not more than a drop or two of Indian blood in her veins.  If they had been all Indian—­Chipewyan, Cree, Ojibway, Dog Rib—­anything—­there would have been no trouble at all in the matter.  He would have bent them to his power, and Nepeese would have come to his cabin, as Marie had come six months ago.  But there was the accursed French of it!  Pierrot and Nepeese were different.  And yet—­

He smiled grimly, and his hands clenched tighter.  After all, was not his power sufficient?  Would even Pierrot dare stand up against that?  If Pierrot objected, he would drive him from the country—­from the trapping regions that had come down to him as heritage from father and grandfather, and even before their day.  He would make of Pierrot a wanderer and an outcast, as he had made wanderers and outcasts of a score of others who had lost his favor.  No other Post would sell to or buy from Pierrot if Le Bete—­the black cross—­was put after his name.  That was his power—­a law of the factors that had come down through the centuries.  It was a tremendous power for evil.  It had brought him Marie, the slim, dark-eyed Cree girl, who hated him—­and who in spite of her hatred “kept house for him.”

That was the polite way of explaining her presence if explanations were ever necessary.  McTaggart looked again at the notes he had made on the sheet of paper.  Pierrot’s trapping country, his own property according to the common law of the wilderness, was very valuable.  During the last seven years he had received an average of a thousand dollars a year for his furs, for McTaggart had been unable to cheat Pierrot quite as completely as he had cheated the Indians.  A thousand dollars a year!  Pierrot would think twice before he gave that up.  McTaggart chuckled as he crumpled the paper in his hand and prepared to put out the light.  Under his close-cropped beard his reddish face blazed with the fire that was in his blood.  It was an unpleasant face—­like iron, merciless, filled with the look that gave him his name of Napao Wetikoo.  His eyes gleamed, and he drew a quick breath as he put out the light.

He chuckled again as he made his way through the darkness to the door.  Nepeese as good as belonged to him.  He, would have her if it cost—­Pierrot’s life.  And—­why not?  It was all so easy.  A shot on a lonely trap line, a single knife thrust—­and who would know?  Who would guess where Pierrot had gone?  And it would all be Pierrot’s fault.  For the last time he had seen Pierrot, he had made an honest proposition:  he would marry Nepeese.  Yes, even that.  He had told Pierrot so.  He had told Pierrot that when the latter was his father-in-law, he would pay him double price for furs.

And Pierrot had stared—­had stared with that strange, stunned look in his face, like a man dazed by a blow from a club.  And so if he did not get Nepeese without trouble it would all be Pierrot’s fault.  Tomorrow McTaggart would start again for the half-breed’s country.  And the next day Pierrot would have an answer for him.  Bush McTaggart chuckled again as he went to bed.