“So I see.  Mine was but the first I could put my hands upon in the darkness.”

“’Tis that of old Corlier, and sadly lacking in repair.  If you will steer, Ma’amselle?”

Thus set forth as forlorn a hope as ever lost itself in that vast region of hard living and daily tragedy, with the strength of the man set behind the woman’s wisdom in as delicate a compliment as ever breathed itself in silken halls, and the blind courage of the dreamer urged it on. .

At the forks of Red River they passed the signs of a landing.

Here had the Indians summarily sent ashore all of the Nor’westers who had been with De Courtenay and who had followed in the uncertainty of fear, not daring to desert lest they be overtaken and massacred.

All, that is, save Bois DesCaut and the lean, hawk-faced Runners of the Burnt Woods.

Thanking their gods, the North-west servants had lost no time in taking advantage of the fact that they were not wanted, leaving their Montreal master to whatever fate might befall him.

Dupre went ashore and examined the reach of land, the trampled grass, a broken bush or two.

“Ten men, I think,” he said, returning, “and all in tremendous haste.  The Nor’westers escaping, I have no doubt.  Would our captives were among them.”

“No such fortune, M’sieu,” said Maren calmly, “Heard you not the cry before the gate in that unhallowed scramble what time they took the factor and the venturer?  ’Twas ‘a skin for a skin.’  There are many guards.”

The summer day dreamed by in drowsy beauty, like a woman or a rose full-blown, and Maren, who would at another time have seen each smallest detail of its perfection through the eye of love, saw only the rushing water ahead and counted time and distance.

Dupre, kneeling in the bow, his lithe brown arms bare to the shoulder, where the muscles lifted and fell like waves, was silent.  Sadness sat upon him like a garment, yet lightened by a holy joy.

Odd servers of Love, these two, who knew only its pain without its pleasure, yet who were standing on the threshold of its Holy of Holies.

Of nights they sat together at the tiny fire of a few laid sticks and talked at intervals in a strange companionship.

Never again did they speak of love, nor even so much as skirt its fringes, though the young trapper read with wistful eyes its working in the woman’s face.  Out of her eyes had gone a certain light to be replaced by another, as if a star had passed near a smouldering world and gone on, changed by the contact, its radiance darkened by a deeper glow.

The firm cheeks, dusky as sunset, had lost something of their contour.

Like comrades, too, they shared the work and the watches, the girl standing guard with rifle and ball while Dupre snatched heavy sleep, herself dropping down like the veriest old wolf of the North on mossy bank or green grass for the rest they sternly shortened.