other miracle for which I have not tried
to account; he built his cabin; for two years he had gone with his
canoe to the shore of the great Slave, forty miles distant, for the
food he ate. But WHY was he here? That was the story that came bit by
bit, half in his fever, half in his sanity. I will tell it in my own
words. He was a Government man, mapping out the last timber lines along
the edge of the Great Barren, when he first met Andre Beauvais and his
wife, Marie. An accident took him to their cabin, a sprained leg. Andre
was a fox-hunter, and it was when he was coming home from one of his
trips that he found Joseph Brecht helpless in the deep snow, and
carried him on his shoulders to his cabin.

Ah, gentlemen, it was the old story--the story old as time. In his
sanity he told us about Marie, I hovering over him closely, M'sieu
sitting back in the shadows. She was like some wonderful wildflower,
French, a little Indian. He told us how her long black hair would
stream in a shining cascade, soft as the breast of a swan, to her knees
and below; how it would hang again in two great, lustrous braids, and
how her eyes were limpid pools that set his soul afire, and how her
slim, beautiful body filled him with a monstrous desire. She must have
been beautiful. And her husband, Andre Beauvais, worshipped her, and
the ground she trod on. And he had the faith in her that a mother has
in her child. It was a sublime love, and Joseph Brecht told us about it
as he lay there, dying, as he supposed. In that faith of his Andre went
unsuspectingly to his trap-lines and his poison-trails, and Marie and
Joseph were for many hours at a time alone, sometimes for a day,
sometimes for two days, and occasionally for three, for even after his
limb had regained its strength Joseph feigned that it was bad. It was a
hard fight, he said--a hard fight for him to win her; but win her he
did, utterly, absolutely, heart, body and soul. Remember, he was from
the South, with all its power of language, all its tricks of love, all
its furtiveness of argument, a strong man with a strong mind--and she
had lived all her life in the wilderness. She was no match for him. She
surrendered. He told us how, after that, he would unbind her wonderful
hair and pillow his face in it; how he lived in a heaven of transport,
how utterly she gave herself to him in those times when Andre, was away.

Did he love her?

Yes, in that mad passion of the brute. But not as you an