he has always kept in her own heart, mon Dieu, and what a
wonderful thing he had to fight for! You knew the child. But the
woman--non? She was like an angel. Her eyes, when you looked into
them--hat can I say, m'sieu? They made you forget. And I have seen her
hair, unbound, black and glossy as the velvet side of a sable, covering
her to the hips. And two years ago I saw Jacques Dupont's hands in that
hair, and he was dragging her by it--"

Something snapped. It was a muscle in Reese Beaudin's arm. He had
stiffened like iron.

"And you let him do that!"

Joe Delesse shrugged his shoulders. It was a shrug of hopelessness, of
disgust.

"For the third time I interfered, and for the third time Jacques Dupont
beat me until I was nearer dead than alive. And since then I have made
it none of my business. It was, after all, the fault of the man who ran
away. You see, m'sieu, it was like this: Dupont was mad for her, and
this man who ran away--the Yellow-back--wanted her, and Elise loved the
Yellow-back. This Yellow-back was twenty-three or four, and he read
books, and played a fiddle and drew strange pictures--and was weak in
the heart when it came to a fight. But Elise loved him. She loved him
for those very things that made him a fool and a weakling, m'sieu, the
books and the fiddle and the pictures; and she stood up with the
courage for them both. And she would have married him, too, and would
have fought for him with a club if it had come to that, when the thing
happened that made him run away. It was at the midsummer carnival, when
all the trappers and their wives and children were at Lac Bain. And
Dupont followed the Yellow-back about like a dog. He taunted him, he
insulted him, he got down on his knees and offered to fight him without
getting on his feet; and there, before the very eyes of Elise, he
washed the Yellow-back's face in the grease of one of the roasted
caribou! And the Yellow-back was a man! Yes, a grown man! And it was
then that Jacques Dupont shouted out his challenge to all that crowd.
He would fight the Yellow-back. He would fight him with his right arm
tied behind his back! And before Elise and the Yellow-back, and all
that crowd, friends tied his arm so that it was like a piece of wood
behind him, and it was his right arm, his fighting arm, the better half
of him that was gone. And even then the Yellow-back was as white as the
paper he drew pictures on. Ventre saint gris, but then was his chance
to