McTaggart was one of those who heard.  He was putting his signature in ink to a letter he had written to the company when Lerue’s words came to him.  His hand stopped so suddenly that a drop of ink spattered on the letter.  Through him there ran a curious shiver as he looked over at the half-breed.  Just then Marie came in.  McTaggart had brought her back from her tribe.  Her big, dark eyes had a sick look in them, and some of her wild beauty had gone since a year ago.

“He was gone like—­that!” Lerue was saying, with a snap of his fingers.  He saw Marie, and stopped.

“Black, you say?” McTaggart said carelessly, without lifting his eyes from his writing.  “Did he not bear some dog mark?”

Lerue shrugged his shoulders.

“He was gone like the wind, m’sieu.  But he was a wolf.”

With scarcely a sound that the others could hear Marie had whispered into the factor’s ear, and folding his letter McTaggart rose quickly and left the store.  He was gone an hour.  Lerue and the others were puzzled.  It was not often that Marie came into the store.  It was not often that they saw her at all.  She remained hidden in the factor’s log house, and each time that he saw her Lerue thought that her face was a little thinner than the last, and her eyes bigger and hungrier looking.  In his own heart there was a great yearning.

Many a night he passed the little window beyond which he knew that she was sleeping.  Often he looked to catch a glimpse of her pale face, and he lived in the one happiness of knowing that Marie understood, and that into her eyes there came for an instant a different light when their glances met.  No one else knew.  The secret lay between them—­and patiently Lerue waited and watched.  “Some day,” he kept saying to himself—­“Some day”—­and that was all.  The one word carried a world of meaning and of hope.  When that day came he would take Marie straight to the missioner over at Fort Churchill, and they would be married.  It was a dream—­a dream that made the long days and the longer nights on the trap line patiently endured.  Now they were both slaves to the environing Power.  But—­some day—­

Lerue was thinking of this when McTaggart returned at the end of the hour.  The factor came straight up to where the half dozen of them were seated about the big box stove, and with a grunt of satisfaction shook the freshly fallen snow from his shoulders.

“Pierre Eustach has accepted the Government’s offer and is going to guide that map-making party up into the Barrens this winter,” he announced.  “You know, Lerue—­he has a hundred and fifty traps and deadfalls set, and a big poison-bait country.  A good line, eh?  And I have leased it of him for the season.  It will give me the outdoor work I need—­three days on the trail, three days here.  Eh, what do you say to the bargain?”

“It is good,” said Lerue.

“Yes, it is good,” said Roget.