The moment he had looked up into her face in the doorway, it had overwhelmed him.  And now even the sound of her footsteps on the floor filled him with an exquisite exultation.  It was more than exultation.  It was a feeling of possession.

In the hollow of his hand he—­Blake, the man-hunter—­held the fate of this woman.  She was the Fiddler’s wife—­and the Fiddler was a murderer.

Marie heard the sudden deep breath that forced itself from his lips, a gasp that would have been a cry of triumph if he had given it voice.

“You are in pain, m’sieu,” she exclaimed, turning toward him quickly.

“A little,” he said, smiling at her.  “Will you help me to sit up, Marie?”

He saw ahead of him another and more thrilling game than the man-hunt now.  And Marie, unsuspicious, put her arms about the shoulders of the Pharisee and helped him to rise.  They ate their supper with a narrow table between them.  If there had been a doubt in Blake’s mind before that, the half hour in which she sat facing him dispelled it utterly.  At first the amazing beauty of Thoreau’s wife had impinged itself upon his senses with something of a shock.  But he was cool now.  He was again master of his old cunning.  Pitilessly and without conscience, he was marshaling the crafty forces of his brute nature for this new and more thrilling fight—­the fight for a woman.

That in representing the Law he was pledged to virtue as well as order had never entered into his code of life.  To him the Law was force—­power.  It had exalted him.  It had forged an iron mask over the face of his savagery.  And it was the savage that was dominant in him now.  He saw in Marie’s dark eyes a great love—­love for a murderer.

It was not his thought that he might alienate that.  For that look, turned upon himself, he would have sacrificed his whole world as it had previously existed.  He was scheming beyond that impossibility, measuring her even as he called himself Duval, counting—­not his chances of success, but the length of time it would take him to succeed.

He had never failed.  A man had never beaten him.  A woman had never tricked him.  And he granted no possibility of failure now.  But—­how?  That was the question that writhed and twisted itself in his brain even as he smiled at her over the table and told her of the black days of Jan’s sickness up on the edge of the Barren.

And then it came to him—­all at once.  Marie did not see.  She did not feel.  She had no suspicion of this loyal friend of her husband’s.

Blake’s heart pounded triumphant.  He hobbled back to the cot, leaning on Marie slim shoulder; and as he hobbled he told her how he had helped Jan into his cabin in just this same way, and how at the end Jan had collapsed—­just as he collapsed when he came to the cot.  He pulled Marie down with him—­accidentally.  His lips touched her head.  He laughed.