t afternoon, seemed most like a dream to him, yet his
brain was afire with the reality of it. His mind struggled again with
the hundred questions which he had asked himself that day, and in the
end Josephine remained as completely enshrouded in mystery as ever. Yet
of one thing was he convinced. The oppression of the thing under which
Jean and the girl were fighting had become more acute with the turning
of their faces homeward. At Adare House lay the cause of their
hopelessness, of Josephine's grief, and of the gloom under which the
half-breed had fallen so completely that night. Until they reached
Adare House he could guess at nothing. And there--what would he find?

In spite of himself he felt creeping slowly over him a shuddering fear
that he had not acknowledged before. The darkness deepening as the fire
died away, the stillness of the night, the low wailing of a wind
growing out of the north roused in him the unrest and doubt that
sunshine and day had dispelled. An uneasy slumber came at last with
this disquiet. His mind was filled with fitful dreams. Again he was
back with Radisson and MacTavish, listening to the foxes out on the
barrens. He heard the Scotchman's moaning madness and listened to the
blast of storm. And then he heard a cry--a cry like that which
MacTavish fancied he had heard in the wind an hour before he died. It
was this dream-cry that roused him.

He sat up, and his face and hands were damp. It was black in the tent.
Outside even the bit of wind had died away. He reached out a hand,
groping for Jean. The half-breed's blankets had not been disturbed.
Then for a few moments he sat very still, listening, and wondering if
the cry had been real. As he sat tense and still in the half daze of
the sleep it came again. It was the shrill laughing carnival of a loon
out on the lake. More than once he had laughed at comrades who had
shivered at that sound and cowered until its echoes had died away in
moaning wails. He understood now. He knew why the Indians called it
moakwa--"the mad thing." He thought of MacTavish, and threw the blanket
from his shoulders, and crawled out of the tent.

Only a few faintly glowing embers remained where he had piled the birch
logs. The sky was full of stars. The moon, still full and red, hung low
in the west. The lake lay in a silvery and unruffled shimmer. Through
the silence there came to him from a great distance the coughing
challenge of a bull moose inviting a rival to