at her breast, she swore that each day of her life she has let Dupont
know that she hates him, and that she loves you, and that some day
Reese Beaudin would return to avenge her. Yes, she told him that--I
know it by what I saw in her eyes. With that cross clutched in her
fingers she swore that she had suffered torture and shame, and that
never a word of it had she whispered to a living soul, that she might
turn the passion of Jacques Dupont's black heart into a great hatred.
And today--Jacques Dupont will kill you!"

"I shall die hard," Reese repeated again.

He tucked the violin in its buckskin covering under his arm. From the
table he took his cap and placed it on his head.

In a last effort McDougall sprang from his chair and caught the other's
arm.

"Reese Beaudin--you are going to your death! As factor of Lac
Bain--agent of justice under power of the Police--I forbid it!"

"So-o-o-o," spoke Reese Beaudin gently. "Mon pere--"

He unbuttoned his coat, which had remained buttoned. Under the coat was
a heavy shirt; and the shirt he opened, smiling into the factor's eyes,
and McDougall's face froze, and the breath was cut short on his lips.

"That!" he gasped.

Reese Beaudin nodded.

Then he opened the door and went out.

Joe Delesse had been watching the factor's house, and he worked his way
slowly along the edge of the feasters so that he might casually come
into the path of Reese Beaudin. And there was one other man who also
had watched, and who came in the same direction. He was a stranger,
tall, closely hooded, his mustached face an Indian bronze. No one had
ever seen him at Lac Bain before, yet in the excitement of the carnival
the fact passed without conjecture or significance. And from the cabin
of Henri Paquette another pair of eyes saw Reese Beaudin, and Mother
Paquette heard a sob that in itself was a prayer.

In and out among the devourers of caribou-flesh, scanning the groups
and the ones and the twos and the threes, passed Jacques Dupont, and
with him walked his friend, one-eyed Layonne. Layonne was a big man,
but Dupont was taller by half a head. The brutishness of his face was
hidden under a coarse red beard; but the devil in him glowered from his
deep-set, inhuman eyes; it walked in his gait, in the hulk of his great
shoulders, in the gorilla-like slouch of his hips. His huge hands hung
partly clenched at his sides. His breath was heavy with whisky that
Layonne himself had smuggled in, and