“You have the time?” he asked then.

Philip looked at his watch.

“It is eight o’clock.”

“And I must see Josephine—­alone—­before ten,” said Jean quickly.  “You must arrange it, M’sieur.  No one must know that I have returned until I see her.  It is important.  It means—­”

“What?”

“The great God alone can answer that,” replied Jean in a strange voice.  “Perhaps it will mean that to-morrow, or the next day, or the day after that M’sieur Weyman will know the secret we are keeping from him now, and will fight shoulder to shoulder with Jean Jacques Croisset in a fight that the wilderness will remember so long as there are tongues to tell of it!”

There was nothing of boastfulness or of excitement in his words.  They were in the voice of a man who saw himself facing the final arbiter of things—­a voice dead to visible hope, yet behind which there trembled a thing that made Philip face him with a new fire in his eyes.

“Why to-morrow or the next day?” he demanded.  “Why shroud me in this damnable mystery any longer, Jean?  If there is fighting to be done, let me fight!”

Jean’s hollowed cheeks took on a flush.

“I would give my life if we two could go out and fight—­as I want to fight,” he said in a low, tense voice, “It would be worth your life and mine—­that fight.  It would be glorious.  But I am a Catholic, M’sieur.  I am a Catholic of the wilderness.  And I have taken the most binding oath in the world.  I have sworn by the sweet soul of my dead Iowaka to do only as Josephine tells me to do in this.  Over her grave I swore that, with Josephine kneeling at my side.  I have prayed that my Iowaka might come to me and tell me if I am right.  But in this her voice has been silent.  I have prayed Josephine to free me from my oath, and she has refused.  I am afraid.  I dare reveal nothing.  I cannot act as I want to act.  But to-night—­”

His voice sank to a whisper.  His fingers gripped deep into the flesh of Philip’s hand.

“To-night may mean—­something,” he went on, his voice filled with an excitement strange to him.  “The fight is coming, M’sieur.  We cannot much longer evade what we have been trying to evade!  It is coming.  And then, shoulder to shoulder, we will fight!”

“And until then, I must wait?”

“Yes, you must wait, M’sieur.”

Jean freed his hand and sat down in one of the chairs near the table.  His eyes turned toward the window.

“You need not fear another shot, M’sieur,” he said quietly.  “The man who fired that will not fire again.”

“You killed him?”

Jean bowed his head without replying.  The movement was neither of affirmation nor denial: 

“He will not fire again.”

“It was more than one against one,” persisted Philip.  “Does your oath compel you to keep silent about that, too?”

There was a note of irritation in his voice which was almost a challenge to Jean.  It did not prick the half-breed.  He looked at Philip a moment before he replied: