“You lie!” Dupont’s voice rose in a savage roar.  His huge shoulders bulked over those about him.  He crowded to the edge of the platform.  “You lie!”

“He is a woman’s dog,” repeated Reese Beaudin without excitement, yet so clearly that every ear heard.  “He is a woman’s pet, and M’sieu Dupont most surely does lie if he denies it!”

So far as memory went back no man at Lac Bain that day had ever heard another man give Jacques Dupont the lie.  A thrill swept those who heard and understood.  There was a great silence, in that silence men near him heard the choking rage in Dupont’s great chest.  He was staring up—­straight up into the smiling face of Reese Beaudin; and in that moment he saw beyond the glossy black beard, and amazement and unbelief held him still.  In the next, Reese Beaudin had the violin in his hands.  He flung off the buckskin, and in a flash the instrument was at his shoulder.

“See!  I will play, and the woman’s pet shall sing!”

And once more, after five years, Lac Bain listened to the magic of Reese Beaudin’s violin.  And it was Elise’s old love song that he played.  He played it, smiling down into the eyes of a monster whose face was turning from red to black; yet he did not play it to the end, nor a quarter of it, for suddenly a voice shouted: 

“It is Reese Beaudin—­come back!”

Joe Delesse, paralyzed, speechless, could have sworn it was the hooded stranger who shouted; and then he remembered, and flung up his great arms, and bellowed: 

“Oui—­by the Saints, it is Reese Beaudin—­Reese Beaudin come back!”

Suddenly as it had begun the playing ceased, and Henri Paquette found himself with the violin in his hands.  Reese Beaudin turned, facing them all, the wintry sun glowing in his beard, his eyes smiling, his head high—­unfraid now, more fearless than any other man that had ever set foot in Lac Bain.  And McDougall, with his arm touching Elise’s hair, felt the wild and throbbing pulse of her body.  This day—­this hour—­this minute in which she stood still, inbreathing—­had confirmed her belief in Reese Beaudin.  As she had dreamed, so had he risen.  First of all the men in the world he stood there now, just as he had been first in the days when she had loved his dreams, his music, and his pictures.  To her he was the old god, more splendid,—­for he had risen above fear, and he was facing Dupont now with that strange quiet smile on his lips.  And then, all at once, her soul broke its fetters, and over the women’s heads she reached out her arms, and all there heard her voice in its triumph, its joy, its fear.

“Reese!  Reese—­my sakeakun!”

Over the heads of all the forest people she called him beloved!  Like the fang of an adder the word stung Dupont’s brain.  And like fire touched to powder, swiftly as lightning illumines the sky, the glory of it blazed in Reese Beaudin’s face.  And all that were there heard him clearly: