how I have
hated! So that I could have torn her in pieces.

"And many times I would have burned them, that you might forget. But,
instead, I sewed them from sight in the lining of the coat--and here is
the coat."

Bill tossed the mackinaw into the bottom of the canoe.

"Thank you, Jeanne," he said. "And until we meet again, good-by!"

With a push of the paddle he shot the light canoe far out into the
current of the stream.

Bill paddled leisurely, camping early and sitting late over his
camp-fire smoking many pipefuls of tobacco. And, as he smoked, his
thoughts drifted over the events of the past year, and the people who
comprised his little world.

Appleton, who had offered him the chance to make good; whole-hearted
Fallon; devoted old Daddy Dunnigan; Stromberg, in whom was much to
admire; Creed, the craven tool of Moncrossen; the boss himself,
crooked, brutal, vicious; Blood River Jack, his friend; Wa-ha-ta-na-ta,
the sinister old squaw, who believed all white men to be bad; and
Jeanne, the beautiful, half-wild girl, within whose breast a great soul
fluttered against the restraint of her environment.

To this girl he owed his life, and he had repaid the debt by trampling
roughshod upon her heart. Bitterly he reproached himself for not seeing
how things were going. For not until the day she told him in the
clearing had he guessed that she loved him.

And yet now as he looked backward he could remember a hundred little
things that ought to have warned him--a word here, a look, a touch of
the hand--little things, insignificant in themselves, but in the light
of his present understanding, looming large as the danger signals of a
well-ordered block system--signals he had blindly disregarded, to the
wrecking of a heart. Well, he would make all amends in his power; would
look after her as best he could, and in time she would forget.

"They _all_ forget," he muttered aloud with a short, bitter laugh, as
the memory of certain staring head-lines flashed through his brain. "I
wish to God I could forget--_her!_"

But the old wound would not heal, and far into the night he sat staring
into the fire.

"It's a man's game," he murmured as he spread his blankets, "and I will
win out; but why?"

Beyond the fire came the sound of a snapping twig. The man started,
staring into the gloom, when suddenly into the soft light of the dying
embers stepped Jeanne Lacombie. He stared at her speechless.

There, in the uncertain g