ascination upon the rush of
the pounding logs.

Lacombie was dead, and Pierre, his son, who was her first-born, was
dead also; and his blood was upon the head of the men of the logs. For
he had left the post and gone among white men, and she, the mother who
bore him, and Lacombie, his father, had seen him no more.

Years slipped by, bringing other children; Jacques, in whom the white
blood of Lacombie was lost in the blending, and the girl who crouched
at her side.

Long after, from the lips of a passing _Bois brule_, she heard the
story of Pierre's death--how, crazed by whisky and the taunts of a
drunken companion, he had leaped upon a passing log and plunged into
the foaming white chute of the dreaded Saw Tooth rapid through which no
man had passed and lived.

_Sacre._ He was brave! For he came nearly to the end of the rapid,
standing upon his log--but, only nearly to the end--for there he was
dashed and broken upon the rocks in the swirl of the leaping
white-water, and here was she, his mother, gazing at other logs in the
rush of other rapids.

She started at the sudden clutch at her blanket and glanced sharply at
the girl who strained forward upon the very edge of the bluff and
stared, not at the rapid, but straight downward where a few logs
revolved lazily in the grip of the shore eddy.

The girl was pointing excitedly with a tapering white-brown finger to
the fork of a great log where, caught on a sharp limb stub, was the
striped sleeve of a mackinaw, from the end of which protruded a hand,
while after the log, trailing sluggishly in the V of the fork, was the
lifeless body of a man.

As she looked a light of exultation gleamed in the sharp old eyes. Here
was vengeance! For the life of her son--the life of a white man.

She noted with satisfaction that the body was that of a large man. It
was fitting so. For her Pierre had been tall, and broad, and
strong--she would have been disappointed in the meaner price of a small
man's life.

Suddenly she leaped to her feet and ran swiftly along the bluff seeking
a place to descend.

Even among the men of the logs, who are bad, one man stands alone as
the archfiend of them all.

And now--it is possible, for he is a big man--she, Wa-ha-ta-na-ta, the
mother of Pierre and of Jeanne, maybe is permitted to stoop close and
breathe upon the dead face of this man the weird curse of the barren
lands--almost forgotten, now, even among her own people--the blighting
curs