St. Vincent leaned forward to Frona.  “It was not the first shot.”

She nodded, with her eyes still bent on La Flitche, who gallantly waited.

“Then two more shot,” he went on, “quick, together, boom-boom, just like that.  ‘Borg’s shack,’ I say to myself, and run down the trail.  I think Borg kill Bella, which was bad.  Bella very fine girl,” he confided with one of his irresistible smiles.  “I like Bella.  So I run.  And John he run from his cabin like a fat cow, with great noise.  ‘What the matter?’ he say; and I say, ‘I don’t know.’  And then something come, wheugh! out of the dark, just like that, and knock John down, and knock me down.  We grab everywhere all at once.  It is a man.  He is in undress.  He fight.  He cry, ‘Oh!  Oh!  Oh!’ just like that.  We hold him tight, and bime-by pretty quick, he stop.  Then we get up, and I say, ‘Come along back.’”

“Who was the man?”

La Flitche turned partly, and rested his eyes on St. Vincent.

“Go on.”

“So?  The man he will not go back; but John and I say yes, and he go.”

“Did he say anything?”

“I ask him what the matter; but he cry, he . . . he sob, huh-tsch, huh-tsch, just like that.”

“Did you see anything peculiar about him?”

La Flitche’s brows drew up interrogatively.

^Anything uncommon, out of the ordinary?”

“Ah, oui; blood on the hands.”  Disregarding the murmur in the room, he went on, his facile play of feature and gesture giving dramatic value to the recital.  “John make a light, and Bella groan, like the hair-seal when you shoot him in the body, just like that when you shoot him in the body under the flipper.  And Borg lay over in the corner.  I look.  He no breathe ’tall.

“Then Bella open her eyes, and I look in her eyes, and I know she know me, La Flitche.  ‘Who did it, Bella?’ I ask.  And she roll her head on the floor and whisper, so low, so slow, ‘Him dead?’ I know she mean Borg, and I say yes.  Then she lift up on one elbow, and look about quick, in big hurry, and when she see Vincent she look no more, only she look at Vincent all the time.  Then she point at him, just like that.”  Suiting the action to the word, La Flitche turned and thrust a wavering finger at the prisoner.  “And she say, ‘Him, him, him.’  And I say, ‘Bella, who did it?’ And she say, ’Him, him, him.  St. Vincha, him do it.’  And then”—­La Flitche’s head felt limply forward on his chest, and came back naturally erect, as he finished, with a flash of teeth, “Dead.”

The warm-faced man, Bill Brown, put the quarter-breed through the customary direct examination, which served to strengthen his testimony and to bring out the fact that a terrible struggle must have taken place in the killing of Borg.  The heavy table was smashed, the stool and the bunk-board splintered, and the stove over-thrown.  “Never did I see anything like it,” La Flitche concluded his description of the wreck.  “No, never.”