“Their executioner, M’seur.”

With his hands gripped tightly on the table in front of him Jack Howland sat as rigid as though an electric shock had passed through him.

“Great God!” he gasped.

“First I am to tell you a story, M’seur,” continued Croisset, leveling his reddened eyes to the engineer’s.  “It will not be long, and I pray the Virgin to make you understand it as we people of the North understand it.  It begins sixteen years ago.”

“I shall understand, Jean,” whispered Howland.  “Go on.”

“It was at one of the company’s posts that it happened,” Jean began, “and the story has to do with Le M’seur, the Factor, and his wife, L’Ange Blanc—­that is what she was called, M’seur—­the White Angel. Mon Dieu, how we loved her!  Not with a wicked love, M’seur, but with something very near to that which we give our Blessed Virgin.  And our love was but a pitiful thing when compared with the love of these two, each for the other.  She was beautiful, gloriously beautiful as we know women up in the big snows; like Meleese, who was the youngest of their children.

“Ours was the happiest post in all this great northland, M’seur,” continued Croisset after a moment’s pause; “and it was all because of this woman and the man, but mostly because of the woman.  And when the little Meleese came—­she was the first white girl baby that any of us had ever seen—­our love for these two became something that I fear was almost a sacrilege to our dear Lady of God.  Perhaps you can not understand such a love, M’seur; I know that it can not be understood down in that world which you call civilization, for I have been there and have seen.  We would have died for the little Meleese, and the other Meleese, her mother.  And also, M’seur, we would have killed our own brothers had they as much as spoken a word against them or cast at the mother even as much as a look which was not the purest.  That is how we loved her sixteen years ago this winter, M’seur, and that is how we love her memory still.”

“She is dead,” uttered Howland, forgetting in these tense moments the significance Jean’s story might hold for him.

“Yes; she is dead.  M’seur, shall I tell you how she died?”

Croisset sprang to his feet, his eyes flashing, his lithe body twitching like a wolf’s as he stood for an instant half leaning over the engineer.

“Shall I tell you how she died, M’seur?” he repeated, falling back on his stool, his long arms stretched over the table.  “It happened like this, sixteen years ago, when the little Meleese was four years old and the oldest of the three sons was fourteen.  That winter a man and his boy came up from Churchill.  He had letters from the Factor at the Bay, and our Factor and his wife opened their doors to him and to his son, and gave them all that it was in their power to give.