But he did not move back through the gloom, for there was something too revolting in what he had seen, and with the revulsion of it a swift understanding of the truth which made his hands clench as he sat down on the edge of the raft with his feet and legs submerged in the slow-moving current of the river.  The thing was not uncommon.  It was the same monstrous story, as old as the river itself, but in this instance it filled him with a sickening sort of horror which gripped him at first even more than the strangeness of the fact that Carmin Fanchet was the other woman.  His vision and his soul were reaching out to the bateau lying in darkness on the far side of the river, where St. Pierre’s wife was alone in her unhappiness.  His first impulse was to fling himself in the river and race to her—­his second, to go back to St. Pierre, even in his nakedness, and call him forth to a reckoning.  In his profession of man-hunting he had never had the misfortune to kill, but he could kill St. Pierre—­now.  His fingers dug into the slippery wood of the log under him, his blood ran hot, and in his eyes blazed the fury of an animal as he stared into the wall of gloom between him and Marie-Anne Boulain.

How much did she know?  That was the first question which pounded in his brain.  He suddenly recalled his reference to the fight, his apology to Marie-Anne that it should happen so near to her presence, and he saw again the queer little twist of her mouth as she let slip the hint that she was not the only one of her sex who would know of tomorrow’s fight.  He had not noticed the significance of it then.  But now it struck home.  Marie-Anne was surely aware of Carmin Fanchet’s presence on the raft.

But did she know more than that?  Did she know the truth, or was her heart filled only with suspicion and fear, aggravated by St. Pierre’s neglect and his too-apparent haste to return to the raft that night?  Again David’s mind flashed back, recalling her defense of Carmin Fanchet when he had first told her his story of the woman whose brother he had brought to the hangman’s justice.  There could be but one conclusion.  Marie-Anne knew Carmin Fanchet, and she also knew she was on the raft with St. Pierre.

As cooler judgment returned to him, Carrigan refused to concede more than that.  For any one of a dozen reasons Carmin Fanchet might be on the raft going down the river, and it was also quite within reason that Marie-Anne might have some apprehension of a woman as beautiful as Carmin, and possibly intuition had begun to impinge upon her a disturbing fear of a something that might happen.  But until tonight he was confident she had fought against this suspicion, and had overridden it, even though she knew a woman more beautiful than herself was slowly drifting down the stream with her husband.  She had betrayed no anxiety to him in the days that had passed; she had waited eagerly for St. Pierre; like a bird she had gone to him when at last he came, and he had seen her crushed close in St. Pierre’s arms in their meeting.  It was this night, with its gloom and its storm, that had made the shadowings of her unrest a torturing reality.  For St. Pierre had brought her back to the bateau and had played a pitiably weak part in concealing his desire to return to the raft.