So he told himself Marie-Anne did not know the truth, not as he had seen it through the window of St. Pierre’s cabin.  She had been hurt, for he had seen the sting of it, and in that same instant he had seen her soul rise up and triumph.  He saw again the sudden fire that came into her eyes when St. Pierre urged the necessity of his haste, he saw her slim body grow tense, her red lips curve in a flash of pride and disdain.  And as Carrigan thought of her in that way his muscles grew tighter, and he cursed St. Pierre.  Marie-Anne might be hurt, she might guess that her husband’s eyes and thoughts were too frequently upon another’s face—­but in the glory of her womanhood it was impossible for her to conceive of a crime such as he had witnessed through the cabin window.  Of that he was sure.

And then, suddenly, like a blinding sheet of lightning out of a dark sky, came back to him all that St. Pierre had said about Marie-Anne.  He had pitied St. Pierre then; he had pitied this great cool-eyed giant of a man who was fighting gloriously, he had thought, in the face of a situation that would have excited most men.  Frankly St. Pierre had told him Marie-Anne cared more for him than she should.  With equal frankness he had revealed his wife’s confessions to him, that she knew of his love for her, of his kiss upon her hair.

In the blackness Carrigan’s face burned hot.  If he had in him the desire to kill St. Pierre now, might not St. Pierre have had an equally just desire to kill him?  For he had known, even as he kissed her hair, and as his arms held her close to his breast in crossing the creek, that she was the wife of St. Pierre.  And Marie-Anne—­

His muscles relaxed.  Slowly he lowered himself into the cool wash of the river, and struck out toward the bateau.  He did not breast the current with the same fierce determination with which he had crossed through the storm to the raft, but drifted with it and reached the opposite shore a quarter of a mile below the bateau.  Here he waited for a time, while the thickness of the clouds broke, and a gray light came through them, revealing dimly the narrow path of pebbly wash along the shore.  Silently, a stark naked shadow in the night, he came back to the bateau and crawled through his window.

He lighted a lamp, and turned it very low, and in the dim glow of it rubbed his muscles until they burned.  He was fit for tomorrow, and the knowledge of that fitness filled him with a savage elation.  A good-humored love of sport had induced him to fling his first half-bantering challenge into the face of Concombre Bateese, but that sentiment was gone.  The approaching fight was no longer an incident, a foolish error into which he had unwittingly plunged himself.  In this hour it was the biggest physical thing that had ever loomed up in his life, and he yearned for the dawn with the eagerness of a beast that waits for the kill which comes with the break of day.  But it was not the half-breed’s face he saw under the hammering of his blows.  He could not hate the half-breed.  He could not even dislike him now.  He forced himself to bed, and later he slept.  In the dream that came to him it was not Bateese who faced him in battle, but St. Pierre Boulain.