There was no start, no answering movement at his touch.  The rough surface seemed strangely set and still.

He lay silent and thought a moment with strange feelings of new horror surging through him.

Was De Courtenay dead?

Or was it by chance a stone under the braided coat, a hillock where it had been thrown?  That strange feeling of starkness never belonged to a human body soft with the pulse of life.

For hours McElroy lay staring into the night sky with its frosting of great northern stars, and passed again over every week, every day,—­ nay, almost every hour,—­since that morning in early spring when she had stepped off the factory-sill to accompany little Francette to the river bank where Bois DesCaut stood facing a tall young woman against the stockade wall.

With dreary insistence his sore heart brought up each sweet memory, each thrill of joy of those warm days.  He saw every flush on her open face, every droop of her eyes.  Again he saw the white fire in her features that day in the forest glade when she spoke of the Land of the Whispering Hills.  He pondered for the first time, lying bound and helpless among savages, of that unbending thing within her which drove her into the wilderness with such resistless force.  Granted that she had loved him as he thought during that delirious short space of time, would love have been stronger than that force, or would it have been sacrificed?  She was so strong, this strange girl of the long trail, so strong for all things gentle, so unmoving from the way of tenderness.  Proving that came the picture of the tot on her shoulder. “dipping as the ships at sea, ma cherie,” and the look of her face transfigured.  And yet home for her was “the blue sky above, the wind in the pine-tops, the sound of water lapping at the prow of a canoe.”  So she had said on that last day they spoke together in happiness, passing in diffident joy to the gate to meet De Courtenay’s fateful messenger.

Of all women in the vast world she was the one woman.  There was never another face with that strange allurement, that baffling light of strength and tenderness.

Sore, sore, indeed, was the heart of the young factor of Fort de Seviere as he lay under the stars and listened to the death-wail in the darkened camp.

Nowhere was there a fire.

Desolation sat upon the Nakonkirhirinons.

Along toward dawn, presaged by the westward wheeling of the big stars, tom-toms began to beat throughout the maze of lodges.  They beat oddly into the air, cold with the chill of the coming day,

McElroy’s thoughts had left the great country of the Hudson Bay and travelled back along the winding waterways, across the lakes, and at last out on that heaving sea which bore away from his homeland.  Once more he had been in the smoke of London town, had looked into the loving eyes of his mother and gripped the hand of his tradesman father.  Once more he had wondered what the future held.