had felt the thrilling touch of her arms, the terror and love of her lips as she thought him dying. She had given herself to him; and she would come to him--his lady of the snows--if he could escape.
He went to the door and shoved against it with his shoulder. It was immovable. Again he thrust his hand and arm through the first of the narrow ventilating apertures. The wood with which his fingers came in contact was rotting from moisture and age and he found that he could tear out handfuls of it. He fell to work, digging with the fierce eagerness of an animal. At the rate the soft pulpy wood gave way he could win his freedom long before the earliest risers at the post were awake.
A sound stopped him, a hollow cough from out of the blackness beyond the dungeon wall. It was followed an instant later by a gleam of light and Howland darted quickly back to the table. He heard the slipping of a bolt outside the door and it flashed on him then that he should have thrown himself back into his old position on the floor. It was too late for this action now. The door swung open and a shaft of light shot into the chamber. For a space Howland was blinded by it and it was not until the bearer of the lamp had advanced half-way to the table that he recognized his visitor as Jean Croisset. The Frenchman's face was wild and haggard. His eyes gleamed red and bloodshot as he stared at the engineer.
"Mon Dieu, I had hoped to find you dead," he whispered huskily.
He reached up to hang the big oil lamp he carried to a hook in the log ceiling, and Howland sat amazed at the expression on his face. Jean's great eyes gleamed like living coals from out of a death-mask. Either fear or pain had wrought deep lines in his face. His hands trembled as he steadied the lamp. The few hours that had passed since Howland had left him a prisoner on the mountain top had transformed him into an old man. Even his shoulders were hunched forward with an air of weakness and despair as he turned from the lamp to the engineer.
"I had hoped to find you dead, M'seur," he repeated in a voice so low it could not have been heard beyond the door. "That is why I did not bind your wound and give you water when they turned you over to my care. I wanted you to bleed to death. It would have been easier--for both of us."
From under the table he drew forth a second stool and sat down opposite Howland. The two men stared at each other over the sputtering remnant of the candle. Before the engineer had recovered from his astonishment at the sudden appearance of the man whom he believed to be safely imprisoned in the old cabin, Croisset's shifting eyes fell on the mass of torn wood under the aperture.
"Too late, M'seur," he said meaningly. "They are waiting up there now. It is impossible for you to escape."
"That is what I thought about you," replied Howland, forcing himself to speak coolly. "How did you manage it?"
"They came up to free me soon after they got you, M'seur. I am grateful to you for thinking of me, for if you had not told them I might have stayed there and starved like a beast in a trap."
"It was Meleese," said Howland. "I told her."
Jean dropped his head in his hands.
"I have just come from Meleese," he whispered softly. "She sends you her love, M'seur, and tells you not to give up hope. The great God, if she only knew--if she only knew what is about to happen! No one has told her. She is a prisoner in her room, and after that--after that out on the plain--when she came to you and fought like one gone mad to save you--they will not give her freedom until all is over. What time is it, M'seur?"
A clammy chill passed over Howland as he read the time.
"Half-past four."
The Frenchman shivered; his fingers clasped and unclasped nervously as he leaned nearer his companion.
"The Virgin bear me witness that I wish I might strike ten years off my life and give you freedom," he breathed quickly. "I would do it this instant, M'seur. I would help you to escape if it were in any way possible. But they are in the room at the head of the stair--waiting. At six--"
Something seemed to choke him and he stopped.
"At six--what then?" urged Howland. "My God, man, what makes you look so? What is to happen at six?"
Jean stiffened. A flash of the old fire gleamed in his eyes, and his voice was steady and clear when he spoke again.
"I have no time to lose in further talk like this, M'seur," he said almost harshly. "They know now that it was I who fought for you and for Meleese on the Great North Trail. They know that it is I who saved you at Wekusko. Meleese can no more save me than she can save you, and to make my task a little harder they have made me their messenger, and--"
Again he stopped, choking for words.
"What?" insisted Howland, leaning toward him, his face as white as the tallow in the little dish on the table.
"Their executioner, M'seur."
With his hands gripped tightly on the table in front of him Jack Howland sat as rigid as though an electric shock had passed through him.
"Great God!" he gasped.
"First I am to tell you a story, M'seur," continued Croisset, leveling his reddened eyes to the engineer's. "It will not be long, and I pray the Virgin to make you understand it as we people of the North understand it. It begins sixteen years ago."
"I shall understand, Jean," whispered Howland. "Go on."
"It was at one of the company's posts that it happened," Jean began, "and the story has to do with Le M'seur, the Factor, and his wife, L'Ange Blanc--that is what she was called, M'seur--the White Angel. Mon Dieu, how we loved her! Not with a wicked love, M'seur, but with something very near to that which we give our Blessed Virgin. And our love was but a pitiful thing when compared with the love of these two, each for the other. She was beautiful, gloriously beautiful as we know women up in the big snows; like Meleese, who was the youngest of their children.
"Ours was the happiest post in all this great northland, M'seur," continued Croisset after a moment's pause; "and it was all because of this woman and the man, but mostly because of the woman. And when the little Meleese came--she was the first white girl baby that any of us had ever seen--our love for these two became something that I fear was almost a sacrilege to our dear Lady of God. Perhaps you can not understand such a love, M'seur; I know that it can not be understood down in that world which you call civilization, for I have been there and have seen. We would have died for the little Meleese, and the other Meleese, her mother. And also, M'seur, we would have killed our own brothers had they as much as spoken a word against them or cast at the mother even as much as a look which was not the purest. That is how we loved her sixteen years ago this winter, M'seur, and that is how we love her memory still."
"She is dead," uttered Howland, forgetting in these tense moments the significance Jean's story might hold for him.
"Yes; she is dead. M'seur, shall I tell you how she died?"
Croisset sprang to his feet, his eyes flashing, his lithe body twitching like a wolf's as he stood for an instant half leaning over the engineer.
"Shall I tell you how she died, M'seur?" he repeated, falling back on his stool, his long arms stretched over the table. "It happened like this, sixteen years ago, when the little Meleese was four years old and the oldest of the three sons was fourteen. That winter a man and his boy came up from Churchill. He had letters from the Factor at the Bay, and our Factor and his wife opened their doors to him and to his son, and gave them all that it was in their power to give.
"Mon
