Near Waskiaowaka lake!  And Waskiaowaka was within thirty miles of his own camp on the Blind Indian!  If a bomb had burst under his feet he could not have been more amazed than at this information, given to him in Jeanne’s quiet voice.  Fort o’ God—­within thirty miles of the scene where very soon he was to fight the great battle of his life!  He dug his paddle into the water and sent the canoe hissing up the river.  His blood pounded like that of a racehorse on the home-stretch.  Of all the things that had happened, of all he had learned, this was the most significant.  Every thought ran like a separate powder-flash to a single idea, to one great, overpowering question.  Were Fort o’ God and its people the key to the plot against himself and his company?  Was it the rendezvous of those who were striving to work his ruin?  Doubt, suspicion, almost belief came to him in those few moments, in spite of himself.

He looked at Jeanne.  The gray dawn was breaking, and now light followed swiftly and dissolved the last mist.  In the chill of early morning, when with the approach of the sun a cold, uncomfortable sweat rises heavily from the earth and water, Jeanne had drawn one of the bearskins closely about her.  Her head was bare.  Her hair, glistening with damp, clung in heavy masses about her face.  There was a bewitching childishness about her, a pathetic appeal to him in the forlorn little picture she made—­so helpless, and yet so confident in him.  Every energy in him leaped up in defiance of the revolution which for a few moments had stirred within him.  And Jeanne, as though she had read the working of his mind, looked straight at him and smiled, with a little purring note in her throat that took the place of a thousand words.  It was such a smile, and yet not one of love, which puts the strength of ten men in one man’s arms; and Philip laughed back at her, every chord in his body responding in joyous vibration to the delicate note that had come with it.  No matter what events might find their birth at Fort o’ God, Jeanne was innocent of all knowledge of plot or wrong-doing.  Once for all Philip convinced himself of this.

The thought that came to him, as he looked at Jeanne, found voice through his lips.

“Do you know,” he said, “if I never saw you again I would always have three pictures of you in my memory.  I would never forget how you looked when I first saw you on the cliff—­or as I see you now, wrapped in your bearskins.  Only—­I would think of you—­as you smiled.”

“And the third picture?” questioned Jeanne, little guessing what was in his mind.  “Would that be at the fire, when I burned the bad man’s neck—­or—­or when—­”

She stopped herself, and pouted her mouth in sudden vexation, while a flush which Philip could easily see rose in her cheeks.

“When I doctored your foot?” he finished, rather unchivalrously, chuckling in his delight at her pretty discomfiture.  “No, that wouldn’t be the third, Miss Jeanne.  The other scene which I shall never forget was that on the stone pier at Churchill, when you met a beautiful girl who was coming off the ship.”