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Updated: June 26, 2025
Massive, silent, contemptuous, his small eyes under the wolfish skull cold and alight with a look that sent shuddering from him the timid, thus he had been in his hard-fought and hard-won supremacy, a great, mysterious beast brought full-grown from the snowbound wilderness of the forest one famine-time by old Aquamis and sold to Bois DesCaut for a tie of tobacco.
The Nor'wester from the Saskatchewan was among the Nakonkirhirinons! Was at the very gates of De Seviere! When Pierre Garcon brought the news, McElroy flushed darkly to his fair hair and went on with his work. This was unbearable insolence. "An', M'sieu," pursued Pierre, "not only the man from Montreal, but, like the treacherous dog he is, among the Nor'westers is that vagabond Bois DesCaut."
Across in the darkness among the Bois-Brules one ear had lain close to the tell-tale earth, one evil face peered unsleeping among the dusky shapes of the camp, a swarthy face with a white lock on its temple. Keener than all the rest, Bois DesCaut, driven by personal hate, listened to all the sounds of night.
He saw the woman's arm shoot out and her strong hand, smooth and tawny as finest tanned buckskin, double itself hard and leap in where the jaw turns downward into the curve of the throat. The stroke of a man it was, clean and sharp and well delivered, and DesCaut, catching his heel on a buried stone's sharp jut, went backward with his head in the young grass of the sloping shore.
True, De Courtenay was his latest master, and his spoiling of Maren's aim might as easily send the blade into the black as the red, but in either case he would cause her to decide the death she was trying so bravely to postpone. DesCaut, surely.
She saw again this woman leaning slightly forward, her eyes a-glitter on the prostrate DesCaut, her strong hand doubled and flecked with blood, with Loup at her feet, and quick on the heels of it she saw the look in the factor's eyes as he had commanded her to silence with a motion.
It was a small knife, and it tumbled with seeming carelessness close to De Courtenay's knee. "So," thought McElroy again; "by all rights that should have been for me." DesCaut went on into the heart of the camp among the women, and De Courtenay began moving ever so cautiously toward the priceless bit of steel. With that hidden in one's garments what not of hope might rise within a daring heart?
DesCaut glowered at him a moment and spoke to the headmen around in their speech. There were threatening gutturals and gestures. The flotilla was small compared to that of the tribe back at the gorge, they would know, at any rate. "They say, if M'sieu will let one canoe go through his people with the torches, all will be well.
A shout of derision greeted this throw, and two more took the place of the retiring braves, this time a Runner of the Burnt Woods, wearing the garments of the white man, but smeared with bars of red and yellow paint across the cheeks, and a white renegade. "A Nor'wester's man once," thought McElroy; "another DesCaut."
As the confusion and uproar grew in intensity, one after another joined the dancing circle, until it seemed that every brave in the camp was leaping around the fire. Blue-eyed Indians, Bois-Brules, Nakonkirhirinons, they circled and uttered the monotonous "Ah-a, ah-a," and in the light could be seen the white lock on the temple of Bois DesCaut.
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