ood and torn white bodies,
he dragged the reason for what he had dreamed. When he remembered it, he
slumped a little, his delight in waking up next to a pretty young woman
wiped away.

He heard again the stunning, infuriating words that had tumbled out of
Armand Perrault's bushy brown beard.

_I overheard your brother, Monsieur Pierre, talking to your father this
morning. He spoke of how he has always felt that he had abandoned his
Sauk Indian wife and their son, when he came back here and married
Madame Marie-Blanche. Now that he is a widower, he says, he wants to "do
right by her and the boy."_

This thing about having a Sauk woman and a son--Pierre had never said
anything about that.

To call some Indian whore a _wife_!

_My brother, the master of Victoire, a squaw-man! Father of a mongrel
son!_

Armand had remarked sourly to Raoul, "It seems Monsieur Pierre is a
great one for doing _wrong_ by women."

Raoul knew what he meant. He'd heard the rumor that after Marie-Blanche
had died, Pierre, a little crazy in his grief, had taken Armand's wife
to bed a time or two, to comfort himself.

But that was nothing compared to what Pierre was threatening now.

_Indians living in our home! A squaw in the bed where Pierre slept with
good Marie-Blanche!_

How could Pierre do such a thing, after what the Indians had done to
Helene? After Raoul had spent two years beaten and enslaved by Black
Salmon? How could Papa permit it?

Clarissa turned, holding out before her a lighted white candle in a
little pewter dish. She didn't seem so shy now about letting him see her
naked. He let his eyes linger over her melon-shaped breasts, narrow
waist, the brown puff of hair where her long legs joined her wide hips.

He'd often felt a hankering for Clarissa since he'd hired her father,
Eli Greenglove, to help him run the trading post. But he'd thought it
unwise to get mixed up with her. Eli was a dangerous man. Last night
that hadn't seemed to matter.

After Armand had brought him the bad news, he'd turned to Kentucky
whiskey--Old Kaintuck--and to Clarissa, dancing with her to Registre
Bosquet's fiddle in the taproom to take his mind off this sudden insult
Pierre had flung at him. Late in the evening he'd stumbled upstairs
behind Clarissa to his bedroom in the inn, his hands up her skirts,
feeling the satiny skin of her legs.

And then down on the bed, and--whiskey and all--six times!

But this morning his pleasure in her was