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He dreaded her sanity now more than her delirium, He lighted a tin lamp in the cabin and listened for a moment at the inner door. Isobel was quiet. For the first time he made a more careful note of the cabin. Couchée and his wife had left plenty of food. He had noticed a frozen haunch of venison hanging outside the cabin, and he went out and chopped off several pieces of the meat.
He could not remember the name of Couchee. During the next two hours Philip talked with French, Indian, and half-breed trappers, and questioned the mail runner, who had come in that morning from the south. No one could tell him of Fort o' God. Had Pierre lied to him? His face flushed with anger as this thought came to him.
The trapper's cabin could not be far away, and the trapper himself had passed that way not many minutes since. He examined the two trails and found where the blunt, round point of a snow-shoe had covered an imprint left by Couchée, and at this discovery Billy made a megaphone of his mittened hands and gave utterance to the long, wailing holloa of the forest man.
And as she disappeared into the room from which she had first appeared Billy heard her moaning those terrible words. "You you you " Like a man who had been struck a blow he swayed back to the outer door. Near his dogs and sledge he met Pierre Couchée and his half-French wife coming in from their trap line.
Again Philip fired a third and a fourth time, and one of the three who were disappearing in the white gloom stumbled over a rock, and fell as Pierre had fallen. His companions stopped, picked him up, and staggered on with him. Philip's last shot missed, and before he could reload they were lost among the upheaved masses of the cliff. "Pierre!" he called. "Ho! Pierre Couchee!"
Philip bowed his head in silence, while his eyes grew blinding hot. Pierre pressed his hand. "She loves you as I love her," he whispered, so low that Philip could scarcely hear. "You will love her always. If you do not the Great God will let the curse of Pierre Couchee fall upon you!"
"I'm staying at Churchill until the ship comes in and and I hope you'll let me sit here on the rock." For an instant Pierre's fingers gripped his hand, and he bowed low again like a courtier. Philip saw that he, too, wore the same big, old-fashioned cuffs, and that it was not a knife that hung at his belt, but a short rapier. "And I am Pierre Pierre Couchee," he said.
Philip stood undecided, his ears strained to catch the slightest sound. Ten minutes had not elapsed since he had dropped the handkerchief. Pierre could not have gone far among the rocks. It was possible that he was concealed somewhere near him now. Softly he called his name. "Pierre ho, Pierre Couchee!" There was no answer, and in the next breath he was sorry that he had called.
He was about to run to the crest of the cliff and call loudly for Pierre Couchee when he held the handkerchief and the lace close to his face and the delicate perfume of heliotrope stopped him. There was something familiar about it, something that held him wondering and mystified, until he knew that he had lost the opportunity to recall Pierre and his companion.
The banquet was most splendid: a masque was performed in the evening; the stocking was thrown with all due spirit: and the bride and bride-groom, according to long established fashion, received the company at their couchée." In a footnote to The Secret History of James I., Vol.
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