Carrigan had not expected this.  He was a little shocked and felt also the impropriety of the thing.  The idea of being lugged off like a baby was embarrassing, even in the presence of the one who had deliberately put him in his present condition.  Bateese did the thing with such beastly ease.  It was as if he was no more than a small boy, a runt with no weight whatever, and Bateese was a man.  He would have preferred to stagger along on his own feet or creep on his hands and knees, and he grunted as much to Bateese on the way to the canoe.  He felt, at the same time, that the situation owed him something more of discussion and explanation.  Even now, after half killing him, the woman was taking a rather high-handed advantage of him.  She might at least have assured him that she had made a mistake and was sorry.  But she did not speak to him again.  She said nothing more to Bateese, and when the half-breed deposited him in the midship part of the canoe, facing the bow, she stood back in silence.  Then Bateese brought his pack and rifle, and wedged the pack in behind him so that he could sit upright.  After that, without pausing to ask permission, he picked up the woman and carried her through the shallow water to the bow, saving her the wetting of her feet.

As she turned to find her paddle her face was toward David, and for a moment she was looking at him.

“Do you mind telling me who you are, and where we are going?” he asked.

“I am Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain,” she said.  “My brigade is down the river, M’sieu Carrigan.”

He was amazed at the promptness of her confession, for as one of the working factors of the long arm of the police he accepted it as that.  He had scarcely expected her to divulge her name after the cold-blooded way in which she had attempted to kill him.  And she had spoken quite calmly of “my brigade.”  He had heard of the Boulain Brigade.  It was a name associated with Chipewyan, as he remembered it—­or Fort McMurray.  He was not sure just where the Boulain scows had traded freight with the upper-river craft.  Until this year he was positive they had not come as far south as Athabasca Landing.  Boulain—­Boulain—­The name repeated itself over and over in his mind.  Bateese shoved off the canoe, and the woman’s paddle dipped in and out of the water beginning to shimmer in moonlight.  But he could not, for a time, get himself beyond the pounding of that name in his brain.  It was not merely that he had heard the name before.  There was something significant about it.  Something that made him grope back in his memory of things.  Boulain!  He whispered it to himself, his eyes on the slender figure of the woman ahead of him, swaying gently to the steady sweep of the paddle in her hands.  Yet he could think of nothing.  A feeling of irritation swept over him, disgust at his own mental impotency.  And the dizzying sickness was brewing in his head again.

“I have heard that name—­somewhere—­before,” he said.  There was a space of only five or six feet between them, and he spoke with studied distinctness.