Ridgar paused a moment, and his eyes took on a look of distant things

“Have you not wondered how it was, lad, that a man should live long as I have lived in the wilderness, alone, without ties other than those which bind him to the Great Company, without love of woman, without the joy of children?...I have not always lived so.  Time was when I had my own wickiup, when I lay by my own night-fire and played with the braids of a woman’s hair,—­long black braids, bound with crimson silk and heavy with ornaments, for whose buying I paid my year’s catch, when I looked into eyes black as the woods at night and dumb with the great love she could not speak....  She lived it one day,...nay, died it—­when I had some words with a young man of the tribe, who drew a spear before I knew what he meant and hurled it at me.  She...leaped between.  God!”

He ceased again, and McElroy could hear his breathing, see the whitened knuckles of his hands grasping the poker from the hearth where he had absently stirred the leaping fire.

“It went quite through her,—­a foot beyond her swelling breast, full for my only child, unborn....  She was Negansahima’s daughter....  We mourned together, the old chief and I, and our hearts were bound close as the tree and its bark.  In a far high hill of the Pays d’en Haut we put her to sleep with that last look of love on her dark face...and we made a pact to lie beside her when our time should come, he who out-lived the other to see the rites of the Death Feast.  He has joined her.  I saw his rites.  So for this end, reaching far back, I did not return when you came back to De Seviere, going on with that rabble who dared not harm me who am to share the Sleep of Chiefs some day....

“So!

“Now for the rest.  I know no more of Maren Le Moyne than that first tragic sight of her, hauled into the light by the brute DesCaut.  I only know that she stood before those savages as fearless as a lioness and threw again and again, her black head up and sane, her young body under her own command in every taut cord and muscle, and that again and again and yet again the flying hatchet landed in its own cleft,—­a wonderful performance!—­putting off with coolness and skill the death they would see her decide, choosing neither man of you.”

“But,” cried McElroy, “it was De Courtenay she came to see,—­to save,—­ to die with,—­she loved him, man!”

“Aye,—­maybe.  But I know only that that young trapper, Marc Dupre, gave his life as gallantly as might be to cover our retreat while we, the Nor’wester and I, slipping among the sleepers, carried you to the river; that they woke, those devils, before we had cleared the little gorge, and that M’sieu de Courtenay, brave man and gay cavalier, gave your knees to this woman who helped me get you to the canoe, himself taking the only gun and meeting what fate was his in the narrow seam among the rocks.  She had with her men of Mr. Mowbray’s