“Our brother,” cried David.  “Who is the other?”

“My sister.”

“Yes?”

“Marie-Anne.”

“Good God!” choked David.  “St. Pierre, do you lie?  Is this another bit of trickery?”

“It is the truth,” said St. Pierre.  “Marie-Anne is my sister, and Carmin—­whom you saw in my arms through the cabin window—­”

He paused, smiling into David’s staring eyes, taking full measure of recompense in the other’s heart-breaking attitude as he waited. “—­Is my wife, M’sieu David.”

A great gasp of breath came out of Carrigan.

“Yes, my wife, and the greatest-hearted woman that ever lived, without one exception in all the world!” cried St. Pierre, a fierce pride in his voice.  “It was she, and not Marie-Anne, who shot you on that strip of sand, David Carrigan!  Mon Dieu, I tell you not one woman in a million would have done what she did—­let you live!  Why?  Listen, m’sieu, and you will understand at last.  She had a brother, years younger than she, and to that brother she was mother, sister, everything, because they had no parents almost from babyhood.  She worshiped him.  And he was bad.  Yet the worse he became, the more she loved him and prayed for him.  Years ago she became my wife, and I fought with her to save the brother.  But he belonged to the devil hand and foot, and at last he left us and went south, and became what he was when you were sent out to get him, Sergeant Carrigan.  It was then that my wife went down to make a last fight to save him, to bring him back, and you know how she made that fight, m’sieu—­until the day you hanged him!”

St. Pierre was leaning from his chair, his face ablaze.  “Tell me, did she not fight?” he cried.  “And you, until the last—­did you not fight to have her put behind prison bars with her brother?”

“Yes, it is so,” murmured Carrigan.

“She hated you,” went on St. Pierre.  “You hanged her brother, who was almost a part of her flesh and body.  He was bad, but he had been hers from babyhood, and a mother will love her son if he is a devil.  And then—­I won’t take long to tell the rest of it!  Through friends she learned that you, who had hanged her brother, were on your way to run down Roger Audemard.  And Roger Audemard, mind you, was the same as myself, for I had sworn to take my brother’s place if it became necessary.  She was on the bateau with Marie-Anne when the messenger came.  She had but one desire—­to save me—­to kill you.  If it had been some other man, but it was you, who had hanged her brother!  She disappeared from the bateau that day with a rifle.  You know, M’sieu David, what happened.  Marie-Anne heard the shooting and came—­alone—­just as you rolled out in the sand as if dead.  It was she who ran out to you first, while my Carmin crouched there with her rifle, ready to send another bullet into you if you moved.  It was Marie-Anne you saw standing over you, it was she who knelt down at your side, and then—­”