e of the "Yaga Tah!"

In the telling, the _Bois brule_ had mentioned the name of the drunken
lumber-jack who had baited her Pierre to his death, and in the old
woman's brain the name of Moncrossen was the symbol of all black
deviltry.

After the death of Lacombie, Wa-ha-ta-na-ta had stolen Jeanne from the
mission that she might forget the ways of the white man, and returned
to her people.

Jeanne, whose soft skin, beneath the sun tan, was the white skin of
Lacombie, and who was the most beautiful among all the women of the
North, with her straight, lithe body, and dark, mysterious eyes--eyes
which, in color, were the eyes of the wood folk, but in whose baffling,
compelling depths slumbered the secrets of an alien race.

Jacques, she could understand, for in thought and deed and body he was
Indian--a whelp of her own breed. But the girl, she did not understand,
and her love for her was the idolatrous love with which she had loved
Lacombie.

Through many lean years they lived among the tepees of the Indians,
but, of late, they had come to the lodge of Jacques, who had become a
trapper and guide.

His lodge, of necessity, must be pitched not too far from the lumber
camps of the white men, whose laws make killing deer in winter a
crime--and pay liberally for fresh venison.

Swiftly she descended a short slope of the bluff, uttering quick, low
whines of anticipation. For Jacques, Blood River Jack he was called by
the white men, had told her that Moncrossen was boss of the camp at the
head of the rapid.

All through the winter she had kept the girl continually within her
sight, for she remembered the previous winter when this same Moncrossen
had accidentally come upon their lodge on the south fork of Broken
Knee, and the look in his eyes as he gazed upon the beauty of Jeanne.

She remembered the events that followed when Jacques was paid liberally
by the boss to make a midwinter journey to the railroad, and the low
sound in the night when she awakened to find the girl struggling in the
bear-like grasp of the huge lumberjack, and how she fought him off in
the darkness with a hatchet while Jeanne fled shrieking into the
timber.

Now she stood upon the brink, and beside her stood the girl in whose
dark eyes flashed a primitive tiger-hate--for she, too, remembered the
terror of that night on the south fork of Broken Knee.

And, although she knew nothing of the wild death-curse of the Yaga Tah,
she could at least st