Through, long months of deep winter, in ten
thousand shacks and tepees and cabins, the story of this June had been
written as fate had written it each winter for a hundred years or more.
A story of the triumph of the fittest. A story of tears, of happiness
here and there, of hunger and plenty, of new life and quick death; a
story of strong men and strong women, living in the faith of their
forefathers, with the best blood of old England and France still
surviving in their veins.

Through those same months of winter, the great captains of trade in the
city of Edmonton had been preparing for the coming of the river
brigades. The hundred and fifty miles of trail between that last city
outpost of civilization and Athabasca Landing, the door that opened
into the North, were packed hard by team and dog-sledge and packer
bringing up the freight that for another year was to last the forest
people of the Three River country--a domain reaching from the Landing
to the Arctic Ocean. In competition fought the drivers of Revillon
Brothers and Hudson's Bay, of free trader and independent adventurer.
Freight that grew more precious with each mile it advanced must reach
the beginning of the waterway. It started with the early snows. The
tide was at full by midwinter. In temperature that nipped men's lungs
it did not cease. There was no let-up in the whip-hands of the masters
of trade at Edmonton, Winnipeg, Montreal, and London across the sea. It
was not a work of philanthropy. These men cared not whether Jean and
Jacqueline and Pierre and Marie were well-fed or hungry, whether they
lived or died, so far as humanity was concerned. But Paris, Vienna,
London, and the great capitals of the earth must have their furs--and
unless that freight went north, there would be no velvety offerings for
the white shoulders of the world. Christmas windows two years hence
would be bare. A feminine wail of grief would rise to the skies. For
woman must have her furs, and in return for those furs Jean and
Jacqueline and Pierre and Marie must have their freight. So the
pendulum swung, as it had swung for a century or two, touching, on the
one side, luxury, warmth, wealth, and beauty; on the other, cold and
hardship, deep snows and open skies--with that precious freight the
thing between.

And now, in this year before rail and steamboat, the glory of early
summer was at hand, and the wilderness people were coming up to meet
the freight. The Three Rivers--the Athabasca, the Slave, and the
Mackenzie, all joining in one great two-thousand-mile waterway to the
northern sea--were athrill with the wild impulse and beat of life as
the forest people lived it. The Great Father had sent in his treaty
money, and Cree song and Chipewyan chant joined the age-old melodies of
French and half-breed. Countless canoes drove past the slower and
mightier scow brigades; huge York boats with two rows of oars heaved up
and down like the ancient galleys of Rome; tightly woven cribs of
timber, and giant rafts made tip of many cribs were ready for their
long drift into a timberless country. On this two-thousand-mile
waterway a world had gathered. It was the Nile of the northland, and
each post and gathering place along its length was turned into a
metropolis, half savage, archaic, splendid with the strength of red
blood, clear eyes, and souls that read the word of God in wind and tree.

And up and down this mighty waterway of wilderness trade ran the
whispering spirit of song, like the voice of a mighty god heard under
the stars and in the winds.

But it was an hour ago that David Carrigan had vividly pictured these
things to himself close to the big river, and many things may happen in
the sixty minutes that follow any given minute in a man's life. That
hour ago his one great purpose had been to bring in Black Roger
Audemard, alive or dead--Black Roger, the forest fiend who had
destroyed half a dozen lives in a blind passion of vengeance nearly
fifteen years ago. For ten of those fifteen years it had been thought
that Black Roger was dead. But mysterious rumors had lately come out of
the North. He was alive. People had seen him. Fact followed rumor. His
existence became certainty. The Law took up once more his hazardous
trail, and David Carrigan was the messenger it sent.

"Bring him back, alive or dead," were Superintendent McVane's last
words.

And now, thinking of that parting injunction, Carrigan grinned, even as
the sweat of death dampened his face in the heat of the afternoon sun.
For at the end of those sixty minutes that had passed since his midday
pot of tea, the grimly, atrociously unexpected had happened, like a
thunderbolt out of the azure of the sky.




II


Huddled behind a rock which was scarcely larger than his body,
groveling in the white, soft sand like a turtle making a nest for its
eggs, Carrigan told himself this without any reservation. He was, as he
kept repeating to himself for the comfort of his soul, in a deuce of a
fix. His head was bare--simply because a bullet had taken his hat away.
His blond hair was filled with sand. His face was sweating. But his
blue eyes were alight with a grim sort of humor, though he knew that
unless the other fellow's ammunition ran out he was going to die.

For the twentieth time in as many minutes he looked about him. He was
in the center of a flat area of sand. Fifty feet from him the river
murmured gently over yellow bars and a carpet of pebbles. Fifty feet on
the opposite side of him was the cool, green wall of the forest. The
sunshine playing in it seemed like laughter to him now, a whimsical
sort of merriment roused by the sheer effrontery of the joke which fate
had inflicted upon him.

Between the river and the balsam and spruce was only the rock behind
which he was cringing like a rabbit afraid to take to the open. And his
rock was a mere up-jutting of the solid floor of shale that was under
him. The wash sand that covered it like a carpet was not more than four
or five inches deep. He could not dig in. There was not enough of it
within reach to scrape up as a protection. And his enemy, a hundred
yards or so away, was a determined wretch--and the deadliest shot he
had ever known.

Three times Carrigan had made experiments to prove this, for he had in
mind a sudden rush to the shelter of the timber. Three times he had
raised the crown of his hat slightly above the top of the rock, and
three times the marksmanship of the other had perforated it with
neatness and dispatch. The third bullet had carried his hat a dozen
feet away. Whenever he showed a patch of his clothing, a bullet replied
with unerring precision. Twice they had drawn blood. And the humor
faded out of Carrigan's eyes.

Not long ago he had exulted in the bigness and glory of this country of
his, where strong men met hand to hand and eye to eye. There were the
other kind in it, the sort that made his profession of manhunting a
thing of reality and danger, but he expected these--forgot them--when
the wilderness itself filled his vision. But his present situation was
something unlike anything that had ever happened in his previous
experience with the outlawed. He had faced dangers. He had fought.
There were times when he had almost died. Fanchet, the half-breed who
had robbed a dozen wilderness mail sledges, had come nearest to
trapping him and putting him out of business. Fanchet was a desperate
man and had few scruples. But even Fanchet--before he was caught--would
not have cornered a man with such bloodthirsty unfairness as Carrigan
found himself cornered now. He no longer had a doubt as to what was in
the other's mind. It was not to wound and make merely helpless. It was
to kill. It was not difficult to prove this. Careful not to expose a
part of his arm or shoulder, he drew a white handkerchief from his
pocket, fastened it to the end of his rifle, and held the flag of
surrender three feet above the rock. And then, with equal caution, he
slowly thrust up a flat piece of shale, which at a distance of a
hundred yards might appear as his shoulder or even his head. Scarcely
was it four inches above the top of the rock before there came the
report of a rifle, and the shale was splintered into a hundred bits.

Carrigan lowered his flag and gathered himself in tighter. The accuracy
of the other's marksmanship was appalling. He knew that if he exposed
himself for an instant to use his own rifle or the heavy automatic in
his holster, he would be a dead man before he could press a trigger.
And that time, he felt equally sure, would come sooner or later. His
muscles were growing cramped. He could not forever double himself up
like a four-bladed jackknife behind the altogether inefficient shelter
of the rock.

His executioner was hidden in the edge of the timber, not directly
opposite him, but nearly a hundred yards down stream. Twenty times he
had wondered why the fiend with the rifle did not creep up through that
timber and take a good, open pot-shot at him from the vantage point
which lay at the end of a straight line between his rock and the
nearest spruce and balsam. From that angle he could not completely
shelter himself. But the man a hundred yards below had not moved a foot
from his ambush since he had fired his first shot. That had come when
Carrigan was crossing the open space of soft, white sand. It had left a
burning sensation at his temple--half an inch to the right and it would
have killed him. Swift as the shot itself, he dropped behind the one
protection at hand, the up-jutting shoulder of shale.

For a quarter of an hour he had been making efforts to wriggle himself
free from his bulky shoulder-pack without exposing himself to a
coup-de-grace. At last he had the thing off. It was a tremendous relief
when he thrust it out beside the rock, almost doubling the size of his
shelter. Instantly there came the crash of a bullet in it, and then
another. He heard the rattle of pans, and wondered if his skillet would
be any good after today.

For the first time he could wipe the sweat from his face and stretch
himself. And also he could think. Carrigan possessed an unalterable
faith in the infallibility of the mind. "You can do anything with the
mind," was his code. "It is better than a good gun."

Now that he was physically more at ease, he began reassembling his
scattered mental faculties. Who was this stranger who was pot-shotting
at him with such deadly animosity from the ambush below? Who--

Another crash of lead in tinware and steel put an unpleasant emphasis
to the question. It was so close to his head that it made him wince,
and now--with a wide area within reach about him--he began scraping up
the sand for an added protection. There came a long silence after that
third clatter of distress from his cooking utensils. To David Carrigan,
even in his hour of deadly peril, there was something about it that for
an instant brought back the glow of humor in his eyes. It was hot,
swelteringly hot, in that packet of sand with the unclouded sun almost
straight overhead. He could have tossed a pebble to where a bright-eyed
sandpiper was cocking itself backward and forward, its jerky movements
accompanied by friendly little tittering noises. Everything about him
seemed friendly. The river rippled and murmured in cooling song just
beyond the sandpiper. On the other side the still cooler forest was a
paradise of shade and contentment, astir with subdued and hidden life.
It was nesting season. He heard the twitter of birds. A tiny, brown
wood warbler fluttered out to the end of a silvery birch limb, and it
seemed to David that its throat must surely burst with the burden of
its song. The little fellow's brown body, scarcely larger than a
butternut, was swelling up like a round ball in his effort to vanquish
all other song.

"Go to it, old man," chuckled Carrigan. "Go to it!"

The little warbler, that he might have crushed between thumb and
forefinger, gave him a lot of courage.

Then the tiny chorister stopped for breath. In that interval Carrigan
listened to the wrangling of two vivid-colored Canada jays deeper in
the timber. Chronic scolds they were, never without a grouch. They were
like some people Carrigan had known, born pessimists, always finding
something to complain about, even in their love days.

And these were love days. That was the odd thought that came to
Carrigan as he lay half on his face, his fingers slowly and cautiously
working a loophole between his shoulder-pack and the rock. They were
love days all up and down the big rivers, where men and women sang for
joy, and children played, forgetful of the long, hard days of winter.
And in forest, plain, and swamp was this spirit of love also triumphant
over the land. It was the mating season of all feathered things. In
countless nests were the peeps and twitters of new life; mothers of
first-born were teaching their children to swim and fly; from end to
end of the forest world the little children of the silent places,
furred and feathered, clawed and hoofed, were learning the ways of
life. Nature's yearly birthday was half-way gone, and the doors of
nature's school wide open. And the tiny brown songster at the end of
his birch twig proclaimed the joy of it again, and challenged all the
world to beat him in his adulation.

Carrigan found that he could peer between his pack and the rock to
where the other warbler was singing--and where his enemy lay watching
for the opportunity to kill. It was taking a chance. If a movement
betrayed his loophole, his minutes were numbered. But he had worked
cautiously, an inch at a time, and was confident that the beginning of
his effort to fight back was, up to the present moment, undiscovered.
He believed that he knew about where the ambushed man was concealed. In
the edge of a low-hanging mass of balsam was a fallen cedar. From
behind the butt of that cedar he was sure the shots had come.

And now, even more cautiously than he had made the tiny opening, he
began to work the muzzle of his rifle through the loophole. As he did
this he was thinking of Black Roger Audemard. And yet, almost as
quickly as suspicion leaped into his mind, he told himself that the
thing was impossible. It could not be Black Roger, or one of Black
Roger's friends, behind the cedar log. The idea was inconceivable, when
he considered how carefully the secret of his mission had been kept at
the Landing. He had not even said goodby to his best friends. And
because Black Roger had won through all the preceding years, Carrigan
was stalking his prey out of uniform. There had been nothing to betray
him. Besides, Black Roger Audemard must be at least a thousand miles
north, unless something had tempted him to come up the rivers with the
spring brigades. If he used logic at all, there was but one conclusion
for him to arrive at. The man in ambush was some rascally half-breed
who coveted his outfit and whatever valuables he might have about his
person.

A fourth smashing eruption among his comestibles and culinary
possessions came to drive home the fact that even that analysis of the
situation was absurd. Whoever was behind the rifle fire had small
respect for the contents of his pack, and he was surely not in grievous
need of a good gun or ammunition. A sticky mess of condensed cream was
running over Carrigan's hand. He doubted if there was a whole tin in
his kit.

For a few moments he lay quietly on his face after the fourth shot. His
eyes were turned toward the river, and on the far side, a quarter of a
mile away, three canoes were moving swiftly up the slow current of the
stream. The sunlight flashed on their wet sides. The gleam of dripping
paddles was like the flutter of silvery birds' wings, and across the
water came an unintelligible shout in response to the rifle shot. It
occurred to David that he might make a trumpet of his hands and shout
back, but the distance was too great for his voice to carry its message
for help. Besides, now that he had the added protection of the pack, he
felt a certain sense of humiliation at the thought of showing the white
feather. A few minutes more, if all went well, and he would settle for
the man behind the log.

He continued again the slow operation of worming his rifle barrel
between the pack and the rock. The near-sighted little sandpiper had
discovered him and seemed interested in the operation. It had come a
dozen feet nearer, and was perking its head and seesawing on its long
legs as it watched with inquisitive inspection the unusual
manifestation of life behind the rock. Its twittering note had changed
to an occasional sharp and querulous cry. Carrigan wanted to wring its
neck. That cry told the other fellow that he was still alive and moving.

It seemed an age before his rifle was through, and every moment he
expected another shot. He flattened himself out, Indian fashion, and
sighted along the barrel. He was positive that his enemy was watching,
yet he could make out nothing that looked like a head anywhere along
the log. At one end was a clump of deeper foliage. He was sure he saw a
sudden slight movement there, and in the thrill of the moment was
tempted to send a bullet into the heart of it. But he saved his
cartridge. He felt the mighty importance of certainty. If he fired
once--and missed--the advantage of his unsuspected loophole would be
gone. It would be transformed into a deadly menace. Even as it was, if
his enemy's next bullet should enter that way--

He felt the discomfort of the thought, and in spite of himself a tremor
of apprehension ran up his spine. He felt an even greater desire to
wring the neck of the inquisitive little sandpiper. The creature had
circled round squarely in front of him and stood there tilting its tail
and bobbing its head as if its one insane desire was to look down the
length of his rifle barrel. The bird was giving him away. If the other
fellow was only half as clever as his marksmanship was good--

Suddenly every nerve in Carrigan's body tightened. He was positive that
he had caught the outline of a human head and shoulders in the foliage.
His finger pressed gently against the trigger of his Winchester. Before
he breathed again he would have fired. But a shot from the foliage beat
him out by the fraction of a second. In that precious time lost, his
enemy's bullet entered the edge of his kit--and came through. He felt
the shock of it, and in the infinitesimal space between the physical
impact and the mental effect of shock his brain told him the horrible
thing had happened. It was his head--his face. It was as if he had
plunged them suddenly into hot water, and what was left of his skull
was filled with the rushing and roaring of a flood. He staggered up,
clutching his face with both hands. The world about him was twisted and
black, a dizzily revolving thing--yet his still fighting mental vision
pictured clearly for him a monstrous, bulging-eyed sandpiper as big as
a house. Then he toppled back on the white sand, his arms flung out
limply, his face turned to the ambush wherein his murderer lay.

His body was clear of the rock and the pack, but there came no other
shot from the thick clump of balsam. Nor, for a time, was there
movement. The wood warbler was cheeping inquiringly at this sudden
change in the deportment of his friend behind the shoulder of shale.
The sandpiper, a bit startled, had gone back to the edge of the river
and was running a race with himself along the wet sand. And the two
quarrelsome jays had brought their family squabble to the edge of the
timber.

It was their wrangling that roused Carrigan to the fact that he was not
dead. It was a thrilling discovery--that and the fact that he made out
clearly a patch of sunlight in the sand. He did not move, but opened
his eyes wider. He could see the timber. On a straight line with his
vision was the thick clump of balsam. And as he looked, the boughs
parted and a figure came out. Carrigan drew a deep breath. He found
that it did not hurt him. He gripped the fingers of the hand that was
under his body, and they closed on the butt of his service automatic.
He would win yet, if God gave him life a few minutes longer.

His enemy advanced. As he drew nearer, Carrigan closed his eyes more
and more. They must be shut, and he must appear as if dead, when the
other came up. Then, when the scoundrel put down his gun, as he
naturally would--his chance would be at hand. If a quiver of his eyes
betrayed him--

He closed them tight. Dizziness began to creep over him, and the fire
in his brain grew hot again. He heard footsteps, and they stopped in
the sand close beside him. Then he heard a human voice. It did not
speak in words, but gave utterance to a strange and unnatural cry. With
a mighty effort Carrigan assembled his last strength. It seemed to him
that he brought himself up quickly, but his movement was slow,
painful--the effort of a man who might be dying. The automatic hung
limply in his hand, its muzzle pointing to the sand. He looked up,
trying to swing into action that mighty weight of his weapon. And then
from his own lips, even in his utter physical impotence, fell a cry of
wonder and amazement.

His enemy stood there in the sunlight, staring down at him with big,
dark eyes that were filled with horror. They were not the eyes of a
man. David Carrigan, in this most astounding moment of his life, found
himself looking up into the face of a woman.




III


For a matter of twenty seconds--even longer it seemed to Carrigan--the
life of these two was expressed in a vivid and unforgettable tableau.
One half of it David saw--the blue sky, the dazzling sun, the girl in
between. The pistol dropped from his limp hand, and the weight of his
body tottered on the crook of his under-elbow. Mentally and physically
he was on the point of collapse, and yet in those few moments every
detail of the picture was painted with a brush of fire in his brain.
The girl was bareheaded. Her face was as white as any face he had ever
seen, living or dead; her eyes were like pools that had caught the
reflection of fire; he saw the sheen of her hair, the poise of her
slender body--its shock, stupefaction, horror. He sensed these things
even as his brain wobbled dizzily, and the larger part of the picture
began to fade out of his vision. But her face remained to the last. It
grew clearer, like a cameo framed in an iris--a beautiful, staring,
horrified face with shimmering tresses of jet-black hair blowing about
it like a veil. He noticed the hair, that was partly undone as if she
had been in a struggle of some sort, or had been running fast against
the breeze that came up the river.

He fought with himself to hold that picture of her, to utter some word,
make some movement. But the power to see and to live died out of him.
He sank back with a queer sound in his throat. He did not hear the
answering cry from the girl as she flung herself, with a quick little
prayer for help, on her knees in the soft, white sand beside him. He
felt no movement when she raised his head in her arm and with her bare
hand brushed back his sand-littered hair, revealing where the bullet
had struck him. He did not know when she ran back to the river.

His first sensation was of a cool and comforting something trickling
over his burning temples and his face. It was water. Subconsciously he
knew that, and in the same way he began to think. But it was hard to
pull his thoughts together. They persisted in hopping about, like a lot
of sand-fleas in a dance, and just as he got hold of one and reached
for another, the first would slip away from him. He began to get the
best of them after a time, and he had an uncontrollable desire to say
something. But his eyes and his lips were sealed tight, and to open
them, a little army of gnomes came out of the darkness in the back of
his head, each of them armed with a lever, and began prying with all
their might. After that came the beginning of light and a flash of
consciousness.

The girl was working over him. He could feel her and hear her movement.
Water was trickling over his face. Then he heard a voice, close over
him, saying something in a sobbing monotone which he could not
understand.

With a mighty effort he opened his eyes.

"Thank LE BON DIEU, you live, m'sieu," he heard the voice say, as if
coming from a long distance away. "You live, you live--"

"Tryin' to," he mumbled thickly, feeling suddenly a sense of great
elation. "Tryin'--"

He wanted to curse the gnomes for deserting him, for as soon as they
were gone with their levers, his eyes and his lips shut tight again, or
at least he thought they did. But he began to sense things in a curious
sort of way. Some one was dragging him. He could feel the grind of sand
under his body. There were intervals when the dragging operation
paused. And then, after a long time, he seemed to hear more than one
voice. There were two--sometimes a murmur of them. And odd visions came
to him. He seemed to see the girl with shining black hair and dark
eyes, and then swiftly she would change into a girl with hair like
blazing gold. This was a different girl. She was not like Pretty Eyes,
as his twisted mind called the other. This second vision that he saw
was like a radiant bit of the sun, her hair all aflame with the fire of
it and her face a different sort of face. He was always glad when she
went away and Pretty Eyes came back.

To David Carrigan this interesting experience in his life might have
covered an hour, a day, or a month. Or a year for that matter, for he
seemed to have had an indefinite association with Pretty Eyes. He had
known her for a long time and very intimately, it seemed. Yet he had no
memory of the long fight in the hot sun, or of the river, or of the
singing warblers, or of the inquisitive sandpiper that had marked out
the line which his enemy's last bullet had traveled. He had entered
into a new world in which everything was vague and unreal except that
vision of dark hair, dark eyes, and pale, beautiful face. Several times
he saw it with marvelous clearness, and each time he drifted away into
darkness again with the sound of a voice growing fainter and fainter in
his ears.

Then came a time of utter chaos and soundless gloom. He was in a pit,
where even his subconscious self was almost dead under a crushing
oppression. At last a star began to glimmer in this pit, a star pale
and indistinct and a vast distance away. But it crept steadily up
through the eternity of darkness, and the nearer it came, the less
there was of the blackness of night. From a star it grew into a sun,
and with the sun came dawn. In that dawn he heard the singing of a
bird, and the bird was just over his head. When Carrigan opened his
eyes, and understanding came to him, he found himself under the silver
birch that belonged to the wood warbler.

For a space he did not ask himself how he had come there. He was
looking at the river and the white strip of sand. Out there were the
rock and his dunnage pack. Also his rifle. Instinctively his eyes
turned to the balsam ambush farther down. That, too, was in a blaze of
sunlight now. But where he lay, or sat, or stood--he was not sure what
he was doing at that moment--it was shady and deliciously cool. The
green of the cedar and spruce and balsam was close about him, inset
with the silver and gold of the thickly-leaved birch. He discovered
that he was bolstered up partly against the trunk of this birch and
partly against a spruce sapling. Between these two, where his head
rested, was a pile of soft moss freshly torn from the earth. And within
reach of him was his own kit pail filled with water.

He moved himself cautiously and raised a hand to his head. His fingers
came in contact with a bandage.

For a minute or two after that he sat without moving while his amazed
senses seized upon the significance of it all. In the first place he
was alive. But even this fact of living was less remarkable than the
other things that had happened. He remembered the final moments of the
unequal duel. His enemy had got him. And that enemy was a woman!
Moreover, after she had blown away a part of his head and had him
helpless in the sand, she had--in place of finishing him there--dragged
him to this cool nook and tied up his wound. It was hard for him to
believe, but the pail of water, the moss behind his shoulders, the
bandage, and certain visions that were reforming themselves in his
brain convinced him. A woman had shot him. She had worked like the very
devil to kill him. And afterward she had saved him! He grinned. It was
final proof that his mind hadn't been playing tricks on him. No one but
a woman would have been quite so unreasonable. A man would have
completed the job.

He began to look for her up and down the white strip of sand. And in
looking he saw the gray and silver flash of the hard-working sandpiper.
He chuckled, for he was exceedingly comfortable, and also
exhilaratingly happy to know that the thing was over and he was not
dead. If the sandpiper had been a man, he would have called him up to
shake hands with him. For if it hadn't been for the bird getting
squarely in front of him and giving him away, there might have been a
more horrible end to it all. He shuddered as he thought of the mighty
effort he had made to fire a shot into the heart of the balsam
ambush--and perhaps into the heart of a woman!

He reached for the pail and drank deeply of the water in it. He felt no
pain. His dizziness was gone. His mind had grown suddenly clear and
alert. The warmth of the water told him almost instantly that it had
been taken from the river some time ago. He observed the change in sun
and shadows. With the instinct of a man trained to note details, he
pulled out his watch. It was almost six o'clock. More than three hours
had passed since the sandpiper had got in front of his gun. He did not
attempt to rise to his feet, but scanned with slower and more careful
scrutiny the edge of the forest and the river. He had been mystified
while cringing for his life behind the rock, but he was infinitely more
so now. Greater desire he had never had than this which thrilled him in
these present minutes of his readjustment--desire to look upon the
woman again. And then, all at once, there came back to him a mental
flash of the other. He remembered, as if something was coming back to
him out of a dream, how the whimsical twistings of his sick brain had
made him see two faces instead of one. Yet he knew that the first
picture of his mysterious assailant, the picture painted in his brain
when he had tried to raise his pistol, was the right one. He had seen
her dark eyes aglow; he had seen the sunlit sheen of her black hair
rippling in the wind; he had seen the white pallor in her face, the
slimness of her as she stood over him in horror--he remembered even the
clutch of her white hand at her throat. A moment before she had tried
to kill him. And then he had looked up and had seen her like that! It
must have been some unaccountable trick in his brain that had flooded
her hair with golden fire at times.

His eyes followed a furrow in the white sand which led from where he
sat bolstered against the tree down to his pack and the rock. It was
the trail made by his body when she had dragged him up to the shelter
and coolness of the timber. One of his laws of physical care was to
keep himself trained down to a hundred and sixty, but he wondered how
she had dragged up even so much as that of dead weight. It had taken a
great deal of effort. He could see distinctly three different places in
the sand where she had stopped to rest.

Carrigan had earned a reputation as the expert analyst of "N" Division.
In delicate matters it was seldom that McVane did not take him into
consultation. He possessed an almost uncanny grip on the working
processes of a criminal mind, and the first rule he had set down for
himself was to regard the acts of omission rather than the one
outstanding act of commission. But when he proved to himself that the
chief actor in a drama possessed a normal rather than a criminal mind,
he found himself in the position of checkmate. It was a thrilling game.
And he was frankly puzzled now, until--one after another--he added up
the sum total of what had been omitted in this instance of his own
personal adventure. Hidden in her ambush, the woman who had shot him
had been in both purpose and act an assassin. Her determination had
been to kill him. She had disregarded the white flag with which he had
pleaded for mercy. Her marksmanship was of fiendish cleverness. Up to
her last shot she had been, to all intent and purpose, a murderess.

The change had come when she looked down upon him, bleeding and
helpless, in the sand. Undoubtedly she had thought he was dying. But
why, when she saw his eyes open a little later, had she cried out her
gratitude to God? What had worked the sudden transformation in her? Why
had she labored to save the life she had so atrociously coveted a
minute before?

If his assailant had been a man, Carrigan would have found an answer.
For he was not robbed, and therefore robbery was not a motif. "A case
of mistaken identity," he would have told himself. "An error in visual
judgment."

But the fact that in his analysis he was dealing with a woman made his
answer only partly satisfying. He could not disassociate himself from
her eyes--their beauty, their horror, the way they had looked at him.
It was as if a sudden revulsion had come over her; as if, looking down
upon her bleeding handiwork, the woman's soul in her had revolted, and
with that revulsion had come repentance--repentance and pity.

"That," thought Carrigan, "would be just like a woman--and especially a
woman with eyes like hers."

This left him but two conclusions to choose from. Either there had been
a mistake, and the woman had shown both horror and desire to amend when
she discovered it, or a too tender-hearted agent of Black Roger
Audemard had waylaid him in the heart of the white strip of sand.

The sun was another hour lower in the sky when Carrigan assured himself
in a series of cautious experiments that he was not in a condition to
stand upon his feet. In his pack were a number of things he wanted--his
blankets, for instance, a steel mirror, and the thermometer in his
medical kit. He was beginning to feel a bit anxious about himself.
There were sharp pains back of his eyes. His face was hot, and he was
developing an unhealthy appetite for water. It was fever and he knew
what fever meant in this sort of thing, when one was alone. He had
given up hope of the woman's return. It was not reasonable to expect
her to come back after her furious attempt to kill him. She had
bandaged him, bolstered him up, placed water beside him, and had then
left him to work out the rest of his salvation alone. But why the deuce
hadn't she brought up his pack?

On his hands and knees he began to work himself toward it slowly. He
found that the movement caused him pain, and that with this pain, if he
persisted in movement, there was a synchronous rise of nausea. The two
seemed to work in a sort of unity. But his medicine case was important
now, and his blankets, and his rifle if he hoped to signal help that
might chance to pass on the river. A foot at a time, a yard at a time,
he made his way down into the sand. His fingers dug into the footprints
of the mysterious gun-woman. He approved of their size. They were small
and narrow, scarcely longer than the palm and fingers of his hand--and
they were made by shoes instead of moccasins.

It seemed an interminable time to him before he reached his pack. When
he got there, a pendulum seemed swinging back and forth inside his
head, beating against his skull. He lay down with his pack for a
pillow, intending to rest for a spell. But the minutes added themselves
one on top of another. The sun slipped behind clouds banking in the
west. It grew cooler, while within him he was consumed by a burning
thirst. He could hear the ripple of running water, the laughter of it
among pebbles a few yards away. And the river itself became even more
desirable than his medicine case, or his blankets, or his rifle. The
song of it, inviting and tempting him, blotted thought of the other
things out of his mind. And he continued his journey, the swing of the
pendulum in his head becoming harder, but the sound of the river
growing nearer. At last he came to the wet sand, and fell on his face,
and drank.

After this he had no great desire to go back. He rolled himself over,
so that his face was turned up to the sky. Under him the wet sand was
soft, and it was comfortingly cool. The fire in his head died out. He
could hear new sounds in the edge of the forest evening sounds. Only
weak little twitters came from the wood warblers, driven to silence by
thickening gloom in the densely canopied balsams and cedars, and
frightened by the first low hoots of the owls. There was a crash not
far distant, probably a porcupine waddling through brush on his way for
a drink; or perhaps it was a thirsty deer, or a bear coming out in the
hope of finding a dead fish. Carrigan loved that sort of sound, even
when a pendulum was beating back and forth in his head. It was like
medicine to him, and he lay with wide-open eyes, his ears picking up
one after another the voices that marked the change from day to night.
He heard the cry of a loon, its softer, chuckling note of honeymoon
days. From across the river came a cry that was half howl, half bark.
Carrigan knew that it was coyote, and not wolf, a coyote whose breed
had wandered hundreds of miles north of the prairie country.

The gloom gathered in, and yet it was not darkness as the darkness of
night is known a thousand miles south. It was the dusky twilight of day
where the sun rises at three o'clock in the morning and still throws
its ruddy light in the western sky at nine o'clock at night; where the
poplar buds unfold themselves into leaf before one's very eyes; where
strawberries are green in the morning and red in the afternoon; where,
a little later, one could read newspaper print until midnight by the
glow of the sun--and between the rising and the setting of that sun
there would be from eighteen to twenty hours of day. It was evening
time in the wonderland of the north, a wonderland hard and frozen and
ridden by pain and death in winter, but a paradise upon earth in this
month of June.

The beauty of it filled Carrigan's soul, even as he lay on his back in
the damp sand. Far south of him steam and steel were coming, and the
world would soon know that it was easy to grow wheat at the Arctic
Circle, that cucumbers grew to half the size of a man's arm, that
flowers smothered the land and berries turned it scarlet and black. He
had dreaded these days--days of what he called "the great
discovery"--the time when a crowded civilization would at last
understand how the fruits of the earth leaped up to the call of twenty
hours of sun each day, even though that earth itself was eternally
frozen if one went down under its surface four feet with a pick and
shovel.

Tonight the gloom came earlier because of the clouds in the west. It
was very still. Even the breeze had ceased to come from up the river.
And as Carrigan listened, exulting in the thought that the coolness of
the wet sand was drawing the fever from him, he heard another sound. At
first he thought it was the splashing of a fish. But after that it came
again, and still again, and he knew that it was the steady and rhythmic
dip of paddles.

A thrill shot through him, and he raised himself to his elbow. Dusk
covered the river, and he could not see. But he heard low voices as the
paddles dipped. And after a little he knew that one of these was the
voice of a woman.

His heart gave a big jump. "She is coming back," he whispered to
himself. "She is coming back!"




IV


Carrigan's first impulse, sudden as the thrill that leaped through him,
was to cry out to the occupants of the unseen canoe. Words were on his
lips, but he forced them back. They could not miss him, could not get
beyond the reach of his voice--and he waited. After all, there might be
profit in a reasonable degree of caution. He crept back toward his
rifle, sensing the fact that movement no longer gave him very great
distress. At the same time he lost no sound from the river. The voices
were silent, and the dip, dip, dip of paddles was approaching softly
and with extreme caution. At last he could barely hear the trickle of
them, yet he knew the canoe was coming steadily nearer. There was a
suspicious secretiveness in its approach. Perhaps the lady with the
beautiful eyes and the glistening hair had changed her mind again and
was returning to put an end to him.

The thought sharpened his vision. He saw a thin shadow a little darker
than the gloom of the river; it grew into shape; something grated
lightly upon sand and pebbles, and then he heard the guarded plash of
feet in shallow water and saw some one pulling the canoe up higher. A
second figure joined the first. They advanced a few paces and stopped.
In a moment a voice called softly,

"M'sieu! M'sieu Carrigan!"

There was an anxious note in the voice, but Carrigan held his tongue.
And then he heard the woman say,

"It was here, Bateese! I am sure of it!"

There was more than anxiety in her voice now. Her words trembled with
distress. "Bateese--if he is dead--he is up there close to the trees."

"But he isn't dead," said Carrigan, raising himself a little. "He is
here, behind the rock again!"

In a moment she had run to where he was lying, his hand clutching the
cold barrel of the pistol which he had found in the sand, his white
face looking up at her. Again he found himself staring into the glow of
her eyes, and in that pale light which precedes the coming of stars and
moon the fancy struck him that she was lovelier than in the full
radiance of the sun. He heard a throbbing note in her throat. And then
she was down on her knees at his side, leaning close over him, her
hands groping at his shoulders, her quick breath betraying how swiftly
her heart was beating.

"You are not hurt--badly?" she cried.

"I don't know," replied David. "You made a perfect shot. I think a part
of my head is gone. At least you've shot away my balance, because I
can't stand on my feet!"

Her hand touched his face, remaining there for an instant, and the palm
of it pressed his forehead. It was like the touch of cool velvet, he
thought. Then she called to the man named Bateese. He made Carrigan
think of a huge chimpanzee as he came near, because of the shortness of
his body and the length of his arms. In the half light he might have
been a huge animal, a hulking creature of some sort walking upright.
Carrigan's fingers closed more tightly on the butt of his automatic.
The woman began to talk swiftly in a patois of French and Cree. David
caught the gist of it. She was telling Bateese to carry him to the
canoe, and to be very careful, because m'sieu was badly hurt. It was
his head, she emphasized. Bateese must be careful of his head.

David slipped his pistol into its holster as Bateese bent over him. He
tried to smile at the woman to thank her for her solicitude--after
having nearly killed him. There was an increasing glow in the night,
and he began to see her more plainly. Out on the middle of the river
was a silvery bar of light. The moon was coming up, a little pale as
yet, but triumphant in the fact that clouds had blotted out the sun an
hour before his time. Between this bar of light and himself he saw the
head of Bateese. It was a wild, savage-looking head, bound
pirate-fashion round the forehead with a huge Hudson's Bay kerchief.
Bateese might have been old Jack Ketch himself bending over to give the
final twist to a victim's neck. His long arms slipped under David.
Gently and without effort he raised him to his feet. And then, as
easily as he might have lifted a child, he trundled him up in his arms
and walked off with him over the sand.

Carrigan had not expected this. He was a little shocked and felt also
the impropriety of the thing. The idea of being lugged off like a baby
was embarrassing, even in the presence of the one who had deliberately
put him in his present condition. Bateese did the thing with such
beastly ease. It was as if he was no more than a small boy, a runt with
no weight whatever, and Bateese was a man. He would have preferred to
stagger along on his own feet or creep on his hands and knees, and he
grunted as much to Bateese on the way to the canoe. He felt, at the
same time, that the situation owed him something more of discussion and
explanation. Even now, after half killing him, the woman was taking a
rather high-handed advantage of him. She might at least have assured
him that she had made a mistake and was sorry. But she did not speak to
him again. She said nothing more to Bateese, and when the half-breed
deposited him in the midship part of the canoe, facing the bow, she
stood back in silence. Then Bateese brought his pack and rifle, and
wedged the pack in behind him so that he could sit upright. After that,
without pausing to ask permission, he picked up the woman and carried
her through the shallow water to the bow, saving her the wetting of her
feet.

As she turned to find her paddle her face was toward David, and for a
moment she was looking at him.

"Do you mind telling me who you are, and where we are going?" he asked.

"I am Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain," she said. "My brigade is down the
river, M'sieu Carrigan."

He was amazed at the promptness of her confession, for as one of the
working factors of the long arm of the police he accepted it as that.
He had scarcely expected her to divulge her name after the cold-blooded
way in which she had attempted to kill him. And she had spoken quite
calmly of "my brigade." He had heard of the Boulain Brigade. It was a
name associated with Chipewyan, as he remembered it--or Fort McMurray.
He was not sure just where the Boulain scows had traded freight with
the upper-river craft. Until this year he was positive they had not
come as far south as Athabasca Landing. Boulain--Boulain--The name
repeated itself over and over in his mind. Bateese shoved off the
canoe, and the woman's paddle dipped in and out of the water beginning
to shimmer in moonlight. But he could not, for a time, get himself
beyond the pounding of that name in his brain. It was not merely that
he had heard the name before. There was something significant about it.
Something that made him grope back in his memory of things. Boulain! He
whispered it to himself, his eyes on the slender figure of the woman
ahead of him, swaying gently to the steady sweep of the paddle in her
hands. Yet he could think of nothing. A feeling of irritation swept
over him, disgust at his own mental impotency. And the dizzying
sickness was brewing in his head again.

"I have heard that name--somewhere--before," he said. There was a space
of only five or six feet between them, and he spoke with studied
distinctness.

"Possibly you have, m'sieu."

Her voice was exquisite, clear as the note of a bird, yet so soft and
low that she seemed scarcely to have spoken. And it was, Carrigan
thought, criminally evasive--under the circumstances. He wanted her to
turn round and say something. He wanted, first of all, to ask her why
she had tried to kill him. It was his right to demand an explanation.
And it was his duty to get her back to the Landing, where the law would
ask an accounting of her. She must know that. There was only one way in
which she could have learned his name, and that was by prying into his
identification papers while he was unconscious. Therefore she not only
knew his name, but also that he was Sergeant Carrigan of the Royal
Northwest Mounted Police. In spite of all this she was apparently not
very deeply concerned. She was not frightened, and she did not appear
to be even slightly excited.

He leaned nearer to her, the movement sending a sharp pain between his
eyes. It almost drew a cry from him, but he forced himself to speak
without betraying it.

"You tried to murder me--and almost succeeded. Haven't you anything to
say?"

"Not now, m'sieu--except that it was a mistake, and I am sorry. But you
must not talk. You must remain quiet. I am afraid your skull is
fractured."

Afraid his skull was fractured! And she expressed her fear in the
casual way she might have spoken of a toothache. He leaned back against
his dunnage sack and closed his eyes. Probably she was right. These
fits of dizziness and nausea were suspicious. They made him top-heavy
and filled him with a desire to crumple up somewhere. He was
clear-mindedly conscious of this and of his fight against the weakness.
But in those moments when he felt better and his head was clear of
pain, he had not seriously thought of a fractured skull. If she
believed it, why did she not treat him a bit more considerately?
Bateese, with that strength of an ox in his arms, had no use for her
assistance with the paddle. She might at least have sat facing him,
even if she refused to explain matters more definitely.

A mistake, she called it. And she was sorry for him! She had made those
statements in a matter-of-fact way, but with a voice that was like
music. She had spoken perfect English, but in her words were the
inflection and velvety softness of the French blood which must be
running red in her veins. And her name was Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain!

With eyes closed, Carrigan called himself an idiot for thinking of
these things at the present time. Primarily he was a man-hunter out on
important duty, and here was duty right at hand, a thousand miles south
of Black Roger Audemard, the wholesale murderer he was after. He would
have sworn on his life that Black Roger had never gone at a killing
more deliberately than this same Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain had gone
after him behind the rock!

Now that it was all over, and he was alive, she was taking him
somewhere as coolly and as unexcitedly as though they were returning
from a picnic. Carrigan shut his eyes tighter and wondered if he was
thinking straight. He believed he was badly hurt, but he was as
strongly convinced that his mind was clear. And he lay quietly with his
head against the pack, his eyes closed, waiting for the coolness of the
river to drive his nausea away again.

He sensed rather than felt the swift movement of the canoe. There was
no perceptible tremor to its progress. The current and a perfect
craftsmanship with the paddles were carrying it along at six or seven
miles an hour. He heard the rippling of water that at times was almost
like the tinkling of tiny bells, and more and more bell-like became
that sound as he listened to it. It struck a certain note for him. And
to that note another added itself, until in the purling rhythm of the
river he caught the murmuring monotone of a name
Boulain--Boulain--Boulain. The name became an obsession. It meant
something. And he knew what it meant--if he could only whip his memory
back into harness again. But that was impossible now. When he tried to
concentrate his mental faculties, his head ached terrifically.

He dipped his hand into the water and held it over his eyes. For half
an hour after that he did not raise his head. In that time not a word
was spoken by Bateese or Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain. For the forest
people it was not an hour in which to talk. The moon had risen swiftly,
and the stars were out. Where there had been gloom, the world was now a
flood of gold and silver light. At first Carrigan allowed this to
filter between his fingers; then he opened his eyes. He felt more
evenly balanced again.

Straight in front of him was Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain. The curtain of
dusk had risen from between them, and she was full in the radiance of
the moon. She was no longer paddling, but was looking straight ahead.
To Cardigan her figure was exquisitely girlish as he saw it now. She
was bareheaded, as he had seen tier first, and her hair hung down her
back like a shimmering mass of velvety sable in the star-and-moon glow.
Something told Carrigan she was going to turn her face in his
direction, and he dropped his hand over his eyes again, leaving a space
between the fingers. He was right in his guess. She fronted the moon,
looking at him closely--rather anxiously, he thought. She even leaned a
little toward him that she might see more clearly. Then she turned and
resumed her paddling.

Carrigan was a bit elated. Probably she had looked at him a number of
times like that during the past half-hour. And she was disturbed. She
was worrying about him. The thought of being a murderess was beginning
to frighten her. In spite of the beauty of her eyes and hair and the
slim witchery of her body he had no sympathy for her. He told himself
that he would give a year of his life to have her down at Barracks this
minute. He would never forget that three-quarters of an hour behind the
rock, not if he lived to be a hundred. And if he did live, she was
going to pay, even if she was lovelier than Venus and all the Graces
combined. He felt irritated with himself that he should have observed
in such a silly way the sable glow of her hair in the moonlight. And
her eyes. What the deuce did prettiness matter in the present
situation? The sister of Fanchet, the mail robber, was beautiful, but
her beauty had failed to save Fanchet. The Law had taken him in spite
of the tears in Carmin Fanchet's big black eyes, and in that particular
instance he was the Law. And Carmin Fanchet was pretty--deucedly
pretty. Even the Old Man's heart had been stirred by her loveliness.

"A shame!" he had said to Carrigan. "A shame!" But the rascally Fanchet
was hung by the neck until he was dead.

Carrigan drew himself up slowly until he was sitting erect. He wondered
what Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain would say if he told her about Carmin.
But there was a big gulf between the names Fanchet and Boulain. The
Fanchets had come from the dance halls of Alaska. They were bad, both
of them. At least, so they had judged Carmin Fanchet--along with her
brother. And Boulain--

His hand, in dropping to his side, fell upon the butt of his pistol.
Neither Bateese nor the girl had thought of disarming him. It was
careless of them, unless Bateese was keeping a good eye on him from
behind.

A new sort of thrill crept into Carrigan's blood. He began to see where
he had made a huge error in not playing his part more cleverly. It was
this girl Jeanne who had shot him. It was Jeanne who had stood over him
in that last moment when he had made an effort to use his pistol. It
was she who had tried to murder him and who had turned faint-hearted
when it came to finishing the job. But his knowledge of these things he
should have kept from her. Then, when the proper moment came, he would
have been in a position to act. Even now it might be possible to cover
his blunder. He leaned toward her again, determined to make the effort.

"I want to ask your pardon," he said. "May I?"

His voice startled her. It was as if the stinging tip of a whip-lash
had touched her bare neck. He was smiling when she turned. In her face
and eyes was a relief which she made no effort to repress.

"You thought I might be dead," he laughed softly. "I'm not, Miss
Jeanne. I'm very much alive again. It was that accursed fever--and I
want to ask your pardon! I think--I know--that I accused you of
shooting me. It's impossible. I couldn't think of it--In my clear mind.
I am quite sure that I know the rascally half-breed who pot-shotted me
like that. And it was you who came in time, and frightened him away,
and saved my life. Will you forgive me--and accept my gratitude?"

There came into the glowing eyes of the girl a reflection of his own
smile. It seemed to him that he saw the corners of her mouth tremble a
little before she answered him.

"I am glad you are feeling better, m'sieu."

"And you will forgive me for--for saying such beastly things to you?"

She was lovely when she smiled, and she was smiling at him now. "If you
want to be forgiven for lying, yes," she said. "I forgive you that,
because it is sometimes your business to lie. It was I who tried to
kill you, m'sieu. And you know it."

"But--"

"You must not talk, m'sieu. It is not good for you: Bateese, will you
tell m'sieu not to talk?"

Carrigan heard a movement behind him.

"M'sieu, you will stop ze talk or I brak hees head wit' ze paddle in my
han'!" came the voice of Bateese close to his shoulder. "Do I mak' ze
word plain so m'sieu compren'?"

"I get you, old man," grunted Carrigan. "I get you--both!"

And he leaned back against his dunnage-sack, staring again at the
witching slimness of the lovely Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain as she calmly
resumed her paddling in the bow of the canoe.




V


In the few minutes following the efficient and unexpected warning of
Bateese an entirely new element of interest entered into the situation
for David Carrigan. He had more than once assured himself that he had
made a success of his profession of man-hunting not because he was
brighter than the other fellow, but largely because he possessed a
sense of humor and no vanities to prick. He was in the game because he
loved the adventure of it. He was loyal to his duty, but he was not a
worshipper of the law, nor did he covet the small monthly stipend of
dollars and cents that came of his allegiance to it. As a member of the
Scarlet Police, and especially of "N" Division, he felt the pulse and
thrill of life as he loved to live it. And the greatest of all thrills
came when he was after a man as clever as himself, or cleverer.

This time it was a woman--or a girl! He had not yet made up his mind
which she was. Her voice, low and musical, her poise, and the tranquil
and unexcitable loveliness of her face had made him, at first, register
her as a woman. Yet as he looked at the slim girlishness of her figure
in the bow of the canoe, accentuated by the soft sheen of her partly
unbraided hair, he wondered if she were eighteen or thirty. It would
take the clear light of day to tell him. But whether a girl or a woman,
she had handled him so cleverly that the unpleasantness of his earlier
experience began to give way slowly to an admiration for her capability.

He wondered what the superintendent of "N" Division would say if he
could see Black Roger Audemard's latest trailer propped up here in the
center of the canoe, the prisoner of a velvety-haired but dangerously
efficient bit of feminine loveliness--and a bull-necked,
chimpanzee-armed half-breed!

Bateese had confirmed the suspicion that he was a prisoner, even though
this mysterious pair were bent on saving his life. Why it was their
desire to keep life in him when only a few hours ago one of them had
tried to kill him was a. question which only the future could answer.
He did not bother himself with that problem now. The present was
altogether too interesting, and there was but little doubt that other
developments equally important were close at hand. The attitude of both
Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain and her piratical-looking henchman was
sufficient evidence of that. Bateese had threatened to knock his head
off, and he could have sworn that the girl--or woman--had smiled her
approbation of the threat. Yet he held no grudge against Bateese. An
odd sort of liking for the man began to possess him, just as he found
himself powerless to resist an ingrowing admiration for Marie-Anne. The
existence of Black Roger Audemard became with him a sort of indefinite
reality. Black Roger was a long way off. Marie-Anne and Bateese were
very near. He began thinking of her as Marie-Anne. He liked the name.
It was the Boulain part of it that worked in him with an irritating
insistence.

For the first time since the canoe journey had begun, he looked beyond
the darkly glowing head and the slender figure in the bow. It was a
splendid night. Ahead of him the river was like a rippling sheet of
molten silver. On both sides, a quarter of a mile apart, rose the walls
of the forest, like low-hung, oriental tapestries. The sky seemed near,
loaded with stars, and the moon, rising with almost perceptible
movement toward the zenith, had changed from red to a mellow gold.
Carrigan's soul always rose to this glory of the northern light. Youth
and vigor, he told himself, must always exist under those unpolluted
lights of the upper worlds, the unspeaking things which had told him
more than he had ever learned from the mouths of other men. They stood
for his religion, his faith, his belief in the existence of things
greater than the insignificant spark which animated his own body. He
appreciated them most when there was stillness. And tonight it was
still. It was so quiet that the trickling of the paddles was like
subdued music. From the forest there came no sound. Yet he knew there
was life there, wide-eyed, questing life, life that moved on velvety
wing and padded foot, just as he and Marie-Anne and the half-breed
Bateese were moving in the canoe. To have called out in this hour would
have taken an effort, for a supreme and invisible Hand seemed to have
commanded stillness upon the earth.

And then there came droning upon his ears a break in the stillness, and
as he listened, the shores closed slowly in, narrowing the channel
until he saw giant masses of gray rock replacing the thick verdure of
balsam, spruce, and cedar. The moaning grew louder, and the rocks
climbed skyward until they hung in great cliffs. There could be but one
meaning to this sudden change. They were close to LE SAINT-ESPRIT
RAPIDE--the Holy Ghost Rapids. Carrigan was astonished. That day at
noon he had believed the Holy Ghost to be twenty or thirty miles below
him. Now they were at its mouth, and he saw that Bateese and Jeanne
Marie-Anne Boulain were quietly and unexcitedly preparing to run that
vicious stretch of water. Unconsciously he gripped the gunwales of the
canoe with both hands as the sound of the rapids grew into low and
sullen thunder. In the moonlight ahead he could see the rock walls
closing in until the channel was crushed between two precipitous
ramparts, and the moon and stars, sending their glow between those
walls, lighted up a frothing path of water that made Carrigan hold his
breath. He would have portaged this place even in broad day.

He looked at the girl in the bow. The slender figure Was a little more
erect, the glowing head held a little higher. In those moments he would
have liked to see her face, the wonderful something that must be in her
eyes as she rode fearlessly into the teeth of the menace ahead. For he
could see that she was not afraid, that she was facing this thing with
a sort of exultation, that there was something about it which thrilled
her until every drop of blood in her body was racing with the impetus
of the stream itself. Eddies of wind puffing out from between the chasm
walls tossed her loose hair about her back in a glistening veil. He saw
a long strand of it trailing over the edge of the canoe into the water.
It made him shiver, and he wanted to cry out to Bateese that he was a
fool for risking her life like this. He forgot that he was the one
helpless individual in the canoe, and that an upset would mean the end
for him, while Bateese and his companion might still fight on. His
thought and his vision were focused on the girl--and what lay straight
ahead. A mass of froth, like a windrow of snow, rose up before them,
and the canoe plunged into it with the swiftness of a shot. It
spattered in his face, and blinded him for an instant. Then they were
out of it, and he fancied he heard a note of laughter from the girl in
the bow. In the next breath he called himself a fool for imagining
that. For the run was dead ahead, and the girl became vibrant with
life, her paddle flashing in and out, while from her lips came sharp,
clear cries which brought from Eateese frog-like bellows of response.
The walls shot past; inundations rose and plunged under them; black
rocks whipped with caps of foam raced up-stream with the speed of
living things; the roar became a drowning voice, and then--as if
outreached by the wings of a swifter thing--dropped suddenly behind
them. Smoother water lay ahead. The channel broadened. Moonlight filled
it with a clearer radiance, and Carrigan saw the girl's hair glistening
wet, and her arms dripping.

For the first time he turned about and faced Bateese. The half-breed
was grinning like a Cheshire cat!

"You're a confoundedly queer pair!" grunted Carrigan, and he turned
about again to find Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain as unconcerned as though
running the Holy Ghost Rapids in the glow of the moon was nothing more
than a matter of play.

It was impossible for him to keep his heart from beating a little
faster as he watched her, even though he was trying to regard her in a
most professional sort of way. He reminded himself that she was an
iniquitous little Jezebel who had almost murdered him. Carmin Fanchet
had been like her, an AME DAMNEE--a fallen angel--but his business was
not sympathy in such matters as these. At the same time he could not
resist the lure of both her audacity and her courage, and he found
himself all at once asking himself the amazing question as to what her
relationship might be to Bateese. It occurred to him rather
unpleasantly that there had been something distinctly proprietary in
the way the half-breed had picked her up on the sand, and that Bateese
had shown no hesitation a little later in threatening to knock his head
off unless he stopped talking to her. He wondered if Bateese was a
Boulain.

The two or three minutes of excitement in the boiling waters of the
Holy Ghost had acted like medicine on Carrigan. It seemed to him that
something had given way in his head, relieving him of an oppression
that had been like an iron hoop drawn tightly about his skull. He did
not want Bateese to suspect this change in him, and he slouched lower
against the dunnage-pack with his eyes still on the girl. He was
finding it increasingly difficult to keep from looking at her. She had
resumed her paddling, and Bateese was putting mighty efforts in his
strokes now, so that the narrow, birchbark canoe shot like an arrow
with the down-sweeping current of the river. A few hundred yards below
was a twist in the channel, and as the canoe rounded this, taking the
shoreward curve with dizzying swiftness, a wide, still straight-water
lay ahead. And far down this Carrigan saw the glow of fires.

The forest had drawn back from the river, leaving in its place a broken
tundra of rock and shale and a wide strip of black sand along the edge
of the stream itself. Carrigan knew what it was--an upheaval of the
tar-sand country so common still farther north, the beginning of that
treasure of the earth which would some day make the top of the American
continent one of the Eldorados of the world. The fires drew nearer, and
suddenly the still night was broken by the wild chanting of men. David
heard behind him a choking note in the throat of Bateese. A soft word
came from the lips of the girl, and it seemed to Carrigan that her head
was held higher in the moon glow. The chant increased in volume, a
rhythmic, throbbing, savage music that for a hundred and fifty years
had come from the throats of men along the Three Rivers. It thrilled
Carrigan as they bore down upon it. It was not song as civilization
would have counted song. It was like an explosion, an exultation of
human voice unchained, ebullient with the love of life, savage in its
good-humor. It was LE GAITE DE COEUR of the rivermen, who thought and
sang as their forefathers did in the days of Radisson and good Prince
Rupert; it was their merriment, their exhilaration, their freedom and
optimism, reaching up to the farthest stars. In that song men were
straining their vocal muscles, shouting to beat out their nearest
neighbor, bellowing like bulls in a frenzy of sudden fun. And then, as
suddenly as it had risen in the night, the clamor of voices died away.
A single shout came up the river. Carrigan thought he heard a low
rumble of laughter. A tin pan banged against another. A dog howled. The
flat of an oar played a tattoo for a moment on the bottom of a boat.
Then one last yell from a single throat--and the night was silent again.

And that was the Boulain Brigade--singing at this hour of the night,
when men should have been sleeping if they expected to be up with the
sun. Carrigan stared ahead. Shortly his adventure would take a new
twist. Something was bound to happen when they got ashore. The peculiar
glow of the fires had puzzled him. Now he began to understand. Jeanne
Marie-Anne Boulain's men were camped in the edge of the tar-sands and
had lighted a number of natural gas-jets that came up out of the earth.
Many times he had seen fires like these burning up and down the Three
Rivers. He had lighted fires of his own; he had cooked over them and
had afterward had the fun and excitement of extinguishing them with
pails of water. But he had never seen anything quite like this that was
unfolding itself before his eyes now. There were seven of the fires
over an area of half an acre--spouts of yellowish flame burning like
giant torches ten or fifteen feet in the air. And between them he very
soon made out great bustle and activity. Many figures were moving
about. They looked like dwarfs at first, gnomes at play in a little
world made out of witchcraft. But Bateese was sending the canoe nearer
with powerful strokes, and the figures grew taller, and the spouts of
flame higher. Then he knew what was happening. The Boulain men were
taking advantage of the cool hours of the night and were tarring up.

He could smell the tar, and he could see the big York boats drawn up in
the circle of yellowish light. There were half a dozen of them, and men
stripped to the waist were smearing the bottoms of the boats with
boiling tar and pitch. In the center was a big, black cauldron steaming
over a gas-jet, and between this cauldron and the boats men were
running back and forth with pails. Still nearer to the huge kettle
other men were filling a row of kegs with the precious black GOUDRON
that oozed up from the bowels of the earth, forming here and there
jet-black pools that Carrigan could see glistening in the flare of the
gas-lamps. He figured there were thirty men at work. Six big York boats
were turned keel up in the black sand. Close inshore, just outside the
circle of light, was a single scow.

Toward this scow Bateese sent the canoe. And as they drew nearer, until
the laboring men ashore were scarcely a stone's throw away, the
weirdness of the scene impressed itself more upon Carrigan. Never had
he seen such a crew. There were no Indians among them. Lithe,
quick-moving, bare-headed, their naked arms and shoulders gleaming in
the ghostly illumination, they were racing against time with the
boiling tar and pitch in the cauldron. They did not see the approach of
the canoe, and Bateese did not draw their attention to it. Quietly he
drove the birchbark under the shadow of the big bateau. Hands were
waiting to seize and steady it. Carrigan caught but a glimpse of the
faces. In another instant the girl was aboard the scow, and Bateese was
bending over him. A second time he was picked up like a child in the
chimpanzee-like arms of the half-breed. The moonlight showed him a scow
bigger than he had ever seen on the upper river, and two-thirds of it
seemed to be cabin. Into this cabin Bateese carried him, and in
darkness laid him upon what Carrigan thought must be a cot built
against the wall. He made no sound, but let himself fall limply upon
it. He listened to Bateese as he moved about, and closed his eyes when
Bateese struck a match. A moment later he heard the door of the cabin
close behind the half-breed. Not until then did he open his eyes and
sit up.

He was alone. And what he saw in the next few moments drew an
exclamation of amazement from him. Never had he seen a cabin like this
on the Three Rivers. It was thirty feet long if an inch, and at least
eight feet wide. The walls and ceiling were of polished cedar; the
floor was of cedar closely matched. It was the exquisite finish and
craftsmanship of the woodwork that caught his eyes first. Then his
astonished senses seized upon the other things. Under his feet was a
soft rug of dark green velvet. Two magnificent white bearskins lay
between him and the end of the room. The walls were hung with pictures,
and at the four windows were curtains of ivory lace draped with damask.
The lamp which Bateese had lighted was fastened to the wall close to
him. It was of polished silver and threw a brilliant light softened by
a shade of old gold. There were three other lamps like this, unlighted.
The far end of the room was in deep shadow, but Carrigan made out the
thing he was staring at--a piano. He rose to his feet, disbelieving his
eyes, and made his way toward it. He passed between chairs. Near the
piano was another door, and a wide divan of the same soft, green
upholstery. Looking back, he saw that what he had been lying upon was
another divan. And dose to this were book-shelves, and a table on which
were magazines and papers and a woman's workbasket, and in the
workbasket--sound asleep--a cat!

And then, over the table and the sleeping cat, his eyes rested upon a
triangular banner fastened to the wall. In white against a background
of black was a mighty polar bear holding at bay a horde of Arctic
wolves. And suddenly the thing he had been fighting to recall came to
Carrigan--the great bear--the fighting wolves--the crest of St. Pierre
Boulain!

He took a quick step toward the table--then caught at the back of a
chair. Confound his head! Or was it the big bateau rocking under his
feet? The cat seemed to be turning round in its basket. There were half
a dozen banners instead of one; the lamp was shaking in its bracket;
the floor was tilting, everything was becoming hideously contorted and
out of place. A shroud of darkness gathered about him, and through that
darkness Carrigan staggered blindly toward the divan. He reached it
just in time to fall upon it like a dead man.




VI


For what seemed to be an interminable time after the final breakdown of
his physical strength David Carrigan lived in a black world where a
horde of unseen little devils were shooting red-hot arrows into his
brain. He did not sense the fact of human presence; nor that the divan
had been changed into a bed and the four lamps lighted, and that
wrinkled, brown hands with talon-like fingers were performing a miracle
of wilderness surgery upon him. He did not see the age-old face of
Nepapinas--"The Wandering Bolt of Lightning"--as the bent and tottering
Cree called upon all his eighty years of experience to bring him back
to life. And he did not see Bateese, stolid-faced, silent, nor the
dead-white face and wide-open, staring eyes of Jeanne Marie-Anne
Boulain as her slim, white fingers worked with the old medicine man's.
He was in a gulf of blackness that writhed with the spirits of torment.
He fought them and cried out against them, and his fighting and his
cries brought the look of death itself into the eyes of the girl who
was over him. He did not hear her voice nor feel the soothing of her
hands, nor the powerful grip of Bateese as he held him when the
critical moments came. And Nepapinas, like a machine that had looked
upon death a thousand times, gave no rest to his claw-like fingers
until the work was done--and it was then that something came to drive
the arrow-shooting devils out of the darkness that was smothering
Carrigan.

After that Carrigan lived through an eternity of unrest, a life in
which he seemed powerless and yet was always struggling for supremacy
over things that were holding him down. There were lapses in it, like
the hours of oblivion that come with sleep, and there were other times
when he seemed keenly alive, yet unable to move or act. The darkness
gave way to flashes of light, and in these flashes he began to see
things, curiously twisted, fleeting, and yet fighting themselves
insistently upon his senses. He was back in the hot sand again, and
this time he heard the voices of Jeanne Marie-Anne and Golden-Hair, and
Golden-Hair flaunted a banner in his face, a triangular pennon of black
on which a huge bear was fighting white Arctic wolves, and then she
would run away from him, crying out--"St. Pierre Boulain--St. Pierre
Boulain--" and the last he could see of her was her hair flaming like
fire in the sun. But it was always the other--the dark hair and dark
eyes--that came to him when the little devils returned to assault him
with their arrows. From somewhere she would come out of darkness and
frighten them away. He could hear her voice like a whisper in his ears,
and the touch of her hands comforted him and quieted his pain. After a
time he grew to be afraid when the darkness swallowed her up, and in
that darkness he would call for her, and always he heard her voice in
answer.

Then came a long oblivion. He floated through cool space away from the
imps of torment; his bed was of downy clouds, and on these clouds he
drifted with a great shining river under him; and at last the cloud he
was in began to shape itself into walls and on these walls were
pictures, and a window through which the sun was shining, and a black
pennon--and he heard a soft, wonderful music that seemed to come to him
faintly from another world. Other creatures were at work in his brain
now. They were building up and putting together the loose ends of
things. Carrigan became one of them, working so hard that frequently a
pair of dark eyes came out of the dawning of things to stop him, and
quieting hands and a voice soothed him to rest. The hands and the voice
became very intimate. He missed them when they were not near,
especially the hands, and he was always groping for them to make sure
they had not gone away.

Only once after the floating cloud transformed itself into the walls of
the bateau cabin did the chaotic darkness of the sands fully possess
him again. In that darkness he heard a voice. It was not the voice of
Golden-Hair, or of Bateese, or of Jeanne Marie-Anne. It was close to
his ears. And in that darkness that smothered him there was something
terrible about it as it droned slowly the
words--"HAS-ANY-ONE-SEEN-BLACK-ROGER-AUDEMARD?" He tried to answer, to
call back to it, and the voice came again, repeating the words,
emotionless, hollow, as if echoing up out of a grave. And still harder
he struggled to reply to it, to say that he was David Carrigan, and
that he was out on the trail of Black Roger Audemard, and that Black
Roger was far north. And suddenly it seemed to him that the voice
changed into the flesh and blood of Black Roger himself, though he
could not see in the darkness--and he reached out, gripping fiercely at
the warm substance of flesh, until he heard another voice, the voice of
Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain, entreating him to let his victim go. It was
this time that his eyes shot open, wide and seeing, and straight over
him was the face of Jeanne Marie-Anne, nearer him than it had been even
in the visionings of his feverish mind. His fingers were clutching her
shoulders, gripping like steel hooks.

"M'sieu--M'sieu David!" she was crying.

For a moment he stared; then his hands and fingers relaxed, and his
arms dropped limply. "Pardon--I--I was dreaming," he struggled weakly.
"I thought--"

He had seen the pain in her face. Now, changing swiftly, it lighted up
with relief and gladness. His vision, cleared by long darkness, saw the
change come in an instant like a flash of sunshine. And then--so near
that he could have touched her--she was smiling down into his eyes. He
smiled back. It took an effort, for his face felt stiff and unnatural.

"I was dreaming--of a man--named Roger Audemard," he continued to
apologize. "Did I--hurt you?"

The smile on her lips was gone as swiftly as it had come. "A little,
m'sieu. I am glad you are better. You have been very sick."

He raised a hand to his face. The bandage was there, and also a stubble
of beard on his cheeks. He was puzzled. This morning he had fastened
his steel mirror to the side of a tree and shaved.

"It was three days ago you were hurt," she said quietly. "This is the
afternoon of the third day. You have been in a great fever. Nepapinas,
my Indian doctor, saved your life. You must lie quietly now. You have
been talking a great deal."

"About--Black Roger?" he said.

She nodded.

"And--Golden--Hair?"

"Yes, of Golden--Hair."

"And--some one else--with dark hair--and dark eyes--"

"It may be, m'sieu."

"And of little devils with bows and arrows, and of polar bears, and
white wolves, and of a great lord of the north who calls himself St.
Pierre Boulain?"

"Yes, of all those."

"Then I haven't anything more to tell you," grunted David. "I guess
I've told you all I know. You shot me, back there. And here I am. What
are you going to do next?"

"Call Bateese," she answered promptly, and she rose swiftly from beside
him and moved toward the door.

He made no effort to call her back. His wits were working slowly,
readjusting themselves after a carnival in chaos, and he scarcely
sensed that she was gone until the cabin door closed behind her. Then
again he raised a hand to his face and felt his beard. Three days! He
turned his head so that he could take in the length of the cabin. It
was filled with subdued sunlight now, a western sun that glowed softly,
giving depth and richness to the colors on the floor and walls,
lighting up the piano keys, suffusing the pictures with a warmth of
life. David's eyes traveled slowly to his own feet. The divan had been
opened and transformed into a bed. He was undressed. He had on
somebody's white nightgown. And there was a big bunch of wild roses on
the table where three days ago the cat had been sleeping in the
work-basket. His head cleared swiftly, and he raised himself a little
on one elbow, with extreme caution, and listened. The big bateau was
not moving. It was still tied up, but he could hear no voices out where
the tar-sands were.

He dropped back on his pillow, and his eyes rested on the black pennon.
His blood stirred again as he looked at the white bear and the fighting
wolves. Wherever men rode the waters of the Three Rivers that pennon
was known. Yet it was not common. Seldom was it seen, and never had it
come south of Chipewyan. Many things came to Carrigan now, things that
he had heard at the Landing and up and down the rivers. Once he had
read the tail-end of a report the Superintendent of "N" Division had
sent in to headquarters.

"We do not know this St. Pierre. Few men have seen him out of his own
country, the far headwaters of the Yellowknife, where he rules like a
great overlord. Both the Yellowknives and the Dog Ribs call him KICHEOO
KIMOW, or King, and the same rumors say there is never starvation or
plague in his regions; and it is fact that neither the Hudson's Bay nor
Revillon Brothers in their cleverest generalship and trade have been
able to uproot his almost dynastic jurisdiction. The Police have had no
reason to investigate or interfere."

At least that was the gist of what Carrigan had read in McVane's
report. But he had never associated it with the name of Boulain. It was
of St. Pierre that he had heard stories, St. Pierre and his black
pennon with its white bear and fighting wolves. And so--it was St.
Pierre BOULAIN!

He closed his eyes and thought of the long winter weeks he had passed
at Hay River Post, watching for Fanchet, the mail robber. It was there
he had heard most about this St. Pierre, and yet no one he had talked
with had ever seen him; no one knew whether he was old or young, a
pigmy or a giant. Some stories said that he was strong, that he could
twist a gun-barrel double in his hands; others said that he was old,
very old, so that he never set forth with his brigades that brought
down each year a treasure of furs to be exchanged for freight. And
never did a Dog Rib or a Yellowknife open his mouth about KICHEOO KIMOW
St. Pierre, the master of their unmapped domains. In that great country
north and west of the Great Slave he remained an enigma and a sphinx.
If he ever came out with his brigades, he did not disclose his
identity, so that if one saw a fleet of boats or canoes with the St.
Pierre pennon, one had to make his own guess whether St. Pierre himself
was there or not. But these things were known--that the keenest,
quickest, and strongest men in the northland ran the St. Pierre
brigades, that they brought out the richest cargoes of furs, and that
they carried back with them into the secret fastnesses of their
wilderness the greatest cargoes of freight that treasure could buy. So
much the name St. Pierre dragged out of Carrigan's memory. It came to
him now why the name "Boulain" had pounded so insistently in his brain.
He had seen this pennon with its white bear and fighting wolves only
once before, and that had been over a Boulain scow at Chipewyan. But
his memory had lost its grip on that incident while retaining vividly
its hold on the stories and rumors of the mystery-man, St. Pierre.

Carrigan pulled himself a little higher on his pillow and with a new
interest scanned the cabin. He had never heard of Boulain women. Yet
here was the proof of their existence and of the greatness that ran in
the red blood of their veins. The history of the great northland,
hidden in the dust-dry tomes and guarded documents of the great
company, had always been of absorbing interest to him. He wondered why
it was that the outside world knew so little about it and believed so
little of what it heard. A long time ago he had penned an article
telling briefly the story of this half of a great continent in which
for two hundred years romance and tragedy and strife for mastery had
gone on in a way to thrill the hearts of men. He had told of huge forts
with thirty-foot stone bastions, of fierce wars, of great warships that
had fired their broadsides in battle in the ice-filled waters of
Hudson's Bay. He had described the coming into this northern world of
thousands and tens of thousands of the bravest and best-blooded men of
England and France, and how these thousands had continued to come,
bringing with them the names of kings, of princes, and of great lords,
until out of the savagery of the north rose an aristocracy of race
built up of the strongest men of the earth. And these men of later days
he had called Lords of the North--men who had held power of life and
death in the hollow of their hands until the great company yielded up
its suzerainty to the Government of the Dominion in 1870; men who were
kings in their domains, whose word was law, who were more powerful in
their wilderness castles than their mistress over the sea, the Queen of
Britain.

And Carrigan, after writing of these things, had stuffed his manuscript
away in the bottom of his chest at barracks, for he believed that it
was not in his power to do justice to the people of this wilderness
world that he loved. The powerful old lords were gone. Like dethroned
monarchs, stripped to the level of other men, they lived in the
memories of what had been. Their might now lay in trade. No more could
they set out to wage war upon their rivals with powder and ball. Keen
wit, swift dogs, and the politics of barter had taken the place of
deadlier things. LE FACTEUR could no longer slay or command that others
be slain. A mightier hand than his now ruled the destinies of the
northern people--the hand of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police.

It was this thought, the thought that Law and one of the powerful
forces of the wilderness had met in this cabin of the big bateau, that
came to Carrigan as he drew himself still higher against his pillow. A
greater thrill possessed him than the thrill of his hunt for Black
Roger Audemard. Black Roger was a murderer, a wholesale murderer and a
fiend, a Moloch for whom there could be no pity. Of all men the Law
wanted Black Roger most, and he, David Carrigan, was the chosen one to
consummate its desire. Yet in spite of that he felt upon him the
strange unrest of a greater adventure than the quest for Black Roger.
It was like an impending thing that could not be seen, urging him,
rousing his faculties from the slough into which they had fallen
because of his wound and sickness. It was, after all, the most vital of
all things, a matter of his own life. Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain had
tried to kill him deliberately, with malice and intent. That she had
saved him afterward only added to the necessity of an explanation, and
he was determined that he would have that explanation and settle the
present matter before he allowed another thought of Black Roger to
enter his head.

This resolution reiterated itself in his mind as the machine-like voice
of duty. He was not thinking of the Law, and yet the consciousness of
his accountability to that Law kept repeating itself. In the very face
of it Carrigan knew that something besides the moral obligation of the
thing was urging him, something that was becoming deeply and
dangerously personal. At least--he tried to think of it as dangerous.
And that danger was his unbecoming interest in the girl herself. It was
an interest distinctly removed from any ethical code that might have
governed him in his experience with Carmin Fanchet, for instance.
Comparatively, if they had stood together, Carmin would have been the
lovelier. But he would have looked longer at Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain.

He conceded the point, smiling a bit grimly as he continued to study
that part of the cabin which he could see from his pillow. He had lost
interest--temporarily at least--in Black Roger Audemard. Not long ago
the one question to which, above all others, he had desired an answer
was, why had Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain worked so desperately to kill
him and so hard to save him afterward? Now, as he looked about him, the
question which repeated itself insistently was, what relationship did
she bear to this mysterious lord of the north, St. Pierre?

Undoubtedly she was his daughter, for whom St. Pierre had built this
luxurious barge of state. A fierce-blooded offspring, he thought, one
like Cleopatra herself, not afraid to kill--and equally quick to make
amends when there was a mistake.

There came the quiet opening of the cabin door to break in upon his
thought. He hoped it was Jeanne Marie-Anne returning to him. It was
Nepapinas. The old Indian stood over him for a moment and put a cold,
claw-like hand to his forehead. He grunted and nodded his head, his
little sunken eyes gleaming with satisfaction. Then he put his hands
under David's arms and lifted him until he was sitting upright, with
three or four pillows at his back.

"Thanks," said Carrigan. "That makes me feel better. And--if you don't
mind--my last lunch was three days ago, boiled prunes and a piece of
bannock--"

"I have brought you something to eat, M'sieu David," broke in a soft
voice behind him.

Nepapinas slipped away, and Jeanne Marie-Anne stood in his place. David
stared up at her, speechless. He heard the door close behind the old
Indian. Then Jeanne Marie-Anne drew up a chair, so that for the first
time he could see her clear eyes with the light of day full upon her.

He forgot that a few days ago she had been his deadliest enemy. He
forgot the existence of a man named Black Roger Audemard. Her slimness
was as it had pictured itself to him in the hot sands. Her hair was as
he had seen it there. It was coiled upon her head like ropes of spun
silk, jet-black, glowing softly. But it was her eyes he stared at, and
so fixed was his look that the red lips trembled a bit on the verge of
a smile. She was not embarrassed. There was no color in the clear
whiteness of her skin, except that redness of her lips.

"I thought you had black eyes," he said bluntly. "I'm glad you haven't.
I don't like them. Yours are as brown as--as--"

"Please, m'sieu," she interrupted him, sitting down close beside him.
"Will you eat--now?"

A spoon was at his mouth, and he was forced to take it in or have its
contents spilled over him. The spoon continued to move quickly between
the bowl and his mouth. He was robbed of speech. And the girl's eyes,
as surely as he was alive, were beginning to laugh at him. They were a
wonderful brown, with little, golden specks in them, like the freckles
he had seen in wood-violets. Her lips parted. Between their bewitching
redness he saw the gleam of her white teeth. In a crowd, with her
glorious hair covered and her eyes looking straight ahead, one would
not have picked her out. But close, like this, with her eyes smiling at
him, she was adorable.

Something of Carrigan's thoughts must have shown in his face, for
suddenly the girl's lips tightened a little, and the warmth went out of
her eyes, leaving them cold and distant. He finished the soup, and she
rose again to her feet.

"Please don't go," he said. "If you do, I think I shall get up and
follow. I am quite sure I am entitled to a little something more than
soup."

"Nepapinas says that you may have a bit of boiled fish for supper," she
assured him.

"You know I don't mean that. I want to know why you shot me, and what
you think you are going to do with me."

"I shot you by mistake--and--I don't know just what to do with you,"
she said, looking at him tranquilly, but with what he thought was a
growing shadow of perplexity in her eyes. "Bateese says to fasten a big
stone to your neck and throw you in the river. But Bateese doesn't
always mean what he says. I don't think he is quite as bloodthirsty--"

"--As the young lady who tried to murder me behind the rock," Carrigan
interjected.

"Exactly, m'sieu. I don't think he would throw you into the
river--unless I told him to. And I don't believe I am going to ask him
to do that," she added, the soft glow flashing back into her eyes for
an instant. "Not after the splendid work Nepapinas has done on your
head. St. Pierre must see that. And then, if St. Pierre wishes to
finish you, why--" She shrugged her slim shoulders and made a little
gesture with her hands.

In that same moment there came over her a change as sudden as the
passing of light itself. It was as if a thing she was hiding had broken
beyond her control for an instant and had betrayed her. The gesture
died. The glow went out of her eyes, and in its place came a light that
was almost fear--or pain. She came nearer to Carrigan again, and
somehow, looking up at her, he thought of the little brush warbler
singing at the end of its birch twig to give him courage. It must have
been because of her throat, white and soft, which he saw pulsing like a
beating heart before she spoke to him.

"I have made a terrible mistake, m'sieu David," she said, her voice
barely rising above a whisper. "I'm sorry I hurt you. I thought it was
some one else behind the rock. But I can not tell you more than
that--ever. And I know it is impossible for us to be friends." She
paused, one of her hands creeping to her bare throat, as if to cover
the throbbing he had seen there.

"Why is it impossible?" he demanded, leaning away from his pillows so
that he might bring himself nearer to her.

"Because--you are of the police, m'sieu."

"The police, yes," he said, his heart thrumming inside his breast. "I
am Sergeant Carrigan. I am out after Roger Audemard, a murderer. But my
commission has nothing to do with the daughter of St. Pierre Boulain.
Please--let's be friends--"

He held out his hand; and in that moment David Carrigan placed another
thing higher than duty--and in his eyes was the confession of it, like
the glow of a subdued fire. The girl's fingers drew more closely at her
throat, and she made no movement to accept his hand.

"Friends," he repeated. "Friends--in spite of the police."

Slowly the girl's eyes had widened, as if she saw that new-born thing
riding over all other things in his swiftly beating heart. And afraid
of it, she drew a step away from him.

"I am not St. Pierre Boulain's daughter," she said, forcing the words
out one by one. "I am--his wife."




VII


Afterward Carrigan wondered to what depths he had fallen in the first
moments of his disillusionment. Something like shock, perhaps even more
than that, must have betrayed itself in his face. He did not speak.
Slowly his outstretched arm dropped to the white counterpane. Later he
called himself a fool for allowing it to happen, for it was as if he
had measured his proffered friendship by what its future might hold for
him. In a low, quiet voice Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain was saying again
that she was St. Pierre's wife. She was not excited, yet he understood
now why it was he had thought her eyes were very dark. They had changed
swiftly. The violet freckles in them were like little flecks of gold.
They were almost liquid in their glow, neither brown nor black now, and
with that threat of gathering lightning in them. For the first time he
saw the slightest flush of color in her cheeks. It deepened even as he
held out his hand again. He knew that it was not embarrassment. It was
the heat of the fire back of her eyes. "It's--funny," he said, making
an effort to redeem himself with a lie and smiling. "You rather amaze
me. You see, I have been told this St. Pierre is an old, old man--so
old that he can't stand on his feet or go with his brigades, and if
that is the truth, it is hard for me to picture you as his wife. But
that isn't a reason why we should not be friends. Is it?"

He felt that he was himself again, except for the three days' growth of
beard on his face. He tried to laugh, but it was rather a poor attempt.
And St. Pierre's wife did not seem to hear him. She was looking at him,
looking into and through him with those wide-open glowing eyes. Then
she sat down, out of reach of the hand which he had held toward her.

"You are a sergeant of the police," she said, the softness gone
suddenly out of her voice. "You are an honorable man, m'sieu. Your hand
is against all wrong. Is it not so?" It was the voice of an inquisitor.
She was demanding an answer of him.

He nodded. "Yes, it is so."

The fire in her eyes deepened. "And yet you say you want to be the
friend of a stranger who has tried to kill you. WHY, m'sieu?"

He was cornered. He sensed the humiliation of it, the impossibility of
confessing to her the wild impulse that had moved him before he knew
she was St. Pierre's wife. And she did not wait for him to answer.

"This--this Roger Audemard--if you catch him--what will you do with
him?" she asked.

"He will be hanged," said David. "He is a murderer."

"And one who tries to kill--who almost succeeds--what is the penalty
for that?" She leaned toward him, waiting. Her hands were clasped
tightly in her lap, the spots were brighter in her cheeks.

"From ten to twenty years," he acknowledged. "But, of course, there may
be circumstances--"

"If so, you do not know them," she interrupted him. "You say Roger
Audemard is a murderer. You know I tried to kill you. Then why is it
you would be my friend and Roger Audemard's enemy? Why, m'sieu?"

Carrigan shrugged his shoulders hopelessly. "I shouldn't," he
confessed. "I guess you are proving I was wrong in what I said. I ought
to arrest you and take you back to the Landing as soon as I can. But,
you see, it strikes me there is a big personal element in this. I was
the man almost killed. There was a mistake,--must have been, for as
soon as you put me out of business you began nursing me back to life
again. And--"

"But that doesn't change it," insisted St. Pierre's wife. "If there had
been no mistake, there would have been a murder. Do you understand,
m'sieu? If it had been some one else behind that rock, I am quite
certain he would have died. The Law, at least, would have called it
murder. If Roger Audemard is a criminal, then I also am a criminal. And
an honorable man would not make a distinction because one of them is a
woman!"

"But--Black Roger was a fiend. He deserves no mercy. He--"

"Perhaps, m'sieu!"

She was on her feet, her eyes flaming down upon him. In that moment her
beauty was like the beauty of Carmin Fanchet. The poise of her slender
body, her glowing cheeks, her lustrous hair, her gold-flecked eyes with
the light of diamonds in them, held him speechless.

"I was sorry and went back for you," she said. "I wanted you to live,
after I saw you like that on the sand. Bateese says I was indiscreet,
that I should have left you there to die. Perhaps he is right. And
yet--even Roger Audemard might have had that pity for you."

She turned quickly, and he heard her moving away from him. Then, from
the door, she said,

"Bateese will make you comfortable, m'sieu."

The door opened and closed. She was gone. And he was alone in the cabin
again.

The swiftness of the change in her amazed him. It was as if he had
suddenly touched fire to an explosive. There had been the flare, but no
violence. She had not raised her voice, yet he heard in it the tremble
of an emotion that was consuming her. He had seen the flame of it in
her face and eyes. Something he had said, or had done, had tremendously
upset her, changing in an instant her attitude toward him. The thought
that came to him made his face burn under its scrub of beard. Did she
think he was a scoundrel? The dropping of his hand, the shock that must
have betrayed itself in his face when she said she was St. Pierre's
wife--had those things warned her against him? The heat went slowly out
of his face. It was impossible. She could not think that of him. It
must have been a sudden giving way under terrific strain. She had
compared herself to Roger Audemard, and she was beginning to realize
her peril--that Bateese was right--that she should have left him to die
in the sand!

The thought pressed itself heavily upon Carrigan. It brought him
suddenly back to a realization of how small a part he had played in
this last half hour in the cabin. He had offered to Pierre's wife a
friendship which he had no right to offer and which she knew he had no
right to offer. He was the Law. And she, like Roger Audemard, was a
criminal. Her quick woman's instinct had told her there could be no
distinction between them, unless there was a reason. And now Carrigan
confessed to himself that there had been a reason. That reason had come
to him with the first glimpse of her as he lay in the hot sand. He had
fought against it in the canoe; it had mastered him in those thrilling
moments when he had beheld this slim, beautiful creature riding
fearlessly into the boiling waters of the Holy Ghost. Her eyes, her
hair, the sweet, low voice that had been with him in his fever, had
become a definite and unalterable part of him. And this must have shown
in his eyes and face when he dropped his hand--when she told him she
was St. Pierre's wife.

And now she was afraid of him! She was regretting that she had not left
him to die. She had misunderstood what she had seen betraying itself
during those few seconds of his proffered friendship. She saw only a
man whom she had nearly killed, a man who represented the Law, a man
whose power held her in the hollow of his hand. And she had stepped
back from him, startled, and had told him that she was not St. Pierre's
daughter, but his wife!

In the science of criminal analysis Carrigan always placed himself in
the position of the other man. And he was beginning to see the present
situation from the view-point of Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain. He was
satisfied that she had made a desperate mistake and that until the last
moment she had believed it was another man behind the rock. Yet she had
shown no inclination to explain away her error. She had definitely
refused to make an explanation. And it was simply a matter of common
sense to concede that there must be a powerful motive for her refusal.
There was but one conclusion for him to arrive at--the error which St.
Pierre's wife had made in shooting the wrong man was less important to
her than keeping the secret of why she had wanted to kill some other
man.

David was not unconscious of the breach in his own armor. He had
weakened, just as the Superintendent of "N" Division had weakened that
day four years ago when they had almost quarreled over Carmin Fanchet.

"I'll swear to Heaven she isn't bad, no matter what her brother has
been," McVane had said. "I'll gamble my life on that, Carrigan!"

And because the Chief of Division with sixty years of experience behind
him, had believed that, Carmin Fanchet had not been held as an
accomplice in her brother's evildoing, but had gone back into her
wilderness uncrucified by the law that had demanded the life of her
brother. He would never forget the last time he had seen Carmin
Fanchet's eyes--great, black, glorious pools of gratitude as they
looked at grizzled old McVane; blazing fires of venomous hatred when
they turned on him. And he had said to McVane,

"The man pays, the woman goes--justice indeed is blind!"

McVane, not being a stickler on regulations when it came to Carrigan,
had made no answer.

The incident came back vividly to David as he waited for the promised
coming of Bateese. He began to appreciate McVane's point of view, and
it was comforting, because he realized that his own logic was
assailable. If McVane had been comparing the two women now, he knew
what his argument would be. There had been no absolute proof of crime
against Carmin Fanchet, unless to fight desperately for the life of her
brother was a crime. In the case of Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain there was
proof. She had tried to kill. Therefore, of the two, Carmin Fanchet
would have been the better woman in the eyes of McVane.

In spite of the legal force of the argument which he was bringing
against himself, David felt unconvinced. Carmin Fanchet, had she been
in the place of St. Pierre's wife, would have finished him there in the
sand. She would have realized the menace of letting him live and would
probably have commanded Bateese to dump him in the river. St. Pierre's
wife had gone to the other extreme. She was not only repentant, but was
making restitution, for her mistake, and in making that restitution had
crossed far beyond the dead-line of caution. She had frankly told him
who she was; she had brought him into the privacy of what was
undeniably her own home; in her desire to undo what she had done she
had hopelessly enmeshed herself in the net of the Law--if that Law saw
fit to act. She had done these things with courage and conviction. And
of such a woman, Carrigan thought, St. Pierre must be very proud.

He looked slowly about the cabin again and each thing that he saw was a
living voice breaking up a dream for him. These voices told him that he
was in a temple built because of a man's worship for a woman--and that
man was St. Pierre. Through the two western windows came the last glow
of the western sun, like a golden benediction finding its way into a
sacred place. Here there was--or had been--a great happiness, for only
a great pride and a great happiness could have made it as it was.
Nothing that wealth and toil could drag up out of a civilization a
thousand miles away had been too good for St. Pierre's wife. And about
him, looking more closely, David saw the undisturbed evidences of a
woman's contentment. On the table were embroidery materials with which
she had been working, and a lamp-shade half finished. A woman's
magazine printed in a city four thousand miles away lay open at the
fashion plates. There were other magazines, and many books, and open
music above the white keyboard of the piano, and vases glowing red and
yellow with wild-flowers and silver birch leaves. He could smell the
faint perfume of the fireglow blossoms, red as blood. In a pool of
sunlight on one of the big white bear rugs lay the sleeping cat. And
then, at the far end of the cabin, an ivory-white Cross of Christ
glowed for a few moments in a last homage of the sinking sun.

Uneasiness stole upon him. This was the woman's holy ground, her
sanctuary and her home, and for three days his presence had driven her
from it. There was no other room. In making restitution she had given
up to him her most sacred of all things. And again there rose up in him
that new-born thing which had set strange fires stirring in his heart,
and which from this hour on he knew he must fight until it was dead.

For an hour after the last of the sun was obliterated by the western
mountains he lay in the gloom of coming darkness. Only the lapping of
water under the bateau broke the strange stillness of the evening. He
heard no sound of life, no voice, no tread of feet, and he wondered
where the woman and her men had gone and if the scow was still tied up
at the edge of the tar-sands. And for the first time he asked himself
another question, Where was the man, St. Pierre?




VIII


It was utterly dark in the cabin, when the stillness was broken by low
voices outside. The door opened, and some one came in. A moment later a
match flared up, and in the shifting glow of it Carrigan saw the dark
face of Bateese, the half-breed. One after another he lighted the four
lamps. Not until he had finished did he turn toward the bed. It was
then that David had his first good impression of the man. He was not
tall, but built with the strength of a giant. His arms were long. His
shoulders were stooped. His head was like the head of a stone gargoyle
come to life. Wide-eyed, heavy-lipped, with the high cheek-bones of an
Indian and uncut black hair bound with the knotted red MOUCHOIR, he
looked more than ever like a pirate and a cutthroat to David. Such a
man, he thought, might make play out of the business of murder. And
yet, in spite of his ugliness, David felt again the mysterious
inclination to like the man.

Bateese grinned. It was a huge grin, for his mouth was big. "You ver'
lucky fellow," he announced. "You sleep lak that in nice sof' bed an'
not back on san'-bar, dead lak ze feesh I bring you, m'sieu. That ees
wan beeg mistake. Bateese say, 'Tie ze stone roun' hees neck an' mak'
heem wan ANGE DE MER. Chuck heem in ze river, MA BELLE Jeanne!' An' she
say no, mak heem well, an' feed heem feesh. So I bring ze feesh which
she promise, an' when you have eat, I tell you somet'ing!"

He returned to the door and brought back with him a wicker basket. Then
he drew up the table beside Carrigan and proceeded to lay out before
him the boiled fish which St. Pierre's wife had promised him. With it
was bread and an earthen pot of hot tea.

"She say that ees all you have because of ze fever. Bateese say, 'Stuff
heem wit' much so that he die queek!'"

"You want to see me dead. Is that it, Bateese?"

"OUI. You mak' wan ver' good dead man, m'sieu!" Bateese was no longer
grinning. He stood back and pointed at the food. "You eat--queek. An'
when you have finish' I tell you somet'ing!"

Now that he saw the luscious bit of whitefish before him, Carrigan was
possessed of the hungering emptiness of three days and nights. As he
ate, he observed that Bateese was performing curious duties. He
straightened a couple of rugs, ran fresh water into the flower vases,
picked up half a dozen scattered magazines, and then, to David's
increasing interest, produced a dust-cloth from somewhere and began to
dust. David finished his fish, the one slice of bread, and his cup of
tea. He felt tremendously good. The hot tea was like a trickle of new
life through every vein in his body, and he had the desire to get up
and try out his legs. Suddenly Bateese discovered that his patient was
laughing at him.

"QUE DIABLE!" he demanded, coming up ferociously with the cloth in his
great hand. "You see somet'ing ver' fonny, m'sieu?"

"No, nothing funny, Bateese," grinned Carrigan. "I was just thinking
what a handsome chambermaid you make. You are so gentle, so nice to
look at, so--"

"DIABLE!" exploded Bateese, dropping his dust cloth and bringing his
huge hands down upon the table with a smash that almost wrecked the
dishes. "You have eat, an' now you lissen. You have never hear' before
of Concombre Bateese. An' zat ees me. See! Wit' these two hands I have
choke' ze polar bear to deat'. I am strongest man w'at ees in all nort'
countree. I pack four hundre' pound ovair portage. I crack ze caribou
bones wit' my teeth, lak a dog. I run sixt' or hundre' miles wit'out
stop for rest. I pull down trees w'at oder man cut wit' axe. I am not
'fraid of not'ing. You lissen? You hear w'at I say?"

"I hear you."

"BIEN! Then I tell you w'at Concombre Bateese ees goin' do wit' you,
M'sieu Sergent de Police! MA BELLE Jeanne she mak' wan gran' meestake.
She too much leetle bird heart, too much pity for want you to die.
Bateese say, 'Keel him, so no wan know w'at happen t'ree day ago behin'
ze rock.' But MA BELLE Jeanne, she say, 'No, Bateese, he ees meestake
for oder man, an' we mus' let heem live.' An' then she tell me to come
an' bring you feesh, an' tell you w'at is goin' happen if you try go
away from thees bateau. You COMPREN'? If you try run away, Bateese ees
goin' keel you! See--wit' thees han's I br'ak your neck an' t'row you
in river. MA BELLE Jeanne say do zat, an' she tell oder mans-twent',
thirt', almos' hundre' GARCONS--to keel you if you try run away. She
tell me bring zat word to you wit' ze feesh. You listen hard w'at I
say?"

If ever a worker of iniquity lived on earth, Carrigan might have judged
Bateese as that man in these moments. The half-breed had worked himself
up to a ferocious pitch. His eyes rolled. His wide mouth snarled in the
virulence of its speech. His thick neck grew corded, and his huge hands
clenched menacingly upon the table. Yet David had no fear. He wanted to
laugh, but he knew laughter would be the deadliest of insults to
Bateese just now. He remembered that the half-breed, fierce as a
pirate, had a touch as gentle as a woman's. This man, who could choke
an ox with his monstrous hands, had a moment before petted a cat,
straightened out rugs, watered the woman's flowers, and had dusted. He
was harmless--now. And yet in the same breath David sensed the fact
that a single word from St. Pierre's wife would be sufficient to fire
his brute strength into a blazing volcano of action. Such a henchman
was priceless--under certain conditions! And he had brought a warning
straight from the woman.

"I think I understand what you mean, Bateese," he said. "She says that
I am to make no effort to leave this bateau--that I am to be killed if
I try to escape? Are you sure she said that?"

"PAR LES MILLE CORNES DU DIABLE, you t'ink Bateese lie, m'sieu?
Concombre Bateese, who choke ze w'ite bear wit' hees two ban', who pull
down ze tree--"

"No, no, I don't think you lie. But I am wondering why she didn't tell
me that when she was here."

"Becaus' she have too much leetle bird heart, zat ees w'y. She say:
'Bateese, you tell heem he mus' wait for St. Pierre. An' you tell heem
good an' hard, lak you choke ze w'ite bear an' lak you pull down ze
tree, so he mak' no meestake an' try get away.' An' she tell zat before
all ze BATELIERS--all ze St. Pierre mans gathered 'bout a beeg
fire--an' they shout up lak wan gargon that they watch an' keel you if
you try get away."

Carrigan reached out a hand. "Let's shake, Bateese. I'll give you my
word that I won't try to escape--not until you and I have a good
stand-up fight with the earth under our feet, and I've whipped you. Is
it a go?"

Bateese stared for a moment, and then his face broke into a wide grin.
"You lak ze fight, m'sieu?"

"Yes. I love a scrap with a good man like you."

One of Bateese's huge hands crawled slowly over the table and engulfed
David's. Joy shone on his face.

"An' you promise give me zat fight, w'en you are strong?"

"If I don't, I'll let you tie a stone around my neck and drop me into
the river."

"You are brave GARCON," cried the delighted Bateese. "Up an' down ze
rivers ees no man w'at can whip Concombre Bateese!" Suddenly his face
grew clouded. "But ze head, m'sieu?" he added anxiously.

"It will get well quickly if you will help me, Bateese. Right now I
want to get up. I want to stretch my legs. Was my head bad?"

"NON. Ze bullet scrape ze ha'r off--so--so--an' turn ze brain seek. I
t'ink you be good fighting man in week!"

"And you will help me up?"

Bateese was a changed man. Again David felt that mighty but gentle
strength of his arms as he helped him to his feet. He was a trifle
unsteady for a moment. Then, with the half-breed close at his side,
ready to catch him if his legs gave way, he walked to one of the
windows and looked out. Across the river, fully half a mile away, he
saw the glow of fires.

"Her camp?" he asked.

"OUI, m'sieu."

"We have moved from the tar-sands?"

"Yes, two days down ze river."

"Why are they not camping over here with us?"

Bateese gave a disgusted grunt. "Becaus' MA BELLE Jeanne have such
leetle bird heart, m'sieu. She say you mus' not have noise near, lak ze
talk an' laugh an' ZE CHANSONS. She say it disturb, an' zat it mak you
worse wit' ze fever. She ees mak you lak de baby, Bateese say to her.
But she on'y laugh at zat an' snap her leetle w'ite finger. Wait St.
Pierre come! He brak yo'r head wit' hees two fists. I hope we have ze
fight before then, m'sieu!"

"We'll have it anyway, Bateese. Where is St. Pierre, and when shall we
see him?"

Bateese shrugged his shoulders. "Mebby week, mebby more. He long way
off."

"Is he an old man?"

Slowly Bateese turned David about until he was facing him. "You ask
not'ing more about St. Pierre," he warned. "No mans talk 'bout St.
Pierre. Only wan--MA BELLE Jeanne. You ask her, an' she tell you shut
up. W'en you don't shut up she call Bateese to brak your head."

"You're a--a sort of all-round head-breaker, as I understand it,"
grunted David, walking slowly back to his bed. "Will you bring me my
pack and clothes in the morning? I want to shave and dress."

Bateese was ahead of him, smoothing the pillows and straightening out
the rumpled bed-clothes. His huge hands were quick and capable as a
woman's, and David could not keep himself from chuckling at this
feminine ingeniousness of the powerful half-breed. Once in the crush of
those gorilla-like arms that were working over his bed now, he thought,
and it would be all over with the strongest man in "N" Division.
Bateese heard the chuckle and looked up.

"Somet'ing ver' funny once more, is eet--w'at?" he demanded.

"I was thinking, Bateese--what will happen to me if you get me in those
arms when we fight? But it isn't going to happen. I fight with my
fists, and I'm going to batter you up so badly that nobody will
recognize you for a long time."

"You wait!" exploded Bateese, making a horrible grimace. "I choke you
lak w'ite bear, I t'row you ovair my should'r, I mash you lak leetle
strawberr', I--" He paused in his task to advance with a formidable
gesture.

"Not now," warned Carrigan. "I'm still a bit groggy, Bateese." He
pointed down at the bed. "I'm driving HER from that," he said. "I don't
like it. Is she sleepin' over there--in the camp?"

"Mebby--an' mebby not, m'sieu," growled Bateese. "You mak' guess, eh?"

He began extinguishing the lights, until only the one nearest the door
was left burning. He did not turn toward Carrigan or speak to him
again. When he Went out, David heard the click of a lock in the door.
Bateese had not exaggerated. It was the intention of St. Pierre's wife
that he should consider himself a prisoner--at least for tonight.

He had no desire to lie down again. There was an unsteadiness in his
legs, but outside of that the evil of his sickness no longer oppressed
him. The staff doctor at the Landing would probably have called him a
fool for not convalescing in the usual prescribed way, but Carrigan was
already beginning to feel the demand for action. In spite of what
physical effort he had made, his head did not hurt him, and his mind
was keenly alive. He returned to the window through which he could see
the fires on the western shore, and found no difficulty in opening it.
A strong screen netting kept him from thrusting out his head and
shoulders. Through it came the cool night breeze of the river. It
seemed good to fill his lungs with it again and smell the fresh aroma
of the forest. It was very dark, and the fires across the river were
brighter because of the deep gloom. There was no promise of the moon in
the sky. He could not see a star. From far in the west he caught the
low intonation of thunder.

Carrigan turned from the window to the end of the cabin in which the
piano stood. Here, too, was the second divan, and he saw the meaning
now of two close-tied curtains, one at each side of the cabin. Drawn
together on a taut wire stretched two inches under the ceiling, they
shut off this end of the bateau and turned at least a third of the
cabin into the privacy of the woman's bedroom. With growing uneasiness
David saw the evidences that this had been her sleeping apartment. At
each side of the piano was a small door, and he opened one of these
just enough to discover that it was a wardrobe closet. A third door
opened on the shore side of the bateau, but this was locked. Shut out
from the view of the lower end of the cabin by a Japanese screen were a
small dresser and a mirror. In the dim illumination that came from the
distant lamp David bent over the open sheet of music on the piano. It
was Mascagni's AVE MARIA.

His blood tingled. His brain was stirred by a new emotion, a growing
thing that made him uneasy and filled him with a strange restlessness.
He felt as though he had come suddenly to the edge of a great danger;
somewhere within him an intelligence seized upon it and understood. Yet
it was not physical enough for him to fight. It was a danger which
crept up and about him, something which he could not see or touch and
yet which made his heart beat faster and the blood come into his face.
It drew him, triumphed over him, dragged his hand forth until his
fingers closed upon a lacy, crumpled bit of a handkerchief that lay on
the edge of the piano keys. It was the woman's handkerchief, and like a
thief he raised it slowly. It smelled faintly of crushed violets; it
was as if she were bending over him in his sickness again, and it was
her breath that came to him. He was not thinking of her as St. Pierre's
wife. And then sharply he caught himself and placed the handkerchief
back on the piano keys. He tried to laugh at himself, but there was an
emptiness where a moment before there had been that thrill of which he
was now ashamed.

He turned back to the window. The thunder had come nearer. It was
coming up fast out of the west, and with it a darkness that was like
the blackness of a pit. A dead stillness was preceding it now, and in
that stillness it seemed to Carrigan that he could hear the soapy,
slitting sound of the streaming flashes of electrical fire that
blazoned the advance of the storm. The camp-fires across the river were
dying down. One of them went out as he looked at it, and he stared into
the darkness as if trying to pierce distance and gloom to see what sort
of a shelter it was that St. Pierre's wife had over there. And there
came over him in these moments a desire that was almost cowardly. It
was the desire to escape, to leave behind him the memory of the rock
and of St. Pierre's wife, and to pursue once more his own great
adventure, the quest of Black Roger Audemard.

He heard the rain coming. At first the sound of it was like the
pattering of ten million tiny feet in dry leaves; then, suddenly, it
was like the roar of an avalanche. It was an inundation, and with it
came crash after crash of thunder, and the black skies were illumined
by an almost uninterrupted glare of lightning. It had been a long time
since Carrigan had felt the shock of such a storm. He closed the window
to keep the rain out, and after that stood with his face flattened
against the glass, staring over the river. The camp-fires were all gone
now, blotted out like so many candles snuffed between thumb and
forefinger, and he shuddered. No canvas ever made would keep that
deluge out. And now there was growing up a wind with it. The tents on
the other side would be beaten down like pegged sheets of paper, ripped
up and torn to pieces. He imagined St. Pierre's wife in that tumult and
distress--the breath blown out of her, half drowned, blinded by deluge
and lightning, broken and beaten because of him. Thought of her
companions did not ease his mind. Human hands were entirely inadequate
to cope with a storm like this that was rocking the earth about him.

Suddenly he went to the door, determined that if Bateese was outside he
would get some satisfaction out of him or challenge him to a fight
right there. He beat against it, first with one fist and then with
both. He shouted. There was no response. Then he exerted his strength
and his weight against the door. It was solid.

He was half turned when his eyes discovered, in a corner where the
lamplight struck dimly, his pack and clothes. In thirty seconds he had
his pipe and tobacco. After that for half an hour he paced up and down
the cabin, while the storm crashed and thundered as if bent upon
destroying all life off the face of the earth.

Comforted by the company of his pipe, Carrigan did not beat at the door
again. He waited, and at the end of another half-hour the storm had
softened down into a steady patter of rain. The thunder had traveled
east, and the lightning had gone with it. David opened the window
again. The air that came in was rain-sweet, soft, and warm. He puffed
out a cloud of smoke and smiled. His pipe always brought his good humor
to the surface, even in the worst places. St. Pierre's wife had
certainly had a good soaking. And in a way the whole thing was a bit
funny. He was thinking now of a poor little golden-plumaged partridge,
soaked to the skin, with its tail-feathers dragging pathetically.
Grinning, he told himself that it was an insult to think of her and a
half-drowned partridge in the same breath. But the simile still
remained, and he chuckled. Probably she was wringing out her clothes
now, and the men were cursing under their breath while trying to light
a fire. He watched for the fire. It failed to appear. Probably she was
hating him for bringing all this discomfort and humiliation upon her.
It was not impossible that tomorrow she would give Bateese permission
to brain him. And St. Pierre? What would this man, her husband, think
and do if he knew that his wife had given up her bedroom to this
stranger? What complications might arise IF HE KNEW!

It was late--past midnight--when Carrigan went to bed. Even then he did
not sleep for a long time. The patter of the rain grew less and less on
the roof of the bateau, and as the sound of it droned itself off into
nothingness, slumber came. David was conscious of the moment when the
rain ceased entirely. Then he slept. At least he must have been very
close to sleep, or had been asleep and was returning for a moment close
to consciousness, when he heard a voice. It came several times before
he was roused enough to realize that it was a voice. And then,
suddenly, piercing his slowly wakening brain almost with the shock of
one of the thunder crashes, it came to him so distinctly that he found
himself sitting up straight, his hands clenched, eyes staring in the
darkness, waiting for it to come again.

Somewhere very near him, in his room, within the reach of his hands, a
strange and indescribable voice had cried out in the darkness the words
which twice before had beat themselves mysteriously into David
Carrigan's brain--"HAS ANY ONE SEEN BLACK ROGER AUDEMARD? HAS ANY ONE
SEEN BLACK ROGER AUDEMARD?"

And David, holding his breath, listened for the sound of another breath
which he knew was in that room.




IX


For perhaps a minute Carrigan made no sound that could have been heard
three feet away from him. It was not fear that held him quiet. It was
something which he could not explain afterward, the sensation, perhaps,
of one who feels himself confronted for a moment by a presence more
potent than that of flesh and blood. BLACK ROGER AUDEMARD! Three times,
twice in his sickness, some one had cried out that name in his ears
since the hour when St. Pierre's wife had ambushed him on the white
carpet of sand. And the voice was now in his room!

Was it Bateese, inspired by some sort of malformed humor? Carrigan
listened. Another minute passed. He reached out a hand and groped about
him, very careful not to make a sound, urged by the feeling that some
one was almost within reach of him. He flung back his blanket and stood
out in the middle of the floor.

Still he heard no movement, no soft footfalls of retreat or advance. He
lighted a match and held it high above his head. In its yellow
illumination he could see nothing alive. He lighted a lamp. The cabin
was empty. He drew a deep breath and went to the window. It was still
open. The voice had undoubtedly come to him through that window, and he
fancied he could see where the screen netting was crushed a bit inward,
as though a face had pressed heavily against it. Outside the night was
beautifully calm. The sky, washed by storm, was bright with stars. But
there was not a ripple of movement that he could hear.

After that he looked at his watch. He must have been sleeping for some
time when the voice roused him, for it was nearly three o'clock. In
spite of the stars, dawn was close at hand. When he looked out of the
window again they were paler and more distant. He had no intention of
going back to bed. He was restless and felt himself surrendering more
and more to the grip of presentiment.

It was still early, not later than six o'clock, when Bateese came in
with his breakfast. He was surprised, as he had heard no movement or
sound of voices to give evidence of life anywhere near the bateau.
Instantly he made up his mind that it was not Bateese who had uttered
the mysterious words of a few hours ago, for the half-breed had
evidently experienced a most uncomfortable night. He was like a rat
recently pulled out of water. His clothes hung upon him sodden and
heavy, his head kerchief dripped, and his lank hair was wet. He slammed
the breakfast things down on the table and went out again without so
much as nodding at his prisoner.

Again a sense of discomfort and shame swept over David, as he sat down
to breakfast. Here he was comfortably, even luxuriously, housed, while
out there somewhere St. Pierre's lovely wife was drenched and even more
miserable than Bateese. And the breakfast amazed him. It was not so
much the caribou tenderloin, rich in its own red juice, or the potato,
or the pot of coffee that was filling the cabin with its aroma, that
roused his wonder, but the hot, brown muffins that accompanied the
other things. Muffins! And after a deluge that had drowned every square
inch of the earth! How had Bateese turned the trick?

Bateese did not return immediately for the dishes, and for half an hour
after he had finished breakfast Carrigan smoked his pipe and watched
the blue haze of fires on the far side of the river. The world was a
blaze of sunlit glory. His imagination carried him across the river.
Somewhere over there, in an open spot where the sun was blazing, Jeanne
Marie-Anne was probably drying herself after the night of storm. There
was but little doubt in his mind that she was already heaping the
ignominy of blame upon him. That was the woman of it.

A knock at his door drew him about. It was a light, quick TAP, TAP,
TAP--not like the fist of either Bateese or Nepapinas. In another
moment the door swung open, and in the flood of sunlight that poured
into the cabin stood St. Pierre's wife!

It was not her presence, but the beauty of her, that held him
spellbound. It was a sort of shock after the vivid imaginings of his
mind in which he had seen her beaten and tortured by storm. Her hair,
glowing in the sun and piled up in shining coils on the crown of her
head, was not wet. She was not the rain-beaten little partridge that
had passed in tragic bedragglement through his mind. Storm had not
touched her. Her cheeks were soft with the warm flush of long hours of
sleep. When she came in, her lips greeting him with a little smile, all
that he had built up for himself in the hours of the night crumbled
away in dust. Again he forgot for a moment that she was St. Pierre's
wife. She was woman, and as he looked upon her now, the most adorable
woman in all the world.

"You are better this morning," she said. Real pleasure shone in her
eyes. She had left the door open, so that the sun filled the room. "I
think the storm helped you. Wasn't it splendid?"

David swallowed hard. "Quite splendid," he managed to say. "Have you
seen Bateese this morning?"

A little note of laughter came into her throat. "Yes. I don't think he
liked it. He doesn't understand why I love storms. Did you sleep well,
M'sieu Carrigan?"

"An hour or two, I think. I was worrying about you. I didn't like the
thought that I had turned you out into the storm. But it doesn't seem
to have touched you."

"No. I was there--quite comfortable." She nodded to the forward
bulkhead of the cabin, beyond the wardrobe closets and the piano.
"There is a little dining-room and kitchenette ahead," she explained.
"Didn't Bateese tell you that?"

"No, he didn't. I asked him where you were, and I think he told me to
shut up."

"Bateese is very odd," said St. Pierre's wife. "He is exceedingly
jealous of me, M'sieu David. Even when I was a baby and he carried me
about in his arms, he was just that way. Bateese, you know, is older
than he appears. He is fifty-one."

She was moving about, quite as if his presence was in no way going to
disturb her usual duties of the day. She rearranged the damask curtains
which he had crumpled with his hands, placed two or three chairs in
their usual places, and moved from this to that with the air of a
housewife who is in the habit of brushing up a bit in the morning.

She seemed not at all embarrassed because he was her prisoner, nor
uncomfortably restrained because of the message she had sent to him by
Bateese. She was warmly and gloriously human. In her apparent unconcern
at his presence he found himself sweating inwardly. A bit nervously he
struck a match to light his pipe, then extinguished it.

She noticed what he had done. "You may smoke," she said, with that
little note in her throat which he loved to hear, like the faintest
melody of laughter that did not quite reach her lips. "St. Pierre
smokes a great deal, and I like it."

She opened a drawer in the dressing-table and came to him with a box
half filled with cigars.

"St. Pierre prefers these--on occasions," she said, "Do you?"

His fingers seemed all thumbs as he took a cigar from the proffered
box. He cursed himself because his tongue felt thick. Perhaps it was
his silence, betraying something of his mental clumsiness, that brought
a faint flush of color into her cheeks. He noted that; and also that
the top of her shining head came just about to his chin, and that her
mouth and throat, looking down on them, were bewitchingly soft and
sweet.

And what she said, when her eyes opened wide and beautiful on him
again, was like a knife cutting suddenly into the heart of his thoughts.

"In the evening I love to sit at St. Pierre's feet and watch him
smoke," she said. "I am glad it doesn't annoy you, because--I like to
smoke," he replied lamely.

She placed the box on the little reading table and looked at his
breakfast things. "You like muffins, too. I was up early this morning,
making them for you!"

"You made them?" he demanded, as if her words were a most amazing
revelation to him.

"Surely, M'sieu David. I make them every morning for St. Pierre. He is
very fond of them. He says the third nicest thing about me is my
muffins!"

"And the other two?" asked David.

"Are St. Pierre's little secrets, m'sieu," she laughed softly, the
color deepening in her cheeks. "It wouldn't be fair to tell you, would
it?"

"Perhaps it wouldn't," he said slowly. "But there are one or two other
things, Mrs.--Mrs. Boulain--"

"You may call me Jeanne, or Marie-Anne, if you care to," she
interrupted him. "It will be quite all right."

She was picking up the breakfast dishes, not at all perturbed by the
fact that she was offering him a privilege which had the effect of
quickening his pulse for a moment or two.

"Thank you," he said. "I don't mind telling you it is going to be
difficult for me to do that--because--well, this is a most unusual
situation, isn't it? In spite of all your kindness, including what was
probably your good-intentioned endeavor to put an end to my earthly
miseries behind the rock, I believe it is necessary for you to give me
some kind of explanation. Don't you?"

"Didn't Bateese explain to you last night?" she asked, facing him.

"He brought a message from you to the effect that I was a prisoner,
that I must make no attempt to escape, and that if I did try to escape,
you had given your men instructions to kill me."

She nodded, quite seriously. "That is right, M'sieu David."

His face flamed. "Then I am a prisoner? You threaten me with death?"

"I shall treat you very nicely if you make no attempt to escape, M'sieu
David. Isn't that fair?"

"Fair!" he cried, choking back an explosion that would have vented
itself on a man. "Don't you realize what has happened? Don't you know
that according to every law of God and man I should arrest you and give
you over to the Law? Is it possible that you don't comprehend my own
duty? What I must do?"

If he had noticed, he would have seen that there was no longer the
flush of color in her cheeks. But her eyes, looking straight at him,
were tranquil and unexcited. She nodded.

"That is why you must remain a prisoner, M'sieu David, It is because I
do realize, I shall not tell you why that happened behind the rock, and
if you ask me, I shall refuse to talk to you. If I let you go now, you
would probably have me arrested and put in jail. So I must keep you
until St. Pierre comes. I don't know what to do--except to keep you,
and not let you escape until then. What would you do?"

The question was so honest, so like a question that might have been
asked by a puzzled child, that his argument for the Law was struck
dead. He stared into the pale face, the beautiful, waiting eyes, saw
the pathetic intertwining of her slim fingers, and suddenly he was
grinning in that big, honest way which made people love Dave Carrigan.

"You're--doing--absolutely--right," he said.

A swift change came in her face. Her cheeks flushed. Her eyes filled
with a sudden glow that made the little violet-freckles in them dance
like tiny flecks of gold.

"From your point of view you are right," he repeated, "and I shall make
no attempt to escape until I have talked with St. Pierre. But I can't
quite see--just now--how he is going to help the situation."

"He will," she assured him confidently.

"You seem to have an unlimited faith in St. Pierre," he replied a
little grimly.

"Yes, M'sieu David. He is the most wonderful man in the world. And he
will know what to do."

David shrugged his shoulders. "Perhaps, in some nice, quiet place, he
will follow the advice Bateese gave you--tie a stone round my neck and
sink me to the bottom of the river."

"Perhaps. But I don't think he will do that I should object to it."

"Oh, you would!"

"Yes. St. Pierre is big and strong, afraid of nothing in the world, but
he will do anything for me. I don't think he would kill you if I asked
him not to." She turned to resume her task of cleaning up the breakfast
things.

With a sudden movement David swung one of the' big chairs close to her.
"Please sit down," he commanded. "I can talk to you better that way. As
an officer of the law it is my duty to ask you a few questions. It
rests in your power to answer all of them or none of them. I have given
you my word not to act until I have seen St. Pierre, and I shall keep
that promise. But when we do meet I shall act largely on the strength
of what you tell me during the next tea minutes. Please sit down!"




X


In that big, deep chair which must have been St. Pierre's own,
Marie-Anne sat facing Carrigan. Between its great arms her slim little
figure seemed diminutive and out of place. Her brown eyes were level
and clear, waiting. They were not warm or nervous, but so coolly and
calmly beautiful that they disturbed Carrigan. She raised her hands,
her slim fingers crumpling for a moment in the soft, thick coils of her
hair. That little movement, the unconscious feminism of it, the way she
folded her hands in her lap afterward, disturbed Carrigan even more.
What a glory on earth it must be to possess a woman like that! The
thought made him uneasy. And she sat waiting, a vivid, softly-breathing
question-mark against the warm coloring of the upholstered chair.

"When you shot me," he began, "I saw you, first, standing over me. I
thought you had come to finish me. It was then that I saw something in
your face--horror, amazement, as though you had done something you did
not know you were doing. You see, I want to be charitable. I want to
understand. I want to excuse you if I can. Won't you tell me why you
shot me, and why that change came over you when you saw me lying there?"

"No, M'sieu David, I shall not tell." She was not antagonistic or
defiant. Her voice was not raised, nor did it betray an unusual
emotion. It was simply decisive, and the unflinching steadiness of her
eyes and the way in which she sat with her hands folded gave to it an
unqualified definiteness.

"You mean that I must make my own guess?"

She nodded.

"Or get it out of St. Pierre?"

"If St. Pierre wishes to tell you, yes."

"Well--" He leaned a little toward her. "After that you dragged me up
into the shade, dressed my wound and made me comfortable. In a hazy
sort of way I knew what was going on. And a curious thing happened. At
times--" he leaned still a little nearer to her--"at times--there
seemed to be two of you!"

He was not looking at her hands, or he would have seen her fingers
slowly tighten in her lap.

"You were badly hurt," she said. "It is not strange that you should
have imagined things, M'sieu David."

"And I seemed to hear two voices," he went on.

She made no answer, but continued to look at him steadily.

"And the other had hair that was like copper and gold fire in the sun.
I would see your face and then hers, again and again--and--since
then--I have thought I was a heavy load for your hands to drag up
through that sand to the shade alone."

She held up her two hands, looking at them. "They are strong," she said.

"They are small," he insisted, "and I doubt if they could drag me
across this floor."

For the first time the quiet of her eyes gave way to a warm fire. "It
was hard work," she said, and the note in her voice gave him warning
that he was approaching the dead-line again. "Bateese says I was a fool
for doing it. And if you saw two of me, or three or four, it doesn't
matter. Are you through questioning me, M'sieu David? If so, I have a
number of things to do."

He made a gesture of despair. "No, I am not through. But why ask you
questions if you won't answer them?"

"I simply can not. You must wait."

"For your husband?"

"Yes, for St. Pierre."

He was silent for a moment, then said, "I raved about a number of
things when I was sick, didn't I?"

"You did, and especially about what you thought happened in the sand.
You called this--this other person--the Fire Goddess. You were so near
dying that of course it wasn't amusing. Otherwise it would have been.
You see MY hair is black, almost!" Again, in a quick movement, her
fingers were crumpling the lustrous coils on the crown of her head.

"Why do you say 'almost'?" he asked.

"Because St. Pierre has often told me that when I am in the sun there
are red fires in it. And the sun was very bright that afternoon in the
sand, M'sieu David."

"I think I understand," he nodded. "And I'm rather glad, too. I like to
know that it was you who dragged me up into the shade after trying to
kill me. It proves you aren't quite so savage as--"

"Carmin Fanchet," she interrupted him softly. "You talked about her in
your sickness, M'sieu David. It made me terribly afraid of you--so much
so that at times I almost wondered if Bateese wasn't right. It made me
understand what would happen to me if I should let you go. What
terrible thing did she do to you? What could she have done more
terrible than I have done?"

"Is that why you have given your men orders to kill me if I try to
escape?" he asked. "Because I talked about this woman, Carmin Fanchet?"

"Yes, it is because of Carmin Fanchet that I am keeping you for St.
Pierre," she acknowledged. "If you had no mercy for her, you could have
none for me. What terrible thing did she do to you, M'sieu?"

"Nothing--to me," he said, feeling that she was putting him where the
earth was unsteady under his feet again. "But her brother was a
criminal of the worst sort. And I was convinced then, and am convinced
now, that his sister was a partner in his crimes. She was very
beautiful. And that, I think, was what saved her."

He was fingering his unlighted cigar as he spoke. When he looked up, he
was surprised at the swift change that had come into the face of St.
Pierre's wife. Her cheeks were flaming, and there were burning fires
screened behind the long lashes of her eyes. But her voice was
unchanged. It was without a quiver that betrayed the emotion which had
sent the hot flush into her face.

"Then--you judged her without absolute knowledge of fact? You judged
her--as you hinted in your fever--because she fought so desperately to
save a brother who had gone wrong?"

"I believe she was bad."

The long lashes fell lower, like fringes of velvet closing over the
fires in her eyes. "But you didn't know!"

"Not absolutely," he conceded. "But investigations--"

"Might have shown her to be one of the most wonderful women that ever
lived, M'sieu David. It is not hard to fight for a good brother--but if
he is bad, it may take an angel to do it!"

He stared, thoughts tangling themselves in his head. A slow shame crept
over him. She had cornered him. She had convicted him of unfairness to
the one creature on earth his strength and his manhood were bound to
protect--a woman. She had convicted him of judging without fact. And in
his head a voice seemed to cry out to him, "What did Carmin Fanchet
ever do to you?"

He rose suddenly to his feet and stood at the back of his chair, his
hands gripping the top of it. "Maybe you are right," he said. "Maybe I
was wrong. I remember now that when I got Fanchet I manacled him, and
she sat beside him all through that first night. I didn't intend to
sleep, but I was tired--and did. I must have slept for an hour, and SHE
roused me--trying to get the key to the handcuffs. She had the
opportunity then--to kill me."

Triumph swept over the face that was looking up at him. "Yes, she could
have killed you--while you slept. But she didn't. WHY?"

"I don't know. Perhaps she had the idea of getting the key and letting
her brother do the job. Two or three days later I am convinced she
would not have hesitated. I caught her twice trying to steal my gun.
And a third time, late at night, when we were within a day or two of
Athabasca Landing, she almost got me with a club. So I concede that she
never did anything very terrible to me. But I am sure that she tried,
especially toward the last."

"And because she failed, she hated you; and because she hated you,
something was warped inside you, and you made up your mind she should
be punished along with her brother. You didn't look at it from a
woman's viewpoint. A woman will fight, and kill, to save one she loves.
She tried, perhaps, and failed. The result was that her brother was
killed by the Law. Was not that enough? Was it fair or honest to
destroy her simply because you thought she might be a partner in her
brother's crimes?"

"It is rather strange," he replied, a moment of indecision in his
voice. "McVane, the superintendent, asked me that same question. I
thought he was touched by her beauty. And I'm sorry--very sorry--that I
talked about her when I was sick. I don't want you to think I am a bad
sort--that way. I'm going to think about it. I'm going over the whole
thing again, from the time I manacled Fanchet, and if I find that I was
wrong--and I ever meet Carmin Fanchet again--I shall not be ashamed to
get down on my knees and ask her pardon, Marie-Anne!"

For the first time he spoke the name which she had given him permission
to use. And she noticed it. He could not help seeing that--a flashing
instant in which the indefinable confession of it was in her face, as
though his use of it had surprised her, or pleased her, or both. Then
it was gone.

She did not answer, but rose from the big chair, and went to the
window, and stood with her back toward him, looking out over the river.
And then, suddenly, they heard a voice. It was the voice he had heard
twice in his sickness, the voice that had roused him from his sleep
last night, crying out in his room for Black Roger Audemard. It came to
him distinctly through the open door in a low and moaning monotone. He
had not taken his eyes from the slim figure of St. Pierre's wife, and
he saw a little tremor pass through her now.

"I heard that voice--again--last night," said David. "It was in this
cabin, asking for Black Roger Audemard."

She did not seem to hear him, and he also turned so that he was looking
at the open door of the cabin.

The sun, pouring through in a golden flood, was all at once darkened,
and in the doorway--framed vividly against the day--was the figure of a
man. A tense breath came to Carrigan's lips. At first he felt a shock,
then an overwhelming sense of curiosity and of pity. The man was
terribly deformed. His back and massive shoulders were so twisted and
bent that he stood no higher than a twelve-year-old boy; yet standing
straight, he would have been six feet tall if an inch, and splendidly
proportioned. And in that same breath with which shock and pity came to
him, David knew that it was accident and not birth that had malformed
the great body that stood like a crouching animal in the open door. At
first he saw only the grotesqueness of it--the long arms that almost
touched the floor, the broken back, the twisted shoulders--and then,
with a deeper thrill, he saw nothing of these things but only the face
and the head of the man. There was something god-like about them,
fastened there between the crippled shoulders. It was not beauty, but
strength--the strength of rock, of carven granite, as if each feature
had been chiseled out of something imperishable and everlasting, yet
lacking strangely and mysteriously the warm illumination that comes
from a living soul. The man was not old, nor was he young. And he did
not seem to see Carrigan, who stood nearest to him. He was looking at
St. Pierre's wife.

The look which David saw in her face was infinitely tender. She was
smiling at the misshapen hulk in the door as she might have smiled at a
little child. And David, looking back at the wide, deep-set eyes of the
man, saw the slumbering fire of a dog-like worship in them. They
shifted slowly, taking in the cabin, questing, seeking, searching for
something which they could not find. The lips moved, and again he heard
that weird and mysterious monotone, as if the plaintive voice of a
child were coming out of the huge frame of the man, crying out as it
had cried last night, "HAS-ANY-ONE-SEEN-BLACK-ROGER-AUDEMARD?"

In another moment St. Pierre's wife was at the deformed giant's side.
She seemed tall beside him. She put her hands to his head and brushed
back the grizzled black hair, laughing softly into his upturned face,
her eyes shining and a strange glow in her cheeks. Carrigan, looking at
them, felt his heart stand still. WAS THIS MAN ST. PIERRE? The thought
came like a lightning flash--and went as quickly; it was impossible and
inconceivable. And yet there was something more than pity in the voice
of the woman who was speaking now.

"No, no, we have not seen him, Andre--we have not seen Black Roger
Audemard. If he comes, I will call you. I promise, Michiwan. I will
call you!"

She was stroking his bearded cheek, and then she put an arm about his
twisted shoulders, and slowly she turned so that in a moment or two
they were facing the sun--and it seemed to Carrigan that she was
talking and sobbing and laughing in the same breath, as that great,
broken hulk of a man moved out slowly from under the caress of her arm
and went on his way. For a space she looked after him. Then in a swift
movement she closed the door and faced Carrigan. She did not speak, but
waited. Her head was high. She was breathing quickly. The tenderness
that a moment before had filled her face was gone, and in her eyes was
the blaze of fighting fires as she waited for him to speak--to give
voice to what she knew was passing in his mind.




XI

For a space there was silence between Carrigan and St. Pierre's wife.
He knew what she was thinking as she stood with her back to the door,
waiting half defiantly, her cheeks still flushed, her eyes bright with
the anticipation of battle. She was ready to fight for the broken
creature on the other side of the door. She expected him to give no
quarter in his questioning of her, to corner her if he could, to demand
of her why the deformed giant had spoken the name of the man he was
after, Black Roger Audemard. The truth hammered in David's brain. It
had not been a delusion of his fevered mind after all; it was not a
possible deception of the half-breed's, as he had thought last night.
Chance had brought him face to face with the mystery of Black Roger.
St. Pierre's wife, waiting for him to speak, was in some way associated
with that mystery, and the cripple was asking for the man McVane had
told him to bring in dead or alive! Yet he did not question her. He
turned to the window and looked out from where Marie-Anne had stood a
few moments before.

The day was glorious. On the far shore he saw life where last night's
camp had been. Men were moving about close to the water, and a York
boat was putting out slowly into the stream. Close under the window
moved a canoe with a single occupant. It was Andre, the Broken Man.
With powerful strokes he was paddling across the river. His deformity
was scarcely noticeable in the canoe. His bare head and black beard
shone in the sun, and between his great shoulders his head looked more
than ever to Carrigan like the head of a carven god. And this man, like
a mighty tree stricken by lightning, his mind gone, was yet a thing
that was more than mere flesh and blood to Marie-Anne Boulain!

David turned toward her. Her attitude was changed. It was no longer one
of proud defiance. She had expected to defend herself from something,
and he had given her no occasion for defense. She did not try to hide
the fact from him, and he nodded toward the window.

"He is going away in a canoe. I am afraid you didn't want me to see
him, and I am sorry I happened to be here when he came."

"I made no effort to keep him away, M'sieu David. Perhaps I wanted you
to see him. And I thought, when you did--" She hesitated.

"You expected me to crucify you, if necessary, to learn the truth of
what he knows about Roger Audemard," he said. "And you were ready to
fight back. But I am not going to question you unless you give me
permission."

"I am glad," she said in a low voice. "I am beginning to have faith in
you, M'sieu David. You have promised not to try to escape, and I
believe you. Will you also promise not to ask me questions, which I can
not answer--until St. Pierre comes?"

"I will try."

She came up to him slowly and stood facing him, so near that she could
have reached out and put her hands on his shoulders.

"St. Pierre has told me a great deal about the Scarlet Police," she
said, looking at him quietly and steadily. "He says that the men who
wear the red jackets never play low tricks, and that they come after a
man squarely and openly. He says they are men, and many times he has
told me wonderful stories of the things they have done. He calls it
'playing the game.' And I'm going to ask you, M'sieu David, will you
play square with me? If I give you the freedom of the bateau, of the
boats, even of the shore, will you wait for St. Pierre and play the
rest of the game out with him, man to man?"

Carrigan bowed his head slightly. "Yes, I will wait and finish the game
with St. Pierre."

He saw a quick throb come and go in her white throat, and with a
sudden, impulsive movement she held out her hand to him. For a moment
he held it close. Her little fingers tightened about his own, and the
warm thrill of them set his blood leaping with the thing he was
fighting down. She was so near that he could feel the throb of her
body. For an instant she bowed her head, and the sweet perfume of her
hair was in his nostrils, the lustrous beauty of it close under his
lips.

Gently she withdrew her hand and stood back from him. To Carrigan she
was like a young girl now. It was the loveliness of girlhood he saw in
the flush of her face and in the gladness that was flaming unashamed in
her eyes.

"I am not frightened any more," she exclaimed, her voice trembling a
bit. "When St. Pierre comes, I shall tell him everything. And then you
may ask the questions, and he will answer. And he will not cheat! He
will play square. You will love St. Pierre, and you will forgive me for
what happened behind the rock!"

She made a little gesture toward the door. "Everything is free to you
out there now," she added. "I shall tell Bateese and the others. When
we are tied up, you may go ashore. And we will forget all that has
happened, M'sieu David. We will forget until St. Pierre comes."

"St. Pierre!" he groaned. "If there were no St. Pierre!"

"I should be lost," she broke in quickly. "I should want to die!"

Through the open window came the sound of a voice. It was the weird
monotone of Andre, the Broken Man. Marie-Anne went to the window. And
David, following her, looked over her head, again so near that his lips
almost touched her hair. Andre had come back. He was watching two York
boats that were heading for the bateau.

"You heard him asking for Black Roger Audemard," she said. "It is
strange. I know how it must have shocked you when he stood like that in
the door. His mind, like his body, is a wreck, M'sieu David. Years ago,
after a great storm, St. Pierre found him in the forest. A tree had
fallen on him. St. Pierre carried him in on his shoulders. He lived,
but he has always been like that. St. Pierre loves him, and poor Andre
worships St. Pierre and follows him about like a dog. His brain is
gone. He does not know what his name is, and we call him Andre. And
always, day and night, he is asking that same question, 'Has any one
seen Black Roger Audemard?' Sometime--if you will, M'sieu David--I
should like to have you tell me what it is so terrible that you know
about Roger Audemard."

The York boats were half-way across the river, and from them came a
sudden burst of wild song. David could make out six men in each boat,
their oars flashing in the morning sun to the rhythm of their chant.
Marie-Anne looked up at him suddenly, and in her face and eyes he saw
what the starry gloom of evening had half hidden from him in those
thrilling moments when they shot through the rapids of the Holy Ghost.
She was girl now. He did not think of her as woman. He did not think of
her as St. Pierre's wife. In that upward glance of her eyes was
something that thrilled him to the depth of his soul. She seemed, for a
moment, to have dropped a curtain from between herself and him.

Her red lips trembled, she smiled at him, and then she faced the river
again, and he leaned a little forward, so that a breath of wind floated
a shimmering tress of her hair against his cheek. An irresistible
impulse seized upon him. He leaned still nearer to her, holding his
breath, until his lips softly touched one of the velvety coils of her
hair. And then he stepped back. Shame swept over him. His heart rose
and choked him, and his fists were clenched at his side. She had not
noticed what he had done, and she seemed to him like a bird yearning to
fly out through the window, throbbing with the desire to answer the
chanting song that came over the water. And then she was smiling up
again into his face hardened with the struggle which he was making with
himself.

"My people are happy," she cried. "Even in storm they laugh and sing.
Listen, m'sieu. They are singing La Derniere Domaine. That is our song.
It is what we call our home, away up there in the lost wilderness where
people never come--the Last Domain. Their wives and sweethearts and
families are up there, and they are happy in knowing that today we
shall travel a few miles nearer to them. They are not like your people
in Montreal and Ottawa and Quebec, M'sieu David. They are like
children. And yet they are glorious children!"

She ran to the wall and took down the banner of St. Pierre Boulain.
"St. Pierre is behind us," she explained. "He is coming down with a
raft of timber such as we can not get in our country, and we are
waiting for him. But each day we must float down with the stream a few
miles nearer the homes of my people. It makes them happier, even though
it is but a few miles. They are coming now for my bateau. We shall
travel slowly, and it will be wonderful on a day like this. It will do
you good to come outside, M'sieu David--with me. Would you care for
that? Or would you rather be alone?"

In her face there was no longer the old restraint. On her lips was the
witchery of a half-smile; in her eyes a glow that flamed the blood in
his veins. It was not a flash of coquetry. It was something deeper and
warmer than that, something real--a new Marie-Anne Boulain telling him
plainly that she wanted him to come. He did not know that his hands
were still clenched at his side. Perhaps she knew. But her eyes did not
leave his face, eyes that were repeating the invitation of her lips,
openly asking him not to refuse.

"I shall be happy to come," he said.

The words fell out of him numbly. He scarcely heard them or knew what
he was saying, yet he was conscious of the unnatural note in his voice.
He did not know he was betraying himself beyond that, did not see the
deepening of the wild-rose flush in the cheeks of St. Pierre's wife. He
picked up his pipe from the table and moved to accompany her.

"You must wait a little while," she said, and her hand rested for an
instant upon his arm. Its touch was as light as the touch of his lips
had been against her shining hair, but he felt it in every nerve of his
body. "Nepapinas is making a special lotion for your hurt. I will send
him in, and then you may come."

The wild chant of the rivermen was near as she turned to the door. From
it she looked back at him swiftly.

"They are happy, M'sieu David," she repeated softly. "And I, too, am
happy. I am no longer afraid. And the world is beautiful again. Can you
guess why? It is because you have given me your promise, M'sieu David,
and because I believe you!"

And then she was gone.

For many minutes he did not move. The chanting of the rivermen, a
sudden wilder shout, the voices of men, and after that the grating of
something alongside the bateau came to him like sounds from another
world. Within himself there was a crash greater than that of physical
things. It was the truth breaking upon him, truth surging over him like
the waves of a sea, breaking down the barriers he had set up,
inundating him with a force that was mightier than his own will. A
voice in his soul was crying out the truth--that above all else in the
world he wanted to reach out his arms to this glorious creature who was
the wife of St. Pierre, this woman who had tried to kill him and was
sorry. He knew that it was not desire for beauty. It was the worship
which St. Pierre himself must have for this woman who was his wife. And
the shock of it was like a conflagration sweeping through him, leaving
him dead and shriven, like the crucified trees standing in the wake of
a fire. A breath that was almost a cry came from him, and his fists
knotted until they were purple. She was St. Pierre's wife! And he,
David Carrigan, proud of his honor, proud of the strength that made him
man, had dared covet her in this hour when her husband was gone! He
stared at the closed door, beginning to cry out against himself, and
over him there swept slowly and terribly another thing--the shame of
his weakness, the hopelessness of the thing that for a space had eaten
into him and consumed him.

And as he stared, the door opened, and Nepapinas came in.




XII


During the next quarter of an hour David was as silent as the old
Indian doctor. He was conscious of no pain when Nepapinas took off his
bandage and bathed his head in the lotion he had brought. Before a
fresh bandage was put on, he looked at himself for a moment in the
mirror. It was the first time he had seen his wound, and he expected to
find himself marked with a disfiguring scar. To his surprise there was
no sign of his hurt except a slightly inflamed spot above his temple.
He stared at Nepapinas, and there was no need of the question that was
in his mind.

The old Indian understood, and his dried-up face cracked and crinkled
in a grin. "Bullet hit a piece of rock, an' rock, not bullet, hit um
head," he explained. "Make skull almost break--bend um in--but
Nepapinas straighten again with fingers, so-so." He shrugged his thin
shoulders with a cackling laugh of pride as he worked his claw-like
fingers to show how the operation had been done.

David shook hands with him in silence; then Nepapinas put on the fresh
bandage, and after that went out, chuckling again in his weird way, as
though he had played a great joke on the white man whom his wizardry
had snatched out of the jaws of death.

For some time there had been a subdued activity outside. The singing of
the boatmen had ceased, a low voice was giving commands, and looking
through the window, David saw that the bateau was slowly swinging away
from the shore. He turned from the window to the table and lighted the
cigar St. Pierre's wife had given him.

In spite of the mental struggle he had made during the presence of
Nepapinas, he had failed to get a grip on himself. For a time he had
ceased to be David Carrigan, the man-hunter. A few days ago his blood
had run to that almost savage thrill of the great game of one against
one, the game in which Law sat on one side of the board and Lawlessness
on the other, with the cards between. It was the great gamble. The
cards meant life or death; there was never a checkmate--one or the
other had to lose. Had some one told him then that soon he would meet
the broken and twisted hulk of a man who had known Black Roger
Audemard, every nerve in him would have thrilled in anticipation of
that hour. He realized this as he paced back and forth over the thick
rugs of the bateau floor. And he knew, even as he struggled to bring
them back, that the old thrill and the old desire were gone. It was
impossible to lie to himself. St. Pierre, in this moment, was of more
importance to him than Roger Audemard. And St. Pierre's wife,
Marie-Anne--

His eyes fell on the crumpled handkerchief on the piano keys. Again he
was crushing it in the palm of his hand, and again the flood of
humiliation and shame swept over him. He dropped the handkerchief, and
the great law of his own life seemed to rise up in his face and taunt
him. He was clean. That had been his greatest pride. He hated the man
who was unclean. It was his instinct to kill the man who desecrated
another man's home. And here, in the sacredness of St. Pierre's
paradise, he found himself at last face to face with that greatest
fight of all the ages.

He faced the door. He threw back his shoulders until they snapped, and
he laughed, as if at the thing that had risen up to point its finger at
him. After all, it did not hurt a man to go through a bit of fire--if
he came out of it unburned. And deep in his heart he knew it was not a
sin to love, even as he loved, if he kept that love to himself. What he
had done when Marie-Anne stood at the window he could not undo. St.
Pierre would probably have killed him for touching her hair with his
lips, and he would not have blamed St. Pierre. But she had not felt
that stolen caress. No one knew--but himself. And he was happier
because of it. It was a sort of sacred thing, even though it brought
the heat of shame into his face.

He went to the door, opened it, and stood out in the sunshine. It was
good to feel the warmth of the sun in his face again and the sweet air
of the open day in his lungs. The bateau was free of the shore and
drifting steadily towards midstream. Bateese was at the great birchwood
rudder sweep, and to David's surprise he nodded in a friendly way, and
his wide mouth broke into a grin.

"Ah, it is coming soon, that fight of ours, little coq de bruyere!" he
chuckled gloatingly. "An' ze fight will be jus' lak that, m'sieu--you
ze little fool-hen's rooster, ze partridge, an' I, Concombre Bateese,
ze eagle!"

The anticipation in the half-breed's eyes reflected itself for an
instant in David's. He turned back into the cabin, bent over his pack,
and found among his clothes two pairs of boxing gloves. He fondled them
with the loving touch of a brother and comrade, and their velvety
smoothness was more soothing to his nerves than the cigar he was
smoking. His one passion above all others was boxing, and wherever he
went, either on pleasure or adventure, the gloves went with him. In
many a cabin and shack of the far hinterland he had taught white men
and Indians how to use them, so that he might have the pleasure of
feeling the thrill of them on his hands. And now here was Concombre
Bateese inviting him on, waiting for him to get well!

He went out and dangled the clumsy-looking mittens under the
half-breed's nose.

Bateese looked at them curiously. "Mitaines," he nodded. "Does ze
little partridge rooster keep his claws warm in those in ze winter?
They are clumsy, m'sieu. I can make a better mitten of caribou skin."
Putting on one of the gloves, David doubled up his fist. "Do you see
that, Concombre Bateese?" he asked. "Well, I will tell you this, that
they are not mittens to keep your hands warm. I am going to fight you
in them when our time comes. With these mittens I will fight you and
your naked fists. Why? Because I do not want to hurt you too badly,
friend Bateese! I do not want to break your face all to pieces, which I
would surely do if I did not put on these soft mittens. Then, when you
have really learned to fight--"

The bull neck of Concombre Bateese looked as if it were about to burst.
His eyes seemed ready to pop out of their sockets, and suddenly he let
out a roar. "What!--You dare talk lak that to Concombre Bateese, w'at
is great'st fightin' man on all T'ree River? You talk lak that to me,
Concombre Bateese, who will kill ze bear wit' hees ban's, who pull down
ze tree, who--who--"

The word-flood of his outraged dignity sprang to his lips; emotion
choked him, and then, looking suddenly over Carrigan's shoulder--he
stopped. Something in his look made David turn. Three paces behind him
stood Marie-Anne, and he knew that from the corner of the cabin she had
heard what had passed between them. She was biting her lips, and behind
the flash of her eyes he saw laughter.

"You must not quarrel, children," she said. "Bateese, you are steering
badly."

She reached out her hands, and without a word David gave her the
gloves. With her palm and fingers she caressed them softly, yet David
saw little lines of doubt come into her white forehead.

"They are pretty--and soft, M'sieu David. Surely they can not hurt
much! Some day when St. Pierre comes, will you teach me how to use
them?"

"Always it is 'When St. Pierre comes,'" he replied. "Shall we be
waiting long?"

"Two or three days, perhaps a little longer. Are you coming with me to
the proue, m'sieu?"

She did not wait for his answer, but went ahead of him, dangling the
two pairs of gloves at her side. David caught a last glimpse of the
half-breed's face as he followed Marie-Anne around the end of the
cabin. Bateese was making a frightful grimace and shaking his huge
fist, but scarcely were they out of sight on the narrow footway that
ran between the cabin and the outer timbers of the scow when a huge
roar of laughter followed them. Bateese had not done laughing when they
reached the proue, or bow-nest, a deck fully ten feet in length by
eight in width, sheltered above by an awning, and comfortably arranged
with chairs, several rugs, a small table, and, to David's amazement, a
hammock. He had never seen anything like this on the Three Rivers, nor
had he ever heard of a scow so large or so luxuriously appointed. Over
his head, at the tip of a flagstaff attached to the forward end of the
cabin, floated the black and white pennant of St. Pierre Boulain. And
under this staff was a screened door which undoubtedly opened into the
kitchenette which Marie-Anne had told him about. He made no effort to
hide his surprise. But St. Pierre's wife seemed not to notice it. The
puckery little lines were still in her forehead, and the laughter had
faded out of her eyes. The tiny lines deepened as there came another
wild roar of laughter from Bateese in the stern.

"Is it true that you have given your word to fight Bateese?" she asked.

"It is true, Marie-Anne. And I feel that Bateese is looking ahead
joyously to the occasion."

"He is," she affirmed. "Last night he spread the news among all my
people. Those who left to join St. Pierre this morning have taken the
news with them, and there is a great deal of excitement and much
betting. I am afraid you have made a bad promise. No man has offered to
fight Bateese in three years--not even my great St. Pierre, who says
that Concombre is more than a match for him."

"And yet they must have a little doubt, as there is betting, and it
takes two to make a bet," chuckled David.

The lines went out of Marie-Anne's forehead, and a half-smile trembled
on her red lips. "Yes, there is betting. But those who are for you are
offering next autumn's muskrat skins and frozen fish against lynx and
fisher and marten. The odds are about thirty to one against you, M'sieu
David!"

The look of pity which was clearly in her eyes brought a rush of blood
to David's face. "If only I had something to wager!" he groaned.

"You must not fight. I shall forbid it!"

"Then Bateese and I will steal off into the forest and have it out by
ourselves."

"He will hurt you badly. He is terrible, like a great beast, when he
fights. He loves to fight and is always asking if there is not some one
who will stand up to him. I think he would desert even me for a good
fight. But you, M'sieu David--"

"I also love a fight," he admitted, unashamed.

St. Pierre's wife studied him thoughtfully for a moment. "With these?"
she asked then, holding up the gloves.

"Yes, with those. Bateese may use his fists, but I shall use those, so
that I shall not disfigure him permanently. His face is none too
handsome as it is."

For another flash her lips trembled on the edge of a smile. Then she
gave him the gloves, a bit troubled, and nodded to a chair with a deep,
cushioned seat and wide arms. "Please make yourself comfortable, M'sieu
David. I have something to do in the cabin and will return in a little
while."

He wondered if she had gone back to settle the matter with Bateese at
once, for it was clear that she did not regard with favor the promised
bout between himself and the half-breed. It was on the spur of a
careless moment that he had promised to fight Bateese, and with little
thought that it was likely to be carried out or that it would become a
matter of importance with all of St. Pierre's brigade. He was evidently
in for it, he told himself, and as a fighting man it looked as though
Concombre Bateese was at least the equal of his braggadocio. He was
glad of that. He grinned as he watched the bending backs of St.
Pierre's men. So they were betting thirty to one against him! Even St.
Pierre might be induced to bet--with HIM. And if he did--

The hot blood leaped for a moment in Carrigan's veins. The thrill went
to the tips of his fingers. He stared out over the river, unseeing, as
the possibilities of the thing that had come into his mind made him for
a moment oblivious of the world. He possessed one thing against which
St. Pierre and St. Pierre's wife would wager a half of all they owned
in the world! And if he should gamble that one thing, which had come to
him like an inspiration, and should whip Bateese--

He began to pace back and forth over the narrow deck, no longer
watching the rowers or the shore. The thought grew, and his mind was
consumed by it. Thus far, from the moment the first shot was fired at
him from the ambush, he had been playing with adventure in the dark.
But fate had at last dealt him a trump card. That something which he
possessed was more precious than furs or gold to St. Pierre, and St.
Pierre would not refuse the wager when it was offered. He would not
dare refuse. More than that, he would accept eagerly, strong in the
faith that Bateese would whip him as he had whipped all other fighters
who had come up against him along the Three Rivers. And when Marie-Anne
knew what that wager was to be, she, too, would pray for the gods of
chance to be with Concombre Bateese!

He did not hear the light footsteps behind him, and when he turned
suddenly in his pacing, he found himself facing Marie-Anne, who carried
in her hands the little basket he had seen on the cabin table. She
seated herself in the hammock and took from the basket a bit of lace
work. For a moment he watched her fingers flashing in and out with the
needles.

Perhaps his thought went to her. He was almost frightened as he saw her
cheeks coloring under the long, dark lashes. He faced the rivermen
again, and while he gripped at his own weakness, he tried to count the
flashings of their oars. And behind him, the beautiful eyes of St.
Pierre's wife were looking at him with a strange glow in their depths.

"Do you know," he said, speaking slowly and still looking toward the
flashing of the oars, "something tells me that unexpected things are
going to happen when St. Pierre returns. I am going to make a bet with
him that I can whip Bateese. He will not refuse. He will accept. And
St. Pierre will lose, because I shall whip Bateese. It is then that
these unexpected things will begin to happen. And I am wondering--after
they do happen--if you will care so very much?"

There was a moment of silence. And then, "I don't want you to fight
Bateese," she said.

The needles were working swiftly when he turned toward her again, and a
second time the long lashes shadowed what a moment before he might have
seen in her eyes.




XIII


The morning passed like a dream to Carrigan. He permitted himself to
live and breathe it as one who finds himself for a space in the heart
of a golden mirage. He was sitting so near Marie-Anne that now and then
the faint perfume of her came to him like the delicate scent of a
flower. It was a breath of crushed violets, sweet as the air he was
breathing, violets gathered in the deep cool of the forest, a whisper
of sweetness about her, as if on her bosom she wore always the living
flowers. He fancied her gathering them last bloom-time, a year ago,
alone, her feet seeking out the damp mosses, her little fingers
plucking the smiling and laughing faces of the violet flowers to be
treasured away in fragrant sachets, as gentle as the wood-thrush's
note, compared with the bottled aromas fifteen hundred miles south. It
seemed to be a physical part of her, a thing born of the glow in her
cheeks, a living exhalation of her soft red lips--and yet only when he
was near, very near, did the life of it reach him.

She did not know he was thinking these things. There was nothing in his
voice, he thought, to betray him. He was sure she was unconscious of
the fight he was making. Her eyes smiled and laughed with him, she
counted her stitches, her fingers worked, and she talked to him as she
might have talked to a friend of St. Pierre's. She told him how St.
Pierre had made the barge, the largest that had ever been on the river,
and that he had built it entirely of dry cedar, so that it floated like
a feather wherever there was water enough to run a York boat. She told
him how St. Pierre had brought the piano down from Edmonton, and how he
had saved it from pitching in the river by carrying the full weight of
it on his shoulders when they met with an accident in running through a
dangerous rapids bringing it down. St. Pierre was a very strong man,
she said, a note of pride in her voice. And then she added,

"Sometimes, when he picks me up in his arms, I feel that he is going to
squeeze the life out of me!"

Her words were like a sharp thrust into his heart. For an instant they
painted a vision for him, a picture of that slim and adorable creature
crushed close in the great arms of St. Pierre, so close that she could
not breathe. In that mad moment of his hurt it was almost a living,
breathing reality for him there on the golden fore-deck of the scow. He
turned his face toward the far shore, where the wilderness seemed to
reach off into eternity. What a glory it was--the green seas of spruce
and cedar and balsam, the ridges of poplar and birch rising like
silvery spume above the darker billows, and afar off, mellowed in the
sun-mists, the guardian crests of Trout Mountains sentineling the
country beyond! Into that mystery-land on the farther side of the
Wabiskaw waterways Carrigan would have loved to set his foot four days
ago. It was that mystery of the unpeopled places that he most desired,
their silence, the comradeship of spaces untrod by the feet of man. And
now, what a fool he was! Through vast distances the forests he loved
seemed to whisper it to him, and ahead of him the river seemed to look
back, nodding over its shoulder, beckoning to him, telling him the word
of the forests was true. It streamed on lazily, half a mile wide, as if
resting for the splashing and roaring rush it would make among the
rocks of the next rapids, and in its indolence it sang the low and
everlasting song of deep and slowly passing water. In that song David
heard the same whisper, that he was a fool! And the lure of the
wilderness shores crept in on him and gripped him as of old. He looked
at the rowers in the two York boats, and then his eyes came back to the
end of the barge and to St. Pierre's wife.

Her little toes were tapping the floor of the deck. She, too, was
looking out over the wilderness. And again it seemed to him that she
was like a bird that wanted to fly.

"I should like to go into those hills," she said, without looking at
him. "Away off yonder!"

"And I--I should like to go with you."

"You love all that, m'sieu?" she asked.

"Yes, madame!"

"Why 'madame,' when I have given you permission to call me
'Marie-Anne'?" she demanded.

"Because you call me 'm'sieu'."

"But you--you have not given me permission--"

"Then I do now," he interrupted quickly.

"Merci! I have wondered why you did not return the courtesy," she
laughed softly. "I do not like the m'sieu. I shall call you 'David'!"

She rose out of the hammock suddenly and dropped her needles and lace
work into the little basket. "I have forgotten something. It is for you
to eat when it comes dinner-time, m'sieu--I mean David. So I must turn
fille de cuisine for a little while. That is what St. Pierre sometimes
calls me, because I love to play at cooking. I am going to bake a pie!"

The dark-screened door of the kitchenette closed behind her, and
Carrigan walked out from under the awning, so that the sun beat down
upon him. There was no longer a doubt in his mind. He was more than
fool. He envied St. Pierre, and he coveted that which St. Pierre
possessed. And yet, before he would take what did not belong to him, he
knew he would put a pistol to his head and blow his life out. He was
confident of himself there. Yet he had fallen, and out of the mire into
which he had sunk he knew also that he must drag himself, and quickly,
or be everlastingly lowered in his own esteem. He stripped himself
naked and did not lie to that other and greater thing of life that was
in him.

He was not only a fool, but a coward. Only a coward would have touched
the hair of St. Pierre's wife with his lips; only a coward would have
let live the thoughts that burned in his brain. She was St. Pierre's
wife--and he was anxious now for the quick homecoming of the chief of
the Boulains. After that everything would happen quickly. He thanked
God that the inspiration of the wager had come to him. After the fight,
after he had won, then once more would he be the old Dave Carrigan,
holding the trump hand in a thrilling game.

Loud voices from the York boats ahead and answering cries from Bateese
in the stern drew him to the open deck. The bateau was close to shore,
and the half-breed was working the long stern sweep as if the power of
a steam-engine was in his mighty arms. The York boats had shortened
their towline and were pulling at right angles within a few yards of a
gravelly beach. A few strokes more, and men who were bare to the knees
jumped out into shallow water and began tugging at the tow rope with
their hands. David looked at his watch. It was ten o'clock. Never in
his life had time passed so swiftly as that morning on the forward deck
of the barge. And now they were tying up, after a drop of six or eight
miles down the river, and he wondered how swiftly St. Pierre was
overtaking them with his raft.

He was filled with the desire to feel the soft crush of the earth under
his feet again, and not waiting for the long plank that Bateese was
already swinging from the scow to the shore, he made a leap that put
him on the sandy beach, St. Pierre's wife had given him this
permission, and he looked to see what effect his act had on the
half-breed. The face of Concombre Bateese was like sullen stone. Not a
sound came from his thick lips, but in his eyes was a deep and
dangerous fire as he looked at Carrigan. There was no need for words.
In them were suspicion, warning, the deadly threat of what would happen
if he did not come back when it was time to return. David nodded. He
understood. Even though St. Pierre's wife had faith in him, Bateese had
not. He passed between the men, and to a man their faces turned on him,
and in their quiet and watchful eyes he saw again that warning and
suspicion, the unspoken threat of what would happen if he forgot his
promise to Marie-Anne Boulain. Never, in a single outfit, had he seen
such splendid men. They were not a mongrel assortment of the lower
country. Slim, tall, clean-cut, sinewy--they were stock of the old
voyageurs of a hundred years ago, and all of them were young. The older
men had gone to St. Pierre. The reason for this dawned upon Carrigan.
Not one of these twelve but could beat him in a race through the
forest; not one that could not outrun him and cut him off though he had
hours the start!

Passing beyond them, he paused and looked back at the bateau. On the
forward deck stood Marie-Anne, and she, too, was looking at him now.
Even at that distance he saw that her face was quiet and troubled with
anxiety. She did not smile when he lifted his hat to her, but gave only
a little nod. Then he turned and buried himself in the green balsams
that grew within fifty paces of the river. The old joy of life leaped
into him as his feet crushed in the soft moss of the shaded places
where the sun did not break through. He went on, passing through a vast
and silent cathedral of spruce and cedar so dense that the sky was
hidden, and came then to higher ground, where the evergreen was
sprinkled with birch and poplar. About him was an invisible choir of
voices, the low twittering of timid little gray-backs, the song of
hidden--warblers, the scolding of distant jays. Big-eyed moose-birds
stared at him as he passed, fluttering so close to his face that they
almost touched his shoulders in their foolish inquisitiveness. A
porcupine crashed within a dozen feet of his trail. And then he came to
a beaten path, and other paths worn deep in the cool, damp earth by the
hoofs of moose and caribou. Half a mile from the bateau he sat down on
a rotting log and filled his pipe with fresh tobacco, while he listened
to catch the subdued voice of the life in this land that he loved.

It was then that the curious feeling came over him that he was not
alone, that other eyes than those of beast and bird were watching him.
It was an impression that grew on him. He seemed to feel their stare,
seeking him out from the darkest coverts, waiting for him to shove on,
dogging him like a ghost. Within him the hound-like instincts of the
man-hunter rose swiftly to the suspicion of invisible presence.

He began to note the changes in the cries of certain birds. A hundred
yards on his right a jay, most talkative of all the forest things, was
screeching with a new note in its voice. On the other side of him, in a
dense pocket of poplar and spruce, a warbler suddenly brought its song
to a jerky end. He heard the excited Pe-wee--Pe-wee--Pe-wee of a
startled little gray-back giving warning of an unwelcome intruder near
its nest. And he rose to his feet, laughing softly as he thumbed down
the tobacco in his pipe. Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain might believe in
him, but Bateese and her wary henchmen had ways of their own of
strengthening their faith.

It was close to noon when he turned back, and he did not return by the
moose path. Deliberately he struck out a hundred yards on either side
of it, traveling where the moss grew thick and the earth was damp and
soft. And five times he found the moccasin-prints of men.

Bateese, with his sleeves up, was scrubbing the deck of the bateau when
David came over the plank.

"There are moose and caribou in there, but I fear I disturbed your
hunters," said Carrigan, grinning at the half-breed. "They are too
clumsy to hunt well, so clumsy that even the birds give them away. I am
afraid we shall go without fresh meat tomorrow!"

Concombre Bateese stared as if some one had stunned him with a blow,
and he spoke no word as David went on to the forward deck. Marie-Anne
had come out under the awning. She gave a little cry of relief and
pleasure.

"I am glad you have come back, M'sieu David!"

"So am I, madame," he replied. "I think the woods are unhealthful to
travel in!"

Out of the earth he felt that a part of the old strength had returned
to him. Alone they sat at dinner, and Marie-Anne waited on him and
called him David again--and he found it easier now to call her
Marie-Anne and look into her eyes without fear that he was betraying
himself. A part of the afternoon he spent in her company, and it was
not difficult for him to tell her something of his adventuring in the
north, and how, body and soul, the northland had claimed him, and that
he hoped to die in it when his time came. Her eyes glowed at that. She
told him of two years she had spent in Montreal and Quebec, of her
homesickness, her joy when she returned to her forests. It seemed, for
a time, that they had forgotten St. Pierre. They did not speak of him.
Twice they saw Andre, the Broken Man, but the name of Roger Audemard
was not spoken. And a little at a time she told him of the hidden
paradise of the Boulains away up in the unmapped wildernesses of the
Yellowknife beyond the Great Bear, and of the great log chateau that
was her home.

A part of the afternoon he spent on shore. He filled a moosehide bag
full of sand and suspended it from the limb of a tree, and for
three-quarters of an hour pommeled it with his fists, much to the
curiosity and amusement of St. Pierre's men, who could see nothing of
man-fighting in these antics. But the exercise assured David that he
had lost but little of his strength and that he would be in form to
meet Bateese when the time came. Toward evening Marie-Anne joined him,
and they walked for half an hour up and down the beach. It was Bateese
who got supper. And after that Carrigan sat with Marie-Anne on the
foredeck of the barge and smoked another of St. Pierre's cigars.

The camp of the rivermen was two hundred yards below the bateau,
screened between by a finger of hardwood, so that except when they
broke into a chorus of laughter or strengthened their throats with
snatches of song, there was no sound of their voices. But Bateese was
in the stern, and Nepapinas was forever flitting in and out among the
shadows on the shore, like a shadow himself, and Andre, the Broken Man,
hovered near as night came on. At last he sat down in the edge of the
white sand of the beach, and there he remained, a silent and lonely
figure, as the twilight deepened. Over the world hovered a sleepy
quiet. Out of the forest came the droning of the wood-crickets, the
last twitterings of the day birds, and the beginning of night sounds. A
great shadow floated out over the river close to the bateau, the first
of the questing, blood-seeking owls adventuring out like pirates from
their h

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