“Pst!” Joe Delesse flung his great arms wide.  “Like that—­he was gone.  And no one ever saw him again, or heard of him again.  But I know that she knew—­my cousin, Elise.  What word it was he left for her at the last she has always kept in her own heart, mon Dieu, and what a wonderful thing he had to fight for!  You knew the child.  But the woman—­non?  She was like an angel.  Her eyes, when you looked into them—­hat can I say, m’sieu?  They made you forget.  And I have seen her hair, unbound, black and glossy as the velvet side of a sable, covering her to the hips.  And two years ago I saw Jacques Dupont’s hands in that hair, and he was dragging her by it—­”

Something snapped.  It was a muscle in Reese Beaudin’s arm.  He had stiffened like iron.

“And you let him do that!”

Joe Delesse shrugged his shoulders.  It was a shrug of hopelessness, of disgust.

“For the third time I interfered, and for the third time Jacques Dupont beat me until I was nearer dead than alive.  And since then I have made it none of my business.  It was, after all, the fault of the man who ran away.  You see, m’sieu, it was like this:  Dupont was mad for her, and this man who ran away—­the Yellow-back—­wanted her, and Elise loved the Yellow-back.  This Yellow-back was twenty-three or four, and he read books, and played a fiddle and drew strange pictures—­and was weak in the heart when it came to a fight.  But Elise loved him.  She loved him for those very things that made him a fool and a weakling, m’sieu, the books and the fiddle and the pictures; and she stood up with the courage for them both.  And she would have married him, too, and would have fought for him with a club if it had come to that, when the thing happened that made him run away.  It was at the midsummer carnival, when all the trappers and their wives and children were at Lac Bain.  And Dupont followed the Yellow-back about like a dog.  He taunted him, he insulted him, he got down on his knees and offered to fight him without getting on his feet; and there, before the very eyes of Elise, he washed the Yellow-back’s face in the grease of one of the roasted caribou!  And the Yellow-back was a man!  Yes, a grown man!  And it was then that Jacques Dupont shouted out his challenge to all that crowd.  He would fight the Yellow-back.  He would fight him with his right arm tied behind his back!  And before Elise and the Yellow-back, and all that crowd, friends tied his arm so that it was like a piece of wood behind him, and it was his right arm, his fighting arm, the better half of him that was gone.  And even then the Yellow-back was as white as the paper he drew pictures on.  Ventre saint gris, but then was his chance to have killed Jacques Dupont!  Half a man could have done it.  Did he, m’sieu?  No, he did not.  With his one arm and his one hand Jacques Dupont whipped that Yellow-back, and he would have killed him if Elise had not rushed in to sav e the Yellow-back’s purple face from going dead black.  And that night the Yellow-back slunk away.  Shame?  Yes.  From that night he was ashamed to show his face ever again at Lac Bain.  And no one knows where he went.  No one—­except Elise.  And her secret is in her own breast.”