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Joe Delesse tried to peer through the cloud of smoke at Reese Beaudin's face. "Yes, I know him. Does he happen to be a friend of yours?" Reese laughed softly. "I have heard of him. They say that he is a devil. To the west I was told that he can whip any man between Hudson's Bay and the Great Bear, that he is a beast in man-shape, and that he will surely be at the big sale at Lac Bain."
"Like the Yellow-back she never returned," breathed Reese Beaudin. "Never. And now it is strange " "What is strange, Joe Delesse?" "That for the first time in all these years she is going to Lac Bain to the dog sale." Reese Beaudin's face was again hidden in the smoke of his pipe. Through it his voice came. "It is a cold night, M'sieu Delesse. Hear the wind howl!"
The monster's head went back, his great body wavered, and then suddenly he plunged backward off the platform and fell with a crash to the ground. A yell went up from the hooded stranger. Joe Delesse split his throat. The crowd drowned Reese Beaudin's voice. But above it all rose a woman's voice shrieking forth a name. And then Jacques Dupont was on the platform again.
And yet she says he was not a coward. She has always said, even to Dupont, that it was the way le Bon Dieu made him, and that because he was made that way he was greater than all other men in the North Country. How do I know? Because, m'sieu, I am Elise Dupont's cousin." Delesse wondered why Reese Beaudin's eyes were glowing like living coals.
And like fire touched to powder, swiftly as lightning illumines the sky, the glory of it blazed in Reese Beaudin's face. And all that were there heard him clearly: "I am Reese Beaudin. I am the Yellow-back. I have returned to meet a man you all know Jacques Dupont.
Until now had they lived to see the science of the sawdust ring pitted against the brute force of Brobdingnagian, of Antaeus and Goliath. For Reese Beaudin's fighting was a fighting without tricks that they could see. He used his fists, and his fists alone. He was like a dancing man. And suddenly, in the midst of the miracle, they saw Jacques Dupont go down.
And two years ago I saw Jacques Dupont's hands in that hair, and he was dragging her by it " Something snapped. It was a muscle in Reese Beaudin's arm. He had stiffened like iron. "And you let him do that!" Joe Delesse shrugged his shoulders. It was a shrug of hopelessness, of disgust.
It was the closely hooded stranger who spoke. "I will give a hundred dollars cash," he said. A look of annoyance crossed Reese Beaudin's face. He was close to the bronze-faced stranger, and edged nearer. "Let the Indian have them," he said in a low voice. "It is Meewe. I knew him years ago. He has carried me on his back. He taught me first to draw pictures."
He flung off the buckskin, and in a flash the instrument was at his shoulder. "See! I will play, and the woman's pet shall sing!" And once more, after five years, Lac Bain listened to the magic of Reese Beaudin's violin. And it was Elise's old love song that he played.
You are tired, m'sieu, that is your bunk." Reese Beaudin held out a hand. The bulk of the two stood out in the lamp-glow, and Joe Delesse was so much the bigger man that his hand was half again the size of Reese Beaudin's. They gripped. And then a strange look went over the face of Joe Delesse. A cry came from out of his beard. His mouth grew twisted.
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