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"Jabel," said General MacNair, "take with our full hearts this money. It has been honestly earned with the capital of your bank. We return it that you may fulfil the dream of your life!" Jabel Blake took the money, and a smile overspread his face. His hard lineaments were soft and fatherly now, and their tears attested how well he was esteemed.
"You do him an injustice! Mr. Lapierre does not want to kill you. He is sorry he was forced to shoot; but, as he said, it was your life or his. And now please do be quiet, or I must leave you to yourself." MacNair closed his eyes, and, seating herself by the table, Chloe stared silently into the face of the portrait until the man's deep, regular breathing told her that he slept.
With Harriet Penny hysterical and excited, Big Lena more glum and taciturn than usual, the Louchoux girl cowering in mortal dread of impending disaster, and Chloe herself disgusted, discouraged, nursing in her heart a consuming rage against Brute MacNair, the man who had wrought the harm, and who had been her evil genius since she had first set foot into the North.
Upon her table in the cottage, Chloe found a brief note to the effect that Lapierre had been, forced to hasten to the eastward to aid LeFroy in dealing with the whiskey-runners. The girl had scant time to think of Lapierre, however, for upon the morning after her arrival, MacNair appeared, accompanied by a hundred or more dejected and woe-begone Indians.
For a long time he stood beside the little crosses that lent a solemn dignity to the rugged heights of Fort Norman. It cannot be said that Bob MacNair had loved his father, in the generally accepted sense of the word.
She must own her error and offer an apology. Seating herself at the table, she seized a pen and wrote rapidly for a long, long time. And then for a long time more she sat buried in thought, and at the end of an hour she arose and tore up the pages she had written, and sat down again and penned another letter which she placed in an envelope addressed with the name of MacNair.
Near the tree MacNair found the gun where its owner had hurled it into the snow found also the tracks of a pair of snowshoes, which headed into the heart of the black spruce swamp. The tracks showed at a glance that the lurking assassin was an Indian, that he was travelling light, and that the chance of running him down was extremely remote.
There was a certain tense hardness in the man's tone, and Chloe was conscious that the smouldering eyes were regarding her searchingly. "MacNair," said the girl, "why, that is the name on those bales!" "What bales?" "The bales in the scow they are on the river-bank now."
Well, he had been invited to come and see. And he had seen. As Esther walked away, demurely acquiescent, by the side of the Rev. Mr. Macnair she was conscious of a conflict of emotions. The sight of the doctor's disappointed face as he stood hat in hand, awoke regret and perhaps a trifle of girlish gratification.
With an effort she regained her poise. "MacNair is out of the way; and that's the main thing," she murmured. She remembered his last words: "Beware of Pierre Lapierre," and her eyes sought the man's hastily scribbled note that lay upon the table where he had left it. She reread the note, and crumpling it in her hand threw it to the floor.
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