“It is good for a man’s soul to know that a woman loves him, and has been true,” he said.  “Mon pere, will you tell me again what she said?  It is strength for me—­and I must soon be going.”

McDougall repeated, as if under a strain from which he could not free himself: 

“She came to me late last night, unknown to Dupont.  She had received your message, and knew you were coming.  And I tell you again that I saw something in her eyes which makes me afraid!  She told me, then, that her father killed Bedore in a quarrel, and that she married Dupont to save him from the law—­and kneeling there, with her hand on the cross at her breast, she swore that each day of her life she has let Dupont know that she hates him, and that she loves you, and that some day Reese Beaudin would return to avenge her.  Yes, she told him that—­I know it by what I saw in her eyes.  With that cross clutched in her fingers she swore that she had suffered torture and shame, and that never a word of it had she whispered to a living soul, that she might turn the passion of Jacques Dupont’s black heart into a great hatred.  And today—­Jacques Dupont will kill you!”

“I shall die hard,” Reese repeated again.

He tucked the violin in its buckskin covering under his arm.  From the table he took his cap and placed it on his head.

In a last effort McDougall sprang from his chair and caught the other’s arm.

“Reese Beaudin—­you are going to your death!  As factor of Lac Bain—­agent of justice under power of the Police—­I forbid it!”

“So-o-o-o,” spoke Reese Beaudin gently.  “Mon pere—­”

He unbuttoned his coat, which had remained buttoned.  Under the coat was a heavy shirt; and the shirt he opened, smiling into the factor’s eyes, and McDougall’s face froze, and the breath was cut short on his lips.

“That!” he gasped.

Reese Beaudin nodded.

Then he opened the door and went out.

Joe Delesse had been watching the factor’s house, and he worked his way slowly along the edge of the feasters so that he might casually come into the path of Reese Beaudin.  And there was one other man who also had watched, and who came in the same direction.  He was a stranger, tall, closely hooded, his mustached face an Indian bronze.  No one had ever seen him at Lac Bain before, yet in the excitement of the carnival the fact passed without conjecture or significance.  And from the cabin of Henri Paquette another pair of eyes saw Reese Beaudin, and Mother Paquette heard a sob that in itself was a prayer.

In and out among the devourers of caribou-flesh, scanning the groups and the ones and the twos and the threes, passed Jacques Dupont, and with him walked his friend, one-eyed Layonne.  Layonne was a big man, but Dupont was taller by half a head.  The brutishness of his face was hidden under a coarse red beard; but the devil in him glowered from his deep-set, inhuman eyes; it walked in his gait, in the hulk of his great shoulders, in the gorilla-like slouch of his hips.  His huge hands hung partly clenched at his sides.  His breath was heavy with whisky that Layonne himself had smuggled in, and in his heart was black murder.