“You are not going to run away, Baree.  Non, you are going to stay with me, and we will kill that man-beast if he dares do to me again what he did back there.”  She flung back the loose hair from about her flushed face, and for a moment she forgot Baree as she thought of that half-minute at the edge of the chasm.  He was looking straight up at her when her glance fell on him again.  “Non, you are not going to run away—­you are going to follow me,” she whispered.  “Come.”

The babiche string tightened about Baree’s neck as she urged him to follow.  It was like another rabbit snare, and he braced his forefeet and bared his fangs just a little.  The Willow did not pull.  Fearlessly she put her hand on his head again.  From the direction of the cabin came a shout, and at the sound of it she took Baree up under her arm once more.

“Bete noir—­bete noir!” she called back tauntingly, but only loud enough to be heard a few yards away.  “Go back to Lac Bain—­owases—­you wild beast!”

Nepeese began to make her way swiftly through the forest.  It grew deeper and darker, and there were no trails.  Three times in the next half-hour she stopped to put Baree down and rest her arm.  Each time she pleaded with him coaxingly to follow her.  The second and third times Baree wriggled and wagged his tail, but beyond those demonstrations of his satisfaction with the turn his affairs had taken he would not go.  When the string tightened around his neck, he braced himself; once he growled—­again he snapped viciously at the babiche.  So Nepeese continued to carry him.

They came at last into a clearing.  It was a tiny meadow in the heart of the forest, not more than three or four times as big as the cabin.  Underfoot the grass was soft and green, and thickly strewn with flowers.  Straight through the heart of this little oasis trickled a streamlet across which the Willow jumped with Baree under her arm, and on the edge of the rill was a small wigwam made of freshly cut spruce and balsam boughs.  Into her diminutive mekewap the Willow thrust her head to see that things were as she had left them yesterday.  Then, with a long breath of relief, she put down her four-legged burden and fastened the end of the babiche to one of the cut spruce limbs.

Baree burrowed himself back into the wall of the wigwam, and with head alert—­and eyes wide open—­watched his companion attentively.  Not a movement of the Willow escaped him.  She was radiant—­and happy.  Her laugh, sweet and wild as a bird’s trill, set Baree’s heart throbbing with a desire to jump about with her among the flowers.

For a time Nepeese seemed to forget Baree.  Her wild blood raced with the joy of her triumph over the factor from Lac Bain.  She saw him again, floundering about in the pool—­pictured him at the cabin now, soaked and angry, demanding of mon pere where she had gone.  And mon pere, with a shrug of his shoulders, was telling him that he didn’t know—­that probably she had run off into the forest.  It did not enter into her head that in tricking Bush McTaggart in that way she was playing with dynamite.  She did not foresee the peril that in an instant would have stamped the wild flush from her face and curdled the blood in her veins—­she did not guess that McTaggart had become for her a deadlier menace than ever.