his
wrists.

And then he heard a voice close over him. It was the voice of Reese
Beaudin.

"And this is your final punishment, Jacques Dupont--to be hanged by the
neck until you are dead. For Bedore was not dead when Elise's father
left him after their fight on the trap-line. It was you who saw the
fight, and finished the killing, and laid the crime on Elise's father.
Mukoki, the Indian, saw you. It is my day, Dupont, and I have waited
long--"

The rest Dupont did not hear. For up from the crowd there went a mighty
roar. And through it a woman was making her way with outreaching
arms--and behind her followed the factor of Lac Bain.

THE FIDDLING MAN

Breault's cough was not pleasant to hear. A cough possesses manifold
and almost unclassifiable diversities. But there is only one cough when
a man has a bullet through his lungs and is measuring his life by
minutes, perhaps seconds. Yet Breault, even as he coughed the red stain
from his lips, was not afraid. Many times he had found himself in the
presence of death, and long ago it had ceased to frighten him. Some day
he had expected to come under the black shadow of it himself--not in a
quiet and peaceful way, but all at once, with a shock. And the time had
come. He knew that he was dying; and he was calm. More than that--in
dying he was achieving a triumph. The red-hot death-sting in his lung
had given birth to a frightful thought in his sickening brain. The day
of his great opportunity was at hand. The hour--the minute.

A last flush of the pale afternoon sun lighted up his black-bearded
face as his eyes turned, with their new inspiration, to his sledge. It
was a face that one would remember--not pleasantly, perhaps, but as a
fixture in a shifting memory of things; a face strong with a brute
strength, implacable in its hard lines, emotionless almost, and beyond
that, a mystery.

It was the best known face in all that part of the northland which
reaches up from Fort McMurray to Lake Athabasca and westward to Fond du
Lac and the Wholdais country. For ten years Breault had made that trip
twice a year with the northern mails. In all its reaches there was not
a cabin he did not know, a face he had not seen, or a name he could not
speak; yet there was not a man, woman, or child who welcomed him except
for what he brought. But the government had found its faith in him
justified. The police at their lonely outposts had come to regard his
comings and goings as de