He loaded a tin plate with hot potatoes, bannock-bread and rice that he had cooked before setting out on the Barren, and placed it before the girl.  A second plate he prepared for Bram, and a third for himself.  Bram had not moved.  He still held the pail and the fish in his hands.  Suddenly he lowered both to the floor with a growl that seemed to come from the bottom of his great chest, and came to the table.  With one huge hand he seized Philip’s arm.  It was not a man’s grip.  There was apparently no effort in it, and yet it was a vise-like clutch that threatened to snap the bone.  And all the time Bram’s eyes were on the girl.  He drew Philip back, released the terrible grip on his arm, and shoved the two extra plates of food to the girl.  Then he faced Philip.

“We eat ze meat, m’sieu!”

Quietly and sanely he uttered the words.  In his eyes and face there was no trace of madness.  And then, even as Philip stared, the change came.  The giant flung back his head and his wild, mad laugh rocked the cabin.  Out in the corral the snarl and cry of the wolves gave a savage response to it.

It took a tremendous effort for Philip to keep a grip on himself.  In that momentary flash of sanity Bram had shown a chivalry which must have struck deep home in the heart of the girl.  There was a sort of triumph in her eyes when he looked at her.  She knew now that he must understand fully what she had been trying to tell him.  Bram, in his madness, had been good to her.  Philip did not hesitate in the impulse of the moment.  He caught Bram’s hand and shook it.  And Bram, his laugh dying away in a mumbling sound, seemed not to notice it.  As Philip began preparing the fish the wolf-man took up a position against the farther wall, squatted Indian-fashion on his heels.  He did not take his eyes from the girl until she had finished, and Philip brought him a half of the fried fish.  He might as well have offered the fish to a wooden sphinx.  Bram rose to his feet, mumbling softly, and taking what was left of one of the two caribou quarters he again left the cabin.

His mad laugh and the snarling outcry of the wolves came to them a moment later.

CHAPTER XI

Scarcely had the door closed when Celie Armin ran to Philip and pulled him to the table.  In the tense half hour of Bram’s watchfulness she had eaten her own breakfast as if nothing unusual had happened; now she insisted on adding potatoes and bannock to Philip’s fish, and turned him a cup of coffee.

“Bless your heart, you don’t want to see me beat out of a breakfast, do you?” he smiled up at her, feeling all at once an immense desire to pull her head down to him and kiss her.  “But you don’t understand the situation, little girl.  Now I’ve been eating this confounded bannock”—­he picked up a chunk of it to demonstrate his point—­“morning, noon and night until the sight of it makes me almost cry for one of mother’s green cucumber pickles.  I’m tired of it.  Bram’s fish is a treat.  And this coffee, seeing that you have turned it in that way—­”