And then he heard a voice close over him.  It was the voice of Reese Beaudin.

“And this is your final punishment, Jacques Dupont—­to be hanged by the neck until you are dead.  For Bedore was not dead when Elise’s father left him after their fight on the trap-line.  It was you who saw the fight, and finished the killing, and laid the crime on Elise’s father.  Mukoki, the Indian, saw you.  It is my day, Dupont, and I have waited long—­”

The rest Dupont did not hear.  For up from the crowd there went a mighty roar.  And through it a woman was making her way with outreaching arms—­and behind her followed the factor of Lac Bain.

THE FIDDLING MAN

Breault’s cough was not pleasant to hear.  A cough possesses manifold and almost unclassifiable diversities.  But there is only one cough when a man has a bullet through his lungs and is measuring his life by minutes, perhaps seconds.  Yet Breault, even as he coughed the red stain from his lips, was not afraid.  Many times he had found himself in the presence of death, and long ago it had ceased to frighten him.  Some day he had expected to come under the black shadow of it himself—­not in a quiet and peaceful way, but all at once, with a shock.  And the time had come.  He knew that he was dying; and he was calm.  More than that—­in dying he was achieving a triumph.  The red-hot death-sting in his lung had given birth to a frightful thought in his sickening brain.  The day of his great opportunity was at hand.  The hour—­the minute.

A last flush of the pale afternoon sun lighted up his black-bearded face as his eyes turned, with their new inspiration, to his sledge.  It was a face that one would remember—­not pleasantly, perhaps, but as a fixture in a shifting memory of things; a face strong with a brute strength, implacable in its hard lines, emotionless almost, and beyond that, a mystery.

It was the best known face in all that part of the northland which reaches up from Fort McMurray to Lake Athabasca and westward to Fond du Lac and the Wholdais country.  For ten years Breault had made that trip twice a year with the northern mails.  In all its reaches there was not a cabin he did not know, a face he had not seen, or a name he could not speak; yet there was not a man, woman, or child who welcomed him except for what he brought.  But the government had found its faith in him justified.  The police at their lonely outposts had come to regard his comings and goings as dependable as day and night.  They blessed him for his punctuality, and not one of them missed him when he was gone.  A strange man was Breault.

With his back against a tree, where he had propped himself after the first shock of the bullet in his lung, he took a last look at life with a passionless imperturbability.  If there was any emotion at all in his face it was one of vindictiveness—­an emotion roused by an intense and terrible hatred that in this hour saw the fulfilment of its vengeance.  Few men nursed a hatred as Breault had nursed his.  And it gave him strength now, when another man would have died.