Concombre Bateese stared as if some one had stunned him with a blow, and he spoke no word as David went on to the forward deck.  Marie-Anne had come out under the awning.  She gave a little cry of relief and pleasure.

“I am glad you have come back, M’sieu David!”

“So am I, madame,” he replied.  “I think the woods are unhealthful to travel in!”

Out of the earth he felt that a part of the old strength had returned to him.  Alone they sat at dinner, and Marie-Anne waited on him and called him David again—­and he found it easier now to call her Marie-Anne and look into her eyes without fear that he was betraying himself.  A part of the afternoon he spent in her company, and it was not difficult for him to tell her something of his adventuring in the north, and how, body and soul, the northland had claimed him, and that he hoped to die in it when his time came.  Her eyes glowed at that.  She told him of two years she had spent in Montreal and Quebec, of her homesickness, her joy when she returned to her forests.  It seemed, for a time, that they had forgotten St. Pierre.  They did not speak of him.  Twice they saw Andre, the Broken Man, but the name of Roger Audemard was not spoken.  And a little at a time she told him of the hidden paradise of the Boulains away up in the unmapped wildernesses of the Yellowknife beyond the Great Bear, and of the great log chateau that was her home.

A part of the afternoon he spent on shore.  He filled a moosehide bag full of sand and suspended it from the limb of a tree, and for three-quarters of an hour pommeled it with his fists, much to the curiosity and amusement of St. Pierre’s men, who could see nothing of man-fighting in these antics.  But the exercise assured David that he had lost but little of his strength and that he would be in form to meet Bateese when the time came.  Toward evening Marie-Anne joined him, and they walked for half an hour up and down the beach.  It was Bateese who got supper.  And after that Carrigan sat with Marie-Anne on the foredeck of the barge and smoked another of St. Pierre’s cigars.

The camp of the rivermen was two hundred yards below the bateau, screened between by a finger of hardwood, so that except when they broke into a chorus of laughter or strengthened their throats with snatches of song, there was no sound of their voices.  But Bateese was in the stern, and Nepapinas was forever flitting in and out among the shadows on the shore, like a shadow himself, and Andre, the Broken Man, hovered near as night came on.  At last he sat down in the edge of the white sand of the beach, and there he remained, a silent and lonely figure, as the twilight deepened.  Over the world hovered a sleepy quiet.  Out of the forest came the droning of the wood-crickets, the last twitterings of the day birds, and the beginning of night sounds.  A great shadow floated out over the river close to the bateau, the first of the questing, blood-seeking owls adventuring out like pirates from