Outside, two figures were approaching the hut—­a man and a woman; yet at first glance the man might easily have been taken for a woman, because of his clean-shaven face, of the long black robe which he wore, and because his hair fell loose on his shoulders.

“Have patience, my daughter,” said the man.  “Do not enter till I call you.  But stand close to the door, if you will, and hear all.”

So saying he raised his hand as in a kind of benediction, passed to the door, and, after tapping very softly, opened it, entered, and closed it behind him—­not so quickly, however, but that the woman caught a glimpse of the father and the boy.  In her eyes there was the divine look of motherhood.

“Peace be to this house!” said the man gently, as he stepped forward from the door.

The father, startled, turned shrinkingly on him, as though he had seen a spirit.

“M’sieu’ le cure!” he said in French, with an accent much poorer than that of the priest, or even of his own son.  He had learned French from his wife; he himself was English.

The priest’s quick eye had taken in the lighted candles at the little shrine, even as he saw the painfully changed aspect of the man.

“The wife and child, Bagot?” he asked, looking round.  “Ah, the boy!” he added, and going toward the bed, continued, presently, in a low voice:  “Dominique is ill?”

Bagot nodded, and then answered:  “A wildcat and then fever, Father Corraine.”

The priest felt the boy’s pulse softly, then with a close personal look he spoke hardly above his breath, yet distinctly, too: 

“Your wife, Bagot?”

“She is not here, m’sieu’.”  The voice was low and gloomy.

“Where is she, Bagot?”

“I do not know, m’sieu’.”

“When did you see her last?”

“Four weeks ago, m’sieu’.”

“That was September, this is October—­winter.  On the ranches they let their cattle loose upon the plains in winter, knowing not where they go, yet looking for them to return in the spring.  But a woman—­a woman and a wife—­is different....  Bagot, you have been a rough, hard man, and you have been a stranger to your God, but I thought you loved your wife and child!”

The hunter’s hands clenched, and a wicked light flashed up into his eyes; but the calm, benignant gaze of the other cooled the tempest in his veins.  The priest sat down on the couch where the child lay, and took the fevered hand in his own.

“Stay where you are, Bagot, just there where you are, and tell me what your trouble is, and why your wife is not here....  Say all honestly—­by the name of the Christ!” he added, lifting up an iron crucifix that hung on his breast.

Bagot sat down on a bench near the fireplace, the light playing on his bronzed, powerful face, his eyes shining beneath his heavy brows like two coals.  After a moment he began: 

“I don’t know how it started.  I’d lost a lot of pelts—­stolen they were, down on the Child o’ Sin River.  Well, she was hasty and nervous, like as not—­she always was brisker and more sudden than I am.  I—­I laid my powder-horn and whiskey-flash—­up there!”