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Updated: June 21, 2025
A dull pain crept into Jan's back. He felt it slowly creeping into his shoulders and to his arms. He looked at Jackpine and saw that he was swinging his body more and more with the motion of his arms. And then he saw that the terrific pace set by O'Grady was beginning to tell on the occupants of the canoe ahead. The speed grew less and less, until it was no more than seventy yards.
Then the trail widened and sloped down into the dip that ended the portage. For an instant Jan paused to get his bearing, and behind him Jackpine shouted a warning. Up out of the smoldering oven where O'Grady should have found his canoe two men were rushing toward them. They were O'Grady and the Chippewayan. He caught the gleam of a knife in the Indian's hand.
His blood thrilled to the tireless effort of the grayish-yellow pack of magnificent brutes ahead of him; he watched the muscular play of their backs and legs, the eager out-reaching of their wolfish heads, their half-gaping jaws, and from them he looked at Jackpine. There was no effort in his running.
Luck was with him and he cried aloud to Peter as he felt himself in the darkness of a dense cover of spruce and balsam. He freed himself from his entangled snowshoes and went on deeper into the shelter. It became warmer and they could feel no longer a breath of the wind. He unloaded his pack and drew from it a jackpine torch, dried in his cabin and heavy with pitch.
In that forgetfulness Nanette was a girl again, sweet and beautiful as in those days when old Jackpine, the Cree who was now dead had told her that she was born of the flowers. The wonderful dinner was ready at last, and to the baby's delight Nanette induced Miki to sit on a chair at the table.
Perhaps there were even worse things than men. After a time he stretched his great head out between his fore-paws, and slowly the starlight grew dimmer, and the snow less white, and he slept. In a twist of Three Jackpine River, buried in the deep of the forest between the Shamattawa country and Hudson Bay, was the cabin in which lived Jacques Le Beau, the trapper.
In O'Grady's there was something larger and darker a club, and Jan dropped his end of the canoe with a glad cry, and drew one of the knives from his belt. Jackpine came to his side, with his hunting knife in his hand, measuring with glittering eyes the oncoming foe of his race the Chippewayan. And Jan laughed softly to himself, and his teeth gleamed again, for at last fate was playing his game.
"Any one been here, Jackpine?" The old sledge-driver gave his head a negative shake and hunched his shoulders, pointing at the same time to the table, on which lay a carefully folded piece of paper. "Thorne," he grunted.
And he had let her slip away from him, had weakly surrendered himself at a moment when everything that he had dreamed of might have been within his grasp. With Jackpine and Croisset in his power He went no further. Was it too late to do these things now? Croisset would return. With a sort of satisfaction it occurred to him that his actions had disarmed the Frenchman of suspicion.
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