d I might love
a woman, gentlemen. Not as Andre loved her. Whether she had a heart or
a soul it did not matter. His eyes were blind with an insensate joy
when he shrouded himself in her wonderful hair. To see the wild color
painting her face like a flower filled his veins with fire. The beauty
of her, the touch of her, the mad beat of her heart against him made
him like a drunken man in his triumph. Love? Yes, the love of the
brute! He prolonged his stay. He had no idea of taking her with him.
When the time came, he would go. Day after day, week after week he put
it off, feigning that the bone of his leg was affected, and Andre
Beauvais treated him like a brother. He told us all this as he lay
there in his cabin in that sulphur hell. I am a man of God, and I do
not lie.

Is there need to tell you that Andre discovered them? Yes, he found
them--and with that wonderful hair of hers so closely about them that
he was still bound in the tresses when the discovery came.

Andre had come in exhausted, and unexpectedly. There was a terrible
fight, and in spite of his exhaustion he would have killed Joseph
Brecht if at the last moment the latter had not drawn his revolver.
After all is said and done, gentlemen, can a woman love but once?
Joseph Brecht fired. In that infinitesimal moment between the leveling
of the gun and the firing of the shot Marie Beauvais found answer to
that question. Who was it she loved? She sprang to her husband's
breast, sheltering him with the body that had been disloyal to its
soul, and she died there--with a bullet through her heart.

Joseph Brecht told us how, in the horror of his work--and possessed now
by a terrible fear--he ran from the cabin and fled for his life. And
Andre Beauvais must have remained with his dead. For it was many hours
later before he took up the trail of the man whom he made solemn oath
to his God to kill. Like a hunted hare, Joseph Brecht eluded him, and
it was weeks before the fox-trapper came upon him. Andre Beauvais
scorned to kill him from ambush. He wanted to choke his life out
slowly, with his two hands, and he attacked him openly and fairly.

And in that cabin--gasping for breath, dying as he thought, Joseph
Brecht said to us: "It was one or the other. He had the best of me. I
drew my revolver again--and killed him, killed Andre Beauvais, as I had
killed his wife, Marie!"

Here in the South Joseph Brecht might not have been a bad man,
gentlemen. In every man's he