And thenceforth for many days he sat in the sun before the cabin door.  He never dozed, and the pistol lay always across his knees.  Batard had a way, the first thing each day, of looking for the weapon in its wonted place.  At sight of it he would lift his lip faintly in token that he understood, and Leclere would lift his own lip in an answering grin.  One day the missionary took note of the trick.

“Bless me!” he said.  “I really believe the brute comprehends.”

Leclere laughed softly.  “Look you, mon pere.  Dat w’at Ah now spik, to dat does he lissen.”

As if in confirmation, Batard just perceptibly wriggled his lone ear up to catch the sound.

“Ah say ’keel’.”

Batard growled deep down in his throat, the hair bristled along his neck, and every muscle went tense and expectant.

“Ah lift de gun, so, like dat.”  And suiting action to word, he sighted the pistol at Batard.  Batard, with a single leap, sideways, landed around the corner of the cabin out of sight.

“Bless me!” he repeated at intervals.  Leclere grinned proudly.

“But why does he not run away?”

The Frenchman’s shoulders went up in the racial shrug that means all things from total ignorance to infinite understanding.

“Then why do you not kill him?”

Again the shoulders went up.

“Mon pere,” he said after a pause, “de taim is not yet.  He is one beeg devil.  Some taim Ah break heem, so an’ so, all to leetle bits.  Hey? some taim. Bon!”

A day came when Leclere gathered his dogs together and floated down in a bateau to Forty Mile, and on to the Porcupine, where he took a commission from the P. C. Company, and went exploring for the better part of a year.  After that he poled up the Koyokuk to deserted Arctic City, and later came drifting back, from camp to camp, along the Yukon.  And during the long months Batard was well lessoned.  He learned many tortures, and, notably, the torture of hunger, the torture of thirst, the torture of fire, and, worst of all, the torture of music.

Like the rest of his kind, he did not enjoy music.  It gave him exquisite anguish, racking him nerve by nerve, and ripping apart every fibre of his being.  It made him howl, long and wolf-life, as when the wolves bay the stars on frosty nights.  He could not help howling.  It was his one weakness in the contest with Leclere, and it was his shame.  Leclere, on the other hand, passionately loved music—­as passionately as he loved strong drink.  And when his soul clamoured for expression, it usually uttered itself in one or the other of the two ways, and more usually in both ways.  And when he had drunk, his brain a-lilt with unsung song and the devil in him aroused and rampant, his soul found its supreme utterance in torturing Batard.

“Now we will haf a leetle museek,” he would say.  “Eh?  W’at you t’ink, Batard?”