as a dozen others before Marie had slipped out of his memory. It was Nepeese now. He had never seen anything quite so beautiful as Pierrot's girl.
Audibly he cursed Pierrot as he looked at a sheet of paper under his hand, on which for an hour or more he had been making notes out of worn and dusty company ledgers. It was Pierrot who stood in his way. Pierrot's father, according to those notes, had been a full-blooded Frenchman. Therefore Pierrot was half French, and Nepeese was quarter French—though she was so beautiful he could have sworn there was not more than a drop or two of Indian blood in her veins. If they had been all Indian—Chipewyan, Cree, Ojibway, Dog Rib—anything—there would have been no trouble at all in the matter. He would have bent them to his power, and Nepeese would have come to his cabin, as Marie had come six months ago. But there was the accursed French of it! Pierrot and Nepeese were different. And yet—
He smiled grimly, and his hands clenched tighter. After all, was not his power sufficient? Would even Pierrot dare stand up against that? If Pierrot objected, he would drive him from the country—from the trapping regions that had come down to him as heritage from father and grandfather, and even before their day. He would make of Pierrot a wanderer and an outcast, as he had made wanderers and outcasts of a score of others who had lost his favor. No other Post would sell to or buy from Pierrot if Le Bete—the black cross—was put after his name. That was his power—a law of the factors that had come down through the centuries. It was a tremendous power for evil. It had brought him Marie, the slim, dark-eyed Cree girl, who hated him—and who in spite of her hatred "kept house for him."
That was the polite way of explaining her presence if explanations were ever necessary. McTaggart looked again at the notes he had made on the sheet of paper. Pierrot's trapping country, his own property according to the common law of the wilderness, was very valuable. During the last seven years he had received an average of a thousand dollars a year for his furs, for McTaggart had been unable to cheat Pierrot quite as completely as he had cheated the Indians. A thousand dollars a year! Pierrot would think twice before he gave that up. McTaggart chuckled as he crumpled the paper in his hand and prepared to put out the light. Under his close-cropped beard his reddish face blazed with the fire that was in his blood. It was an unpleasant face—like iron, merciless, filled with the look that gave him his name of Napao Wetikoo. His eyes gleamed, and he drew a quick breath as he put out the light.
He chuckled again as he made his way through the darkness to the door. Nepeese as good as belonged to him. He, would have her if it cost—PIERROT'S LIFE. And—WHY NOT? It was all so easy. A shot on a lonely trap line, a single knife thrust—and who would know? Who would guess where Pierrot had gone? And it would all be Pierrot's fault. For the last time he had seen Pierrot, he had made an honest proposition: he would marry Nepeese. Yes, even that. He had told Pierrot so. He had told Pierrot that when the latter was his father-in-law, he would pay him double price for furs.
And Pierrot had stared—had stared with that strange, stunned look in his face, like a man dazed by a blow from a club. And so if he did not get Nepeese without trouble it would all be Pierrot's fault. Tomorrow McTaggart would start again for the half-breed's country. And the next day Pierrot would have an answer for him. Bush McTaggart chuckled again as he went to bed.
Until the next to the last day Pierrot said nothing to Nepeese about what had passed between him and the factor at Lac Bain. Then he told her.
"He is a beast—a man-devil," he said, when he had finished. "I would rather see you out there—with her—dead." And he pointed to the tall spruce under which the princess mother lay.
Nepeese had not uttered a sound. But her eyes had grown bigger and darker, and there was a flush in her cheeks which Pierrot had never seen there before. She stood up when he had finished, and she seemed taller to him. Never had she looked quite so much like a woman, and Pierrot's eyes were deep-shadowed with fear and uneasiness as he watched her while she gazed off into the northwest—toward Lac Bain.
She was wonderful, this slip of a girl-woman. Her beauty troubled him. He had seen the look in Bush McTaggart's eyes. He had heard the thrill in McTaggart's voice. He had caught the desire of a beast in McTaggart's face. It had frightened him at first. But now—he was not frightened. He was uneasy, but his hands were clenched. In his heart there was a smoldering fire. At last Nepeese turned and came and sat down beside him again, at his feet.
"He is coming tomorrow, ma cherie," he said. "What shall I tell him?"
The Willow's lips were red. Her eyes shone. But she did not look up at her father.
"Nothing, Nootawe—except that you are to say to him that I am the one to whom he must come—for what he seeks."
Pierrot bent over and caught her smiling. The sun went down. His heart sank with it, like cold lead.
From Lac Bain to Pierrot's cabin the trail cut within half a mile of the beaver pond, a dozen miles from where Pierrot lived. And it was here, on a twist of the creek in which Wakayoo had caught fish for Baree, that Bush McTaggart made his camp for the night. Only twenty miles of the journey could be made by canoe, and as McTaggart was traveling the last stretch afoot, his camp was a simple affair—a few cut balsams, a light blanket, a small fire. Before he prepared his supper, the factor drew a number of copper wire snares from his small pack and spent half an hour in setting them in rabbit runways. This method of securing meat was far less arduous than carrying a gun in hot weather, and it was certain. Half a dozen snares were good for at least three rabbits, and one of these three was sure to be young and tender enough for the frying pan. After he had placed his snares McTaggart set a skillet of bacon over the coals and boiled his coffee.
Of all the odors of a camp, the smell of bacon reaches farthest in the forest. It needs no wind. It drifts on its own wings. On a still night a fox will sniff it a mile away—twice that far if the air is moving in the right direction. It was this smell of bacon that came to Baree where he lay in his hollow on top of the beaver dam.
Since his experience in the canyon and the death of Wakayoo, he had not fared particularly well. Caution had kept him near the pond, and he had lived almost entirely on crayfish. This new aroma that came with the night wind roused his hunger. But it was elusive: now he could smell it—the next instant it was gone. He left the dam and began questing for the source of it in the forest, until after a time he lost it altogether. McTaggart had finished frying his bacon and was eating it.
It was a splendid night that followed. Perhaps Baree would have slept through it in his nest on the top of the dam if the bacon smell had not stirred the new hunger in him. Since his adventure in the canyon, the deeper forest had held a dread for him, especially at night. But this night was like a pale, golden day. It was moonless; but the stars shone like a billion distant lamps, flooding the world in a soft and billowy sea of light. A gentle whisper of wind made pleasant sounds in the treetops. Beyond that it was very quiet, for it was Puskowepesim—the Molting Moon—and the wolves were not hunting, the owls had lost their voice, the foxes slunk with the silence of shadows, and even the beavers had begun to cease their labors. The horns of the moose, the deer, and the caribou were in tender velvet, and they moved but little and fought not at all. It was late July, Molting Moon of the Cree, Moon of Silence for the Chipewyan.
In this silence Baree began to hunt. He stirred up a family of half-grown partridges, but they escaped him. He pursued a rabbit that was swifter than he. For an hour he had no luck. Then he heard a sound that made every drop of blood in him thrill. He was close to McTaggart's camp, and what he had heard was a rabbit in one of McTaggart's snares. He came out into a little starlit open and there he saw the rabbit going through a most marvelous pantomime. It amazed him for a moment, and he stopped in his tracks.
Wapoos, the rabbit, had run his furry head into the snare, and his first frightened jump had "shot" the sapling to which the copper wire was attached so that he was now hung half in
