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With a little cry she darted to Baree and caught him in her arms. As she looked up at McTaggart, her soft, bare throat was within a few inches of Baree's naked fangs. Her eyes blazed. "You beat him!" she cried. "He hates you hates you " "Let him go!" called Pierrot in an agony of fear. "Mon Dieu! I say let him go, or he will tear the life from you!"
He saw Marie, and stopped. "Black, you say?" McTaggart said carelessly, without lifting his eyes from his writing. "Did he not bear some dog mark?" Lerue shrugged his shoulders. "He was gone like the wind, m'sieu. But he was a wolf." With scarcely a sound that the others could hear Marie had whispered into the factor's ear, and folding his letter McTaggart rose quickly and left the store.
While lovely Nepeese was still shuddering over her thrilling experience under the rock while Pierrot still offered grateful thanks in his prayers for her deliverance and Baree was becoming more and more a fixture at the beaver pond Bush McTaggart was perfecting a little scheme of his own up at Post Lac Bain, about forty miles north and west. McTaggart had been factor at Lac Bain for seven years.
He was not unacquainted with four-footed robbers of the trap line, but usually a wolf or a fox or a dog who had grown adept in thievery troubled only a few traps. But in this case Baree was traveling straight from trap to trap, and his footprints in the snow showed that he had stopped at each one. There was, to McTaggart, almost a human devilishness to his work. He evaded the poisons.
At last she understood understood what her peril had been that day at the edge of the chasm and in the forest, when fearlessly she had played with the menace that was confronting her now. A breath that was like a sob broke from her lips. "M'sieu!" she tried to say. But it was only a gasp an effort. Plainly she heard the click of the iron bolt as it locked the door. McTaggart advanced a step.
During the last seven years he had received an average of a thousand dollars a year for his furs, for McTaggart had been unable to cheat Pierrot quite as completely as he had cheated the Indians. A thousand dollars a year! Pierrot would think twice before he gave that up. McTaggart chuckled as he crumpled the paper in his hand and prepared to put out the light.
When McTaggart had run along the edge of the chasm, Baree had squatted himself in the trodden plot of snow where Nepeese had last stood, his body stiffened and his forefeet braced as he looked down. He had seen her take the leap. Many times that summer he had followed her in her daring dives into the deep, quiet water of the pool. But this was a tremendous distance.
He Bush McTaggart was lord of this wilderness, master of its people, arbiter of their destinies. He was power and the law. The sun was well up when Pierrot, standing in front of his cabin with Nepeese, pointed to a rise in the trail three or four hundred yards away, over which McTaggart had just appeared. "He is coming." With a face which had aged since last night he looked at Nepeese.
Blindly and with an agony that gave no evidence in cry or word she flung herself down beside her father. He was dead. How long Nepeese lay there, how long she waited for Pierrot to move, to open his eyes, to breathe, she would never know. In that time McTaggart rose to his feet and stood leaning against the wall, the pistol in his hand, his brain clearing itself as he saw his final triumph.
It was deep and black and terrible, for between the narrow rock walls the sun did not reach it. The roar of it filled the Willow's ears. She turned and faced McTaggart. Even then he did not guess, but came toward her again, his arms stretched out ahead of him. Fifty yards! It was not much, and shortening swiftly. Once more the Willow's lips moved.
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