With a deep breath Howland sank back.  In a moment he leaned again toward Jean as he saw come into the Frenchman’s eyes a slumbering fire that a few seconds later blazed into vengeful malignity when he drew slowly from an inside pocket of his coat a small parcel wrapped and tied in soft buckskin.

“They have sent you this, M’seur,” he said. “‘At the very last,’ they told me, ‘let him read this.’”

With his eyes on the parcel, scarcely breathing, Howland waited while with exasperating slowness Croisset’s brown fingers untied the cord that secured it.

“First you must understand what this meant to us in the North, M’seur,” said Jean, his hands covering the parcel after he had finished with the cord.  “We are different who live up here—­different from those who live in Montreal, and beyond.  With us a lifetime is not too long to spend in avenging a cruel wrong.  It is our honor of the North.  I was fifteen then, and had been fostered by the Factor and his wife since the day my mother died of the smallpox and I dragged myself into the post, almost dead of starvation.  So it happened that I was like a brother to Meleese and the other three.  The years passed, and the desire for vengeance grew in us as we became older, until it was the one thing that we most desired in life, even filling the gentle heart of Meleese, whom we sent to school in Montreal when she was eleven, M’seur.  It was three years later—­while she was still in Montreal—­that I went on one of my wandering searches to a post at the head of the Great Slave, and there, M’seur—­there—­”

Croisset had risen.  His long arms were stretched high, his head thrown back, his upturned face aflame with a passion that was almost that of prayer.

“M’seur, I thank the great God in Heaven that it was given to Jean Croisset to meet one of those whom we had pledged our lives to find—­and I slew him!”

He stood silent, eyes partly closed, still as if in prayer.  When he sank into his chair again the look of hatred had gone from his face.

“It was the father, and I killed him, M’seur—­killed him slowly, telling him of what he had done as I choked the life from him; and then, a little at a time, I let the life back into him, forcing him to tell me where I would find his son, the slayer of Meleese’s father.  And after that I closed on his throat until he was dead, and my dogs dragged his body through three hundred miles of snow that the others might look on him and know that he was dead.  That was six years ago, M’seur.”

Howland was scarcely breathing.

“And the other—­the son—­” he whispered densely.  “You found him, Croisset?  You killed him?”

“What would you have done, M’seur?”

Howland’s hands gripped those that guarded the little parcel.

“I would have killed him, Jean.”

He spoke slowly, deliberately.

“I would have killed him,” he repeated.