“Ow, Bete” he called; “she will not sell you.  She keeps you because you fought for her, and killed Mon Ami, Jacques Le Beau.  And so I must take you my own way.  In a little while the moon will be up, and then I will slip a noose over your head at the end of a pole, and will choke you so quickly she will not hear a sound.  And who will know where you are gone, if the cage door is left open?  And you will fight for me at Post Fort 0’ God.  Mon dieu! how you will fight!  I swear it will do the ghost of Jacques Le Beau good to see what happens there.”

He went away, to where he had left his light sledge and two dogs in the edge of the timber, and waited for the moon to rise.

Still Miki did not move, A light had appeared in the window of the cabin, and his eyes were fixed on it yearningly as the low whine gathered in his throat again.  His world no longer lay beyond that window.  The Woman and the baby had obliterated in him all desire but to be with them.

In the cabin Nanette was thinking of him—­and of Durant.  The man’s words came to her again, vividly, significantly:  “You will not want the dog.”  Yes, all the forest people would say that same thing—­even Le FACTEUR himself, when he heard.  She would not want the dog!  And why not?  Because he had killed Jacques Le Beau, her husband, in defence of her?  Because he had freed her from the bondage of The Brute?  Because God had sent him to the end of his chain in that terrible moment that the baby Nanette might live, as the other had not, and that she might grow up with laughter on her lips instead of sobs?  In her there rose suddenly a thought that fanned the new flame in her heart.  It must have been Le bon dieu!  Others might doubt, but she—­never.  She recalled all that Le Beau had told her about the wild dog—­how for many days he had robbed the traps, and the terrific fight he had made when at last he was caught.  And of all that The Brute had said there stood out most the words he had spoken one day.

“He is a devil, but he was not born of wolf.  Non, some time, a long time ago, he was a white man’s dog.”

A white man’s dog!

Her soul thrilled.  Once—­a long time ago—­he had known a master with a white heart, just as she had known a girlhood in which the flowers bloomed and the birds sang.  She tried to look back, but she could not see very far.  She could not vision that day, less than a year ago, when Miki, an angular pup, came down out of the Farther North with Challoner; she could not vision the strange comradeship between the pup and Neewa, the little black bear cub, nor that tragic day when they had fallen out of Challoner’s canoe into the swift stream that had carried them over the waterfall and into the Great Adventure which had turned Neewa into a grown bear and Miki into a wild dog.  But in her heart she felt the things which she could not see.  Miki had not come by chance.  Something greater than that had sent him.