The detectives tried to trace the two brutal savages, but did not succeed.

Yes, as long as I live I shall remember that Christmas when I was employed in the far west by the great Canadian Pacific Railway.

* * * * *

Le Loup-Garou.

The fear of it is killing me, Baptiste, for it is on my mind all the time.  Think of it:  for seven long years he has neither been to confession nor partaken of the blessed sacrament, and he is drinking and growing wickeder every day.  This is the last night of the seventh year, and the curse may fall upon him now at any moment.  She buried her wrinkled, fear-stricken face in her thin trembling hands, and wept as though her heart was breaking.  “O Marie, blessed Virgin!” she whispered, “save our son, our Pierre; let not the fate of the loup-garou fall upon him.”  A thin stream of light shone through an ancient crack in the old-fashioned box-stove, and fell caressingly across the bowed head, making its silvery hair look pathetically thin.  The bent shoulders of the sorrowing mother shook convulsively.

Baptiste gazed with a troubled look at the bar of light on his wife’s head, and his heart went out to her as only a husband’s can to a wife who for half a century has borne with him the joys and trials of the passing years.  As he looked at the thin white hair, memory drifted back to the time when it was as black as a raven’s wing, and fell in great glossy folds far below her waist.  A tender smile stole into his face as he remembered how, on account of the waywardness of the beautiful hair and its rebellion against imprisonment, he had more than once heard her chide it; yes, and at times when more than usually arrogant, threaten to use the shears upon it.  He observed, too, how round her shoulders had grown, and noted many other signs of old age which the glow from the stove made so cruelly apparent.  It had taken sixty years of life just to streak her hair with grey; but the past seven years had remorselessly thinned and whitened it, and now not even one black hair was to be seen.  All these things and many more he thought of as he gazed upon his sorrowing wife.

Distressfully the old man put his hand to his forehead, and then thought reverted to himself, and he recalled the days when his head was subject to his will and did not, with painful persistency, nod and tremble the long day through.  The infirmity of age was strong upon him; seventy years is a long time to have lived and toiled as French-Canadian farmers toil in eastern Canada.  He thought, too, how much he had aged the last seven years, and of the one who had caused those years to be fraught with so much suffering to them both.  He realized, indeed, that sorrow ages more quickly than years!