It was well that Le Beau did not read this thought in her mind now.  With his warning he turned to Miki and dragged him out of the cabin to a cage made of saplings in which the winter before he had kept two live foxes.  A small chain ten feet in length he fastened around Miki’s neck and then to one of the sapling bars before he thrust his prisoner inside the door of the prison and freed him by cutting the babiche thongs with a knife.

For several minutes after that Miki lay still while the blood made its way slowly through his numbed and half-frozen limbs.  At last he staggered to his feet, and then it was that Le Beau chuckled jubilantly and turned back to the cabin.

And now followed many days that were days of hell and torment for him—­an unequal struggle between the power of The Brute and the spirit of the Dog.

“I must break you—­Ow! by the Christ!  I will break you!”—­Le Beau would say time and again when he came with the club and the whip.  “I will make you crawl to me—­oui, and when I say fight you will fight!”

It was a small cage, so small that Miki could not get away from the reach of the club and the whip.  They maddened him—­for a time, and Le Beau’s ugly soul was filled with joy as Miki launched himself again and again at the sapling bars, tearing at them with his teeth and frothing blood like a wolf gone mad.  For twenty years Le Beau had trained fighting dogs, and this was his way.  So he had done with Netah until The Killer was mastered, and at his call crept to him on his belly.

Three times, from a window in the cabin, Nanette looked forth on these horrible struggles between the man and the dog, and the third time she buried her face in her arms and sobbed; and when Le Beau came in and found her crying he dragged her to the window and made her look out again at Miki, who lay bleeding and half dead in the cage.  It was a morning on which he started the round of his traps, and he was always gone until late the following day.  And never was he more than well out of sight than Nanette would run out and go to the cage.

It was then that Miki forgot The Brute.  At times so beaten and blinded that he could scarcely stand or see, he would crawl to the bars of the cage and caress the soft hands that Nanette held in fearlessly to him.  And then, after a little, Nanette began to bring the baby out with her, bundled up like a little Eskimo, and in his joy Miki whimpered and wagged his tail and grovelled in his worship before these two.

It was in the second week of his captivity that the wonderful thing happened.  Le Beau was gone, and there was a raging blizzard outside to which Nanette dared not expose the baby.  So she went to the cage, and with a heart that beat wildly, she unbarred the door—­and brought Miki into the cabin!  If Le Beau should ever discover what she had done—!

The thought made her shiver.

After this first time she brought him into the cabin again and again.  Once her heart stood still when Le Beau saw blood on the floor, and his eyes shot at her suspiciously.  Then she lied.