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Updated: June 26, 2025
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."
David thrust the big end of the caribou horn between two of the white-birch bars, but before he had put his weight to the lever he heard a great voice coming round the end of the chateau, and it was calling for Andre, the Broken Man. In a moment it was followed by Black Roger Audemard, who ran under the window and faced the lightning-struck spruce as he shouted Andre's name again.
He saw the nodding of her head, though the moon and star-mist veiled her face. "Yes. What do the Police say about Roger Audemard?" He told her. And not once in the telling of the story did she speak or move. It was a terrible story at best, he thought, but he did not weaken it by smoothing over the details. This was his opportunity.
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.
"Tomorrow, when you see it in the light of day, you will say it is the finest chateau in the north all built of sweet cedar where birch is not used, so that even in the deep snows it gives us the perfume of springtime and flowers." David did not answer, and in a moment Audemard said: "Only on Christmas and New Year and at birthdays and wedding feasts is it lighted up like that.
An' I will breeng odder good fightin' mans for you to w'ip all w'at Concombre Bateese has w'ipped ten, dozen, forty an' you w'ip se gran' bunch, m'sieu. Eh, shall we mak' ze bargain?" "You are planning a pleasant time for me, Bateese," said Carrigan, "but I am afraid it will be impossible. You see, this captain of yours, Black Roger Audemard " "W'at!" Bateese jumped as if stung.
But if you whip Bateese and you can not do that in a hundred years of fighting I will not tell you why my Jeanne shot at you behind the rock. Non, never! Yet I swear I will tell you the other. If you win, I will tell you all I know about Roger Audemard, and that is considerable, m'sieu. Do you agree?" Slowly David held out a hand. St. Pierre's gripped it.
"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.
Pierre and the criminal he was after, but not this, and Roger Audemard, with his hands unclenching and a slow humor beginning to play about his mouth, waited coolly for him to recover from his amazement. In those moments, when his heart seemed to have stopped beating, Carrigan was staring at the other, but his mind had shot beyond him to the woman who was his wife.
On that shore, as far as his eyes could travel up and down, he saw no sign of Marie-Anne, but there remained a canoe, and near the canoe stood Black Roger Audemard, and beyond him, huddled like a charred stump in the sand, was Andre, the Broken Man. On the opposite shore the raft was getting under way.
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