He dressed himself and went again to the window.  Quite distinctly now, he could make out Joe Clamart under his window, running toward the edge of the forest at the head of half a dozen men and boys who carried axes and cross-cut saws over their shoulders.  It was the last of Black Roger’s people that he saw for some time in the open meadow, but from the front of the chateau he could hear many voices, chiefly of women and children, and guessed it was from there that the final operations against the fire were being directed.  The wind was blowing stronger in his face.  With it came a sharper tang of smoke, and the widening light of day was fighting to hold its own against the deepening pall of flame-lit gloom advancing with the wind.

There seemed to come a low and distant sound with that wind, so indistinct that to David’s ears it was like a murmur a thousand miles away.  He strained his ears to hear, and as he listened, there came another sound—­a moaning, sobbing voice below his window!  It was grief he heard now, something that went to his heart and held him cold and still.  The voice was sobbing like that of a child, yet he knew it was not a child’s.  Nor was it a woman’s.  A figure came out slowly in his view, humped over, twisted in its shape, and he recognized Andre, the Broken Man.  David could see that he was crying like a child, and he was facing the flaming forests, with his arms reaching out to them in his moaning.  Then, of a sudden, he gave a strange cry, as if defiance had taken the place of grief, and he hurried across the meadow and disappeared into the timber where a great lightning-riven spruce gleamed dully white through the settling veil of smoke-mist.

For a space David looked after him, a strange beating in his heart.  It was as if he had seen a little child going into the face of a deadly peril, and at last he shouted out for some one to bring back the Broken Man.  But there was no answer from under his window.  The guard was gone.  Nothing lay between him and escape—­if he could force the white birch bars from the window.

He thrust himself against them, using his shoulder as a battering-ram.  Not the thousandth part of an inch could he feel them give, yet he worked until his shoulder was sore.  Then he paused and studied the bars more carefully.  Only one thing would avail him, and that was some object which he might use as a lever.

He looked about him, and not a thing was there in the room to answer the purpose.  Then his eyes fell on the splendid horns of the caribou head.  Black Roger’s discretion had failed him there, and eagerly David pulled the head down from the wall.  He knew the woodsman’s trick of breaking off a horn from the skull, yet in this room, without log or root to help him, the task was difficult, and it was a quarter of an hour after he had last seen the Broken Man before he stood again at the window with the caribou horn in his hands.  He no longer had to hold his breath to hear the low moaning in the wind, and where there had been smoke-gloom before there were now black clouds rolling and twisting up over the tops of the north and eastern forests, as if mighty breaths were playing with them from behind.