The hunter’s lip grew straight and grim.  “I have not.  He’s no’ at the store.  The clerk says a messenger called for him early this mornin’ and he left the clachan at once.  Will he be hidin’ oot, do you think?”

Tom shook his head.  “Not Whaley.  He’ll bluff it through.  The fellow’s not yellow.  Probably he’ll laugh it off and say he was only stealin’ a kiss an’ that Miss Jessie was silly to make a fuss about it.”

“We’ll let it go at that—­after I’ve told him publicly what I think o’ him.”

Where Whaley had been nobody in Faraway knew.  When he returned at sunset, he went direct to the store and took off his snowshoes.  He was knocking the packed and frozen slush from them at the moment Angus McRae confronted him.

The trader laughed, from the lips, just as Tom had prophesied he would do.  “I reckon I owe you an apology, McRae,” he said.  “That li’l’ wild-cat of yours lost her head when I jollied her and Morse broke the door down like the jackass he is.”

The dressing-down that Angus McRae gave Whaley is still remembered by one or two old-timers in the Northwest.  In crisp, biting words he freed his mind without once lapsing into profanity.  He finished with a warning.  “Tak tent you never speak to the lass again, or you an’ me’ll come to grips.”

The storekeeper heard him out, a sneering smile on his white face.  Inside, he raged with furious anger, but he did not let his feelings come to the surface.  He was a man who had the patience to wait for his vengeance.  The longer it was delayed, the heavier would it be.  A characteristic of his cold, callous temperament was that he took fire slowly, but, once lit, his hate endured like peat coals in a grate.  A vain man, his dignity was precious to him.  He writhed at the defeat Morse had put upon him, at his failure with Jessie, at the scornful public rebuke of her father.  Upon all three of these some day he would work a sweet revenge.  Like all gamblers, he followed hunches.  Soon, one of these told him, his chance would come.  When it did he would make all three of them sweat blood.

Beresford met Tom Morse later in the day.  He cocked a whimsical eye at the fur-trader.

“I hear McRae’s going to sue you for damages to his house,” he said.

“Where did you hear all that?” asked his friend, apparently busy inspecting a half-dozen beaver furs.

“And Whaley, for damages to his internal machinery.  Don’t you know you can’t catapult through a man’s tummy with a young pine tree and not injure his physical geography?” the constable reproached.

“When you’re through spoofin’ me, as you subjects of the Queen call it,” suggested Tom.

“Why, then, I’ll tell you to keep an eye on Whaley.  He doesn’t love you a whole lot for what you did, and he’s liable to do you up first chance he gets.”

“I’m not lookin’ for trouble, but if Whaley wants a fight—­”

“He doesn’t—­not your kind of a fight.  His idea will be to have you foul before he strikes.  Walk with an eye in the back of your head.  Sleep with it open, Don’t sit at windows after lamps are lit—­not without curtains all down.  Play all your cards close.”  The red-coat spoke casually, slapping his boot with a small riding-switch.  He was smiling.  None the less Tom knew he was in dead earnest.